The openness and spatial dynamism of Turnbull’s Pegasus (1954) stands out within his oeuvre. He favoured the certainly defined stance of the standing figure or the plane of the face, human or equine, whereas Pegasus has no obvious back and front. Its angled planes, textured with striated lines accentuating or subtly contradicting their primary direction, describe an abbreviated spiralling motion, encouraging the viewer to circulate in similar fashion. In some senses, Pegasus foreshadows the work Anthony Caro began to make a half-decade or so later, although its implicit motion might also chime with the mobiles of Alexander Calder and George Rickey. Yet, without minimising its unique qualities within his work, Pegasus also points towards Turnbull’s wider consideration of edges and his highly refined sense of how minute shifts in line or texture can animate and draw the viewer around even the most upright and monolithic form.

The horse is a key component of Turnbull’s archetypal imagery, present from the 1940s until the 2000s. Pegasus is amongst his most abstract treatments of the subject, an avoidance of direct reference perhaps sanctioned by the mythological creature’s inherently hybrid nature. Even as horses disappeared from daily life, they retained a significant presence within modern sculpture, in the work of artists including Alexander Calder, Elisabeth Frink, Marino Marini and William Tucker. Jacques Lipchitz’s last sculpture treated the story of Bellerophon and Pegasus in fully heroic mode, in a manner that could not be further from Turnbull’s concerns. Perhaps the most famous modernist equine is Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s Horse (1914), the rising arch and schematic geometry of which we might also discern in Turnbull’s Pegasus. Another reason for Pegasus’s abstraction is its intimation of the freedom offered by flight, of escape from the restrictions of the ground. In this respect, we might see echoes in those cloud-like bursts of a number of his paintings, such as 05-59, made towards the end of the 1950s.

- Sam Cornish