Masterpiece Presents: Phyllida Barlow’s Pom-Poms at the Fair’s Front Door

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 8 min

Every year, Masterpiece London hands its entrance to a single artist, and in 2019 that commission went to Phyllida Barlow. Working with her gallery Hauser & Wirth, Barlow filled the threshold with vivid, oversized pom-poms built from hundreds of pieces of discarded fabric, a motif she had first developed almost three decades earlier. It arrived at the very moment her own career, built over four decades largely out of view, had become the story British sculpture most wanted to tell.

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Masterpiece London does not open with a stand. It opens with a single commissioned installation, placed at the entrance to the fair itself and built fresh each year in partnership with a leading artist or gallery, a slot inside the trade considered one of the most coveted projects of the entire calendar because it is the only work every visitor to the fair is guaranteed to see. For the 2019 edition, running from 27 June to 3 July at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, that commission went to Phyllida Barlow, working with her gallery Hauser & Wirth.

What Barlow built was an array of large, vividly coloured pom-pom sculptures, assembled from hundreds of individual pieces of discarded fabric and suspended on wooden beams colour-matched to the fabric they carried, so that structure and material read as a single decision rather than a support holding up a separate artwork. The beams turned slowly as visitors passed beneath and around them, which meant the installation never presented the same silhouette twice. It was, in miniature, a demonstration of the argument Barlow had spent a career making: that sculpture only finishes its job when it is walked around.

The wider fair that this installation introduced, its history, its galleries and the works shown across its 2019 stands, is covered in a companion piece on Masterpiece London 2019. This piece is about the artist Masterpiece chose to greet its visitors, and why that choice mattered.

Forty years before the entrance

Phyllida Barlow was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1944, the great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin on her father’s side. Her family moved to Richmond in west London after the Second World War, into a city still visibly marked by bomb damage, an early and formative encounter with the idea that structure and ruin could occupy the same object. She studied at Chelsea College of Art from 1960 to 1963 under the sculptor George Fullard, whose own approach treated sculpture as an ongoing physical process rather than a fixed plan to be executed, before moving to the Slade School of Fine Art from 1963 to 1966 to complete her training.

Barlow then spent more than four decades teaching, joining the Slade’s staff in the late 1960s and remaining there until she retired in 2009, eventually holding the position of professor of fine art and director of undergraduate studies. Her students over those decades included Rachel Whiteread, Ángela de la Cruz and Sarah Lucas, three artists who each went on to build significant careers of their own, a detail that quietly repositions Barlow’s influence on British sculpture as something that ran through a generation of students for years before her own work reached a comparable audience. For most of that time, teaching was the visible half of her career. The work itself was made steadily, in parallel, largely outside the gallery system.

Recognition arrives late

Barlow’s professional breakthrough as an artist in her own right came in 2004, following an exhibition at BALTIC in Gateshead that brought her sculpture to wider public attention for the first time in four decades of practice. She subsequently began showing with Hauser & Wirth, the gallery that has represented her ever since, including a solo exhibition, RIG, at the gallery’s London space in 2011. The timing matters: Barlow was sixty years old when the wider art world began paying serious attention to work she had been developing since the 1960s, which makes her career one of the clearer examples in recent British sculpture of recognition arriving on the work’s own schedule rather than the market’s.

Venice, 2017: folly and the British Pavilion

In 2017, Barlow represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, filling the British Pavilion with an installation titled folly. It was, by any measure, the most prominent commission of her career, placing a body of work built from cardboard, plaster, cement, plywood and paint inside one of the most closely watched exhibition spaces in the art world, at an age when many artists’ major retrospectives are already behind them. folly extended the language Barlow had built over decades: sculptures painted in vivid, occasionally jarring colour, with the seams and joins of their own construction left visible, so that a viewer could see, and understand, how each piece had been built rather than simply what it depicted. The Venice commission confirmed, on an international stage, an argument Barlow’s work had been making quietly for a very long time: that a sculpture’s construction is part of its subject.

Recognition continued to arrive quickly once it started. Barlow was appointed CBE in 2017, the same year as her Venice Biennale commission, and was later given a damehood in 2021, in recognition of a career that by then spanned nearly six decades. Those honours sit either side of the Masterpiece commission covered here, which places the 2019 installation squarely inside the years when Barlow’s public recognition finally caught up with the scale of the practice she had already built.

Materials with a history

Barlow built her practice on inexpensive, found and recycled materials, plaster, cardboard, cement, fabric, plywood and paint chief among them, at a point in her career when questions of environmental impact, material waste and recycling had not yet become the constant background conversation in contemporary art that they are now. That timing matters. Barlow’s use of discarded and low-value material was not a response to a sustainability agenda that arrived later; the practice long predates it, which makes her current relevance to conversations about material reuse a genuine continuity rather than a rebrand.

The pom-pom motif shown at Masterpiece in 2019 belongs to that same material logic and has a specific origin: Barlow first developed supersized pom-pom forms in the 1990s, built from bundled and knotted fabric rather than yarn, scaling up a domestic, decorative craft technique into something closer to architecture. Returning to that motif for the Masterpiece entrance in 2019, nearly three decades after first developing it, was not a repetition. It placed a form Barlow had spent thirty years refining directly at the threshold of a fair built on connecting historical and contemporary work, which is exactly the kind of long view Masterpiece’s own premise depends on.

Walking around the work

Barlow was direct about the thinking behind that decision to keep returning to sculpture that demands to be circled rather than faced. “I’ve never bought into the idea of looking at a sculpture from just one viewpoint,” she said. “What makes sculptures different from paintings is that they can be walked around and looked at from 360 different viewpoints, where each one slightly contradicts the next.”

That principle explains why the Masterpiece commission worked as well as it did as a piece of architecture, not just as a piece of sculpture. An entrance is, by definition, a threshold that every visitor passes through from a different angle and at a different pace: some arriving early and lingering, others moving quickly toward a specific stand. A static work would present the same face to all of them. Barlow’s pom-poms, mounted on slowly turning beams, guaranteed instead that no two visitors saw quite the same arrangement, and that the same visitor leaving the fair hours later would see a different one again. The installation’s slow rotation was not a decorative flourish. It was the mechanism that let a single artwork answer Barlow’s own definition of what sculpture is for.

A fair’s front door

Masterpiece stages this entrance commission every year specifically because it functions as a taster for the show beyond it: the first work any visitor sees, before they have chosen a single stand to walk toward. Handing that space to Barlow and Hauser & Wirth in 2019 put a sculptor whose reputation had taken forty years to reach its widest audience at the very point where the fair’s own reputation, built on connecting different eras and disciplines of making, was most visible. The wider fair that installation opened onto, its galleries, its stands and the works they showed that year, is where the rest of that story continues.

Final thoughts

The easy version of this story is a fair booking a well-known artist for its entrance. What actually happened in 2019 was more specific than that: Masterpiece handed its threshold to a sculptor whose defining idea, that a work only finishes its argument once you have walked around it, is also the best possible description of what an entrance installation needs to do. Barlow’s pom-poms, turning slowly above visitors on beams matched to their own fabric, were not a decoration placed in front of the fair. They were a demonstration, in real time, of the same principle that Barlow had spent from the 1960s onward building her entire practice around.

That the commission arrived in the years immediately after Barlow’s Venice Biennale pavilion, and after four decades in which teaching was the visible half of her working life, gives it a shape worth noticing. A career built slowly, largely out of public view, met a fair built on the idea that different eras and disciplines of making belong in the same room, and for one week in the summer of 2019, Barlow’s pom-poms were the first thing every visitor to Masterpiece London saw.