Germaine Greer talks about Elisabeth Frink

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is delighted to host a talk with Germaine Greer on the occasion of ‘Elisabeth Frink. Transformation’. ‘Elisabeth Frink was loaded with honours in her lifetime; she was a Companion of Honour, Dame Commander of the British Empire and a Royal Academician. Her work stood in public spaces all over Britain and beyond. She died just when she should have been hitting her prime, at the young age of 62. Perhaps she was too well known; perhaps because she was modish in the sixties and seventies, she became outmoded. Most major galleries have collections of her work, but they don’t show them. There is no equivalent of the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield for Elisabeth Frink, even though – or perhaps because – her work is so much more accessible than Hepworth’s. Snobbery certainly plays a part in her eclipse. There is nothing like the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds to keep her name alive. She is unique among women artists in that her subject was so often the triumph and the tragedy of maleness. Indeed, there have been few male artists who have responded so viscerally to the vulnerability of men, whether soldiers or athletes or guardians of those supposed weaker. In the era when we became intermittently aware of the effects of conflict on the combatants, she created heartbreaking emblems of defeated strength and valour. Nobody, not even Michelangelo, understood virility better than she.’ – Germaine Greer Germaine Greer was born in Melbourne and educated in Australia and at Cambridge University. Her first book, ‘The Female Eunuch’ (1969), took the world by storm and remains one of the most influential texts of the feminist movement. Germaine Greer has had a distinguished academic career in Britain and the USA. She makes regular appearances in print and other media as a broadcaster, journalist, columnist and reviewer. Since 2001 she has been involved in rehabilitating sixty hectares of subtropical rainforest in south-east Queensland; in 2011 she set up Friends of Gondwana Rainforest, a UK charity, to help in financing that and similar projects. This event will take place in the Implement Shed and the exhibition will remain open until the event starts. Tickets are £15 Image: © Neil Spence Photography