Skulpturenpark Köln

Barry Flanagan (b. 1941 in Prestalyn/Wales, d. 2009 in Eulalia del Río, Ibiza) is, alongside Joan Miró, the best-known representative of "pataphysics" or the "science of imaginary solutions". His iconoclastic humour and his ironic campaigns against an avant-garde that went academic in the post-war years, establish his special place within the Postminimalists. His assemblages of objects from the 1960s form his early sculptural work, made from sand, rope and felt which represented a provocative counter-position to the established aesthetic trends. His preference for the hare, which possesses certain essentially human traits, as a subject, makes possible a multiplicity of trans-cultural symbolic meanings, and at the same time, "open" individual emotional associations.