Matthew Frere-Smith

Born in London in 1923, his early interest in art was fostered at a small Quaker school.  After the Second World War he attended Wimbledon College of Art, and continued his studies at the Royal College of Art, graduating top of his year in 1952.

His sculpture developed from early figurative work, carved in wood and stone - including commissions for bronze busts - into abstract and geometric forms using metal, wire, plastic and nylon thread.  As early as 1959 he began 'making drawings based on impossible geometry, as part of research into the creation of lightweight, mobile, airborne, multidimensional expressive forms.

Frere-Smith had solo shows in London at the Drian and Alwin Galleries in the 1960s and in 1974 he won an international sculpture competition in Milan.  His work was collected widely, including by Erno Goldfinger, a modernist architect, who commissioned him to design the famous Elephant and Castle motif as part of the 1960's re-development of that area of London.  Several pieces of his work belong to the The Sainsbury Collection and his public art can be seen in Earlham and Lowestoft and abroad in Milan and Warsaw.

[ mobile site ]