Kenneth Armitage was one of the leading British sculptors of the post-war generation, whose work Herbert Read considered to express the ‘geometry of fear’. This group moved away from the monolithic carvings of their predecessors, towards a more fractured, angst-ridden style. However, it is reductive to suggest that dread was the presiding emotional theme of his practice. For example, from the mid-1960s, Armitage’s works appear rather joyous, playful and even infused with the spirit of ‘pop’. As if describing the present work, Roland Penrose wrote in 1960 that “the idioms used by him, such as the melting together of two or more bodies, the unison of their movement, the stretching, probing gestures of slender limbs, even the small mushroom-shaped heads that contribute to the monumental scale of the massive body beneath them, all these features characteristic of his work convey a playful attitude.” (Penrose, 1960: 11)

Armitage was preoccupied with the human body throughout his life and might therefore be classed as a humanist figure sculptor, whose formal language reflected a deep-seated interest in the archaic, the ‘primitive’ and the classical tradition. By reducing the complexities of human anatomy to a series of essential forms and planes Square Seated Figures (1956), possesses a solidity of mass and a monumental presence that evokes the ritualistic and totemic qualities of early Mediterranean art. The connection between Armitage’s modernism and antiquity was explicitly recognised in the exhibition Shaping the Beginning: Ancient Eastern Mediterranean and Modern Artists at the Museum of Cycladic Art (Nicholas P. Goulandris Foundation), Athens (25 May – 16 September 2006). In this context, Square Seated Figures was positioned as a direct descendant of the Cycladic aesthetic, demonstrating how Armitage translated the forms of the ancient world into post-war British sculpture.