When Marina Abramovic opened her exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2023, many hailed it as the first solo show of a female artist in the institution’s 255-year history. What they didn’t realise was that 38 years prior, in 1985, Elisabeth Frink had in fact been the first woman to be given a solo exhibition in the main galleries, a huge achievement that was accompanied by the offer to become the first female President of the RA, an offer which Frink refused on the grounds that she preferred to be thought of simply as an artist, rather than a public figure. 2025 marks 40 years since this landmark exhibition which has, remarkably, been somewhat forgotten in the annals of art history. Looking back to this important milestone – not only for Frink, but for women artists in Britain more widely.
Messums London are presenting an exhibition of sculpture and drawings from across the artist’s remarkable career, including Soldier’s Head IV (1965), which was shown in the 1985 RA exhibition, and Small Warrior (1956) recently re-discovered and not shown in London since its attribution on the BBC’s Fake or Fortune programme in 2023.
2025 marks 40 years since Elisabeth Frink opened her first major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London – incidentally the first solo exhibition of a female artist in the institution’s history. In fact, in the same year, she rejected the offer to become the first female president of the RA, preferring to be thought of simply as an artist, rather than a public figure. To mark the anniversary of this landmark in British art history, Messums are presenting for sale Soldier’s Head IV (1965), which was shown in the 1985 RA exhibition, alongside a series of exceptional works from within the same timeframe as that of the RA exhibition (1952-1984).
Frink was an artist who never kowtowed to authority or did what was superficially expected of her. Her oeuvre stands out in the late 20th century as a wholly independent exploration of human and animal nature, executed in the artist’s idiosyncratic brand of figuration. Her work has always spoken to the fractiousness of the contemporary world and explores humanity’s innate capacity for brutality, betrayal and hubris, as well as its fundamental fragility (both physical and emotional), our longing for freedom, and our potential for goodness, authenticity and heroism. Frink‘s work epitomised the spirit of the ‘geometry of fear’, which speaks as much to the anxieties of today as those of the post-war era.
War and conflict were subjects of particular importance for Frink. Her experience of living through the horrors of the Second World War instilled in her a lifelong concern for humanitarian issues (she later became a fervent supporter of Amnesty International) and recurring dreams of dark shapes rushing past her; ‘big monstrous things, sometimes with a man in them’. She believed that humanity was entering a new era of brutality, one that was ‘morally numb’, but commented that her concern was ‘not that mankind is any worse than it was: it is just that it is as bad as it was.’ For Frink, agency and free will were qualities that defined humanity; she believed Good and Evil to be a choice that we make, and that every action has a consequence for others and ourselves. Though rarely perceived as overtly political, Frink’s work nevertheless carries a clear message: that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Over the past 8 years, Messums ORG have become one of the leading authorities on Frink and the foremost dealers in her work. In 2019, the gallery saved her Woolland studio from demolition, acquiring the remarkable building and its contents and arranging for them to be carefully dismantled and reconstructed in Wiltshire. The gallery has since hosted several major exhibitions of Frink’s work, including ‘A Place Apart, the resurrection of the Elisabeth Frink Studio’ (Messums West, 2020), ‘Man is an Animal’ (Messums West, 2021) and ‘Breathing New Life: The Elisabeth Frink Woolland Studio Reimagined’ (Messums London, 2023).
“Frink’s manifestation of thoughts and humanity, evident in her sculptural output, presents a way of thinking that is as relevant today in understanding and engaging with brutality.”
– Johnny Messum, Director
