As an artist, Helen Chadwick was preoccupied with the body, outside and in, its sensations and processes. “I want to catch the body at the moment when it’s about to turn,” she said. “Before it starts to decay, to empty …” That absorbing perspective was the source of her radical and often unsettling work. The gorgeous and the grisly exuberantly co-exist in Museo Novecento’s exhibition Life Pleasures, which examines the short and always inventive career of a woman who, when she died suddenly, aged 42, was called “the most important artist of her generation.”
“If I have an intent, it is to open up a crease in language and look at what cannot be articulated – the phenomena of consciousness, the enigma and riddles of selfhood, the moments of sexuality and emotionality.”
Helen Chadwick managed that. She achieved her objective with artworks distinguished by their meticulous making, their celebration of colour and texture, and the visual appeal of materials. Above all, they resound with thoughts about what art can do.
By dealing with materials considered provocative and problematic by conventional taste and morality, Chadwick was prepared to delight and disgust her viewers, usually at the same moment. Who would expect to encounter in any environment, least of all a gallery, sausage-like intestine intertwined with golden hair? Yet her Loop my Loop (1991), made in that way, holds the attention like the twisting line in a Baroque still-life.
Her desire to experiment and cross boundaries inspired many younger artists, especially those she taught at art schools in London and Brighton. When they entered the limelight in the late 1980s, they scandalised the public with sprawling installations, abattoir carcasses and bawdy humour.
What they missed was Chadwick’s discipline: her sharp intellect and painstaking approach ensured that shock was never the abiding purpose. She extracted a curious beauty from unpredictable sources and controversial methods, the outcome of which aroused, then silenced, critics.
That happened in 1994 when she showed enamelled bronze casts made three years earlier during a winter residency in Alberta, Canada. Snow was the abundant material closest to hand and the bodies of the artist and her partner David were the most convenient instrument. Together they gave memorable form to an idea, what Chadwick called the “metaphysical conceit for the union of two people expressing themselves bodily.”
However explained, the method was straightforward if not without discomfort. The hot impression of their urine on snow produced astonishing objects. Detached from the details of their making, they resemble ornate botanical shapes, like flowers opening to pollination with their pistils rising expectantly.
Celebrations of female experience and sexuality were less common then than today. Chadwick broke taboos about sexual pleasure, deviance, death and excess that needed shaking in the 1970s and ’80s. Her approach was tough, forensic, unflinching. Chance was an element; and joy is present in communicating profound meaning while evoking infantile, transgressive behaviour. If she was “bad”, she was also superbly poetic and wickedly witty.
And audiences responded. Chadwick broke attendance records for London’s Serpentine Gallery with “Effluvia”, the exhibition introducing her Piss Flowers (1991). The show’s centrepiece was Cacao, a glooping fountain of several hundred kilos of melted chocolate. Specially made for the show, the cascade filled the room with a rich aroma and the irregular, rudely comical sound of plopping liquid.
Such puns had bold significance when expressed through her sophisticated visual language. During her twenty-year career, which ended abruptly with her death in 1996, food and flowers often featured as materials. One of her earliest works, as a student, cast her own face in jelly, which she invited the public to eat.
She enjoyed the visual beauty of nature, and her sense of colour comes through in the Wreaths to Pleasure (1992-94). These bright, round-format photographs feature orange tulips, orchids, dandelions, narcissi, pink roses, gerbera. Their ornate and symmetrical arrangements currently hang in a lively pattern on the museum’s cloister wall. They recall heraldic monuments as well as a shop display.
Look closely, however, and the designs divulge sexually suggestive shapes: the link between what we see and what we think we see is handled superbly. For wreaths are symbols of remembrance, tokens of death that exists in the cycle of life and procreation. The flowers themselves are suspended in poisonous liquids like oil, cleaning fluids and paint. Chadwick habitually linked beauty with the vulgar and artificial, the seductive with repulsion. Who can deny the truth of that vision?
Compositions were made with precision and invariably drew in the body. The route, though, was taken through astonishing combinations of shape and texture that excite sight, touch and, almost taste. In Glossolalia (1994), numerous antique fox furs radiate to the diameter of a circular tabletop. At the centre is a dark, distended column, a stack of lambs’ tongues cast in bronze. Allusions gather defiantly around this object: named after the act of speaking in tongues, it implies practices that tease with lubricious possibility.
Chadwick’s personal story and experience were common themes. She objectified them in astoundingly fresh and intimate terms. For Ego Geometria Sum (1982-84), her body literally becomes sculpture and geometry. Ten laminated plywood structures take the forms of an incubator, font, pram, bed and so on to a “statue”, all depicting milestones in her life from premature birth to age 30.
On the surface of each are fixed photographs in which her contorted body is shaped to the sculpture and rescaled to the relevant age. This artist considered every detail articulate. The portraits are made to appear impermanent like fading memories, exuding a yearning quality.
A feminist who challenged depictions of women as fetishes of male desire, at her art college degree show in 1976 she attacked the reality of domestic drudgery. The agit-prop piece was mature and confident, involving live performance, installation and video. In an exquisite parody of cleaning and grooming. she and three friends wore shape-clinging costumes of latex painted directly onto their bodies.
Visceral physical sensation pervades The Oval Court (1986), which is perhaps her single greatest work and now part of London’s V&A Museum collection. A triumph of technique and organisation, it may be the finest use of a photocopier in the history art, a medium with striking immediacy.
Blue-tinted xeroxes of Chadwick’s naked body adorned with ribbons, lace and foliage weave around a platform papered with images of insects, fruits, flowers and wild animals. Erotic and playful, the ensemble teems with allusions: to the Baroque, to notions of oneness in nature, to the female body as a self-absorbed site of desire.
Criticism flew around when first shown at the ICA, London, with fellow campaigners for women also unhappy. From that point, Chadwick turned her focus inside the body. She emerged emboldened and, in retrospect, so did the emerging generation of British artists.
Almost thirty years after she died, her legacy remains strong and her unorthodox ideas are undimmed. She failed her O level school art exam in England and went on to be the first female winner of Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize. Chadwick still pleases and provokes.
Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures
Until 1 March 2026
Museo Novecento, Firenze
