The sculptor Nigel Hall was born in Bristol, England in 1943. He is one of the generation of British sculptors who were successors to Henry Moore and Anthony Caro, and coined the concept of “New Sculpture” or “British Sculpture” in the mid-seventies or early eighties. This was by no means a homogeneous group. Within it, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, David Nash or Nigel Hall redefined the theme of landscape in three-dimensional formulations that were unmistakably their own. In Nigel Hall’s case, landscape impressions and the experience of landscape are just stimuli for the creative implementation of a three-dimensional notion of space.
The monumental steel sculpture Big River, dating from 1998, was inspired by a river landscape in Seoul. The sculptor was invited there in 1988 on the occasion of the Olympic Games, to work on setting up the big sculpture park on the Olympic site. Light and shade, movements and stillness, vitality and repose, floating and weighing down, leaning and supporting are all part of the thematic repertoire that leads to this infinitely diverse and complex three-dimensional structure. Compact volume is replaced by a definition of space using sensitively handled lines and geometrical formations. The vertical rods in Big River are upright as the viewers see them, and offer an orientation point.In this way Hall successfully combines dynamics and repose, vitality and stillness, and creates a balance between forces running counter to each other.
