Helen Chadwick
Barbican Art Gallery
Ego Geometria Sum (I Am Geometry), 1983, is the title of the first body of work to have earned Helen Chadwick significant attention. Leonardo, who inscribed his ideal male body in the overlapping figures of the circle and square, would undoubtedly have been pleased to have made such a statement, but it’s harder to know what the intellectual reduction involved in geometricizing the human form implied for the English artist, who died in 1996 aged just forty-two. Mark Sladen, the curator of this first retrospective, follows critic Michael Newman’s interpretation of the work as evoking a “classical