FINE 1000

 One of my favorite works at Tate Modern London was the Chessboard   (pictures below). They are five plaster figures that have been sculpted and painted and installed on free-standing plaster supports. The figures combine aspects of both humans and animals and are semi-abstracted. The artist,  Germaine Richier,   wanted to depict the subject of the chess game and its parts in this artwork. The stumpy supports of the little figures were converted into much taller individual bases of different heights on a larger scale, giving the figurines a greater sense of potential motion.  The King, the Queen, the Bishop, the Knight, and the Castle are the five main chess pieces found on the Chessboard. The Castle is the only piece that has three legs and is the most abstract of the figures. Each one of the chess pieces is a roughly humanoid figure that stands on two legs. The Castle's body is a long collection of horizontal and vertical surfaces that rise upward in the form of four stick-like p

  The Tate Modern London is home to a large hanging sculpture known as The Queen 1962 (photos below). The Queen  is composed of woven and knotted linen thread in a natural color and is suspended from bamboo poles. It is slightly over four meters high. At the top, it has a complex knotted and braided design. Below that, a narrower area gradually widens toward the middle of the piece before gently tapering off toward the floor. The braids may reflect Tawney's love for ancient Egyptian headdresses. At the same time, the knots are reminiscent of the nautical knots on the tugboats she observed from her riverfront studio in Lower Manhattan, New York. In the United States, Tawney was a pioneer of "fiber [sic.] art." She began her career as a sculptor before switching to weaving in 1954 at the Penland School of Crafts, where she learned tapestry under the Finnish weaver Marta Taiple.  The resulting artwork of  Lenore Tawney,  her use of bamboo poles, and her focus on using natura