Michael Lyons

British art has produced some great modern sculptors: from Henry Moore to Jacob Epstein, from Barbara Hepworth to Lynn Chadwick. It is as though, after centuries of academism, a creative force has been released that is able to be continuously regenerated, to such a point that it has almost produced a kind of school, or at any rate a line or movement that is markedly British.  Artists like Kenneth Armitage, Philip King, Antony Caro, Eduardo Paolozzi and the Anglo-Indian Anish Kapoor, to mention but a few, are proof of this ability to turn out great sculptors. In this lively and intellectually stimulating context we find Michael Lyons, a true artist, generous and able to tackle the hard task of the sculptor with an extremely personal vocation, drawing inspiration from poetic forms, with continuous references to nature and to its organic and morphological changes, the same nature in which his works live in symbiosis, having within them a dynamic breath of life. The work of Michael Lyons is not sculpture of the type that “carves away”, but on the contrary a continuous assembling, adding and agglomerating of pieces and forms which, when put together, create dynamically concentric and structurally solid compositions that expand into space, creating movements with a totem-like inspiration. His Chinese experience was of particular interest for his artistic maturity, for it helped better define the poetic character and the sense of a type of sculpture that is close to an oriental concept of art, inspired by signs. This view is tied to the forms and contents of his work and, thanks to this relationship, produces a communion of language that, rather like an impluvium, collects the sense of a plastic force in which it can recognise itself and dialogue, and that generates new visions and future prospects in Michael Lyons.

Vincenzo Sanfo