SELECTED ARTIST

Provenance:

Commissioned by Taylor Clark plc., their collection ever since

Bibliography:

E. Lucie-Smith, Elisabeth Frink, Sculpture and Drawings (London, 1994), pp 24, 187.

Fighting Cocks was commissioned by Taylor Clark, a property firm, for the new offices they were building in Haymarket, central London, in 1987. On learning that the site had previously been used for cockfighting, the company requested that Frink create an appropriate composition.

Shortly after the Second World War, Frink began to use birds as the subject of her work, a powerful means of expressing intense emotion. Her birds have also been interpreted as symbols of military aggression and air power. It is possible that the conception of Fighting Cocks was, in part, based on a series of works the artist made during the 1950s, depicting animals in their death throes. An example of this, entitled Dead Hen is in the Tate collection.