Matthew Spender

The son of a poet and a musician, Matthew was born in London in1945. He studied modern history at Oxford and art at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1968 he moved to Italy with his artist wife Maro Gorky. Matthew started his career as a painter but since1990 has dedicated himself to sculpture. Among his principle collectors are Francis Bacon and Bernardo Bertolucci, who used 47 of Matthew’s sculptures in his film, “Stealing Beauty”. Drawing on Italy’s rich sculptural tradition, and the proximity of Carrara to his Tuscan home, Matthew has worked in marble, travertine and wood. His subject matter ranges from the Vespa to the human form. His work has been shown throughout Italy and in 2008, he had a major retrospective at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. Matthew holds two professorships in Florence and Cararra.

These four freestanding figures in Tuscan Travertine are inspired by the sculpture of Lady Joan of Cornwall in the church of Asthall. It’s rare to find such a beautiful pre-Reformation piece of English sculpture. The Reformation may have been invigorating politically and in terms of religion, but it involved the worst case of iconoclasm that Europe has ever seen. Has England ever recovered? Artistically, in my view, No it has not! My pieces are therefore commemorative. The fact that they are wearing a wimple, although this is taken from the Lady Joan portrait, has a connotation of enforced silence. My four figures stand in relation to one another in the open air, so in time they will also acquire the feeling of dead and weathered tree trunks.