Karin Jonzen: Making Space for the Human Figure by Prof. Fran Lloyd

Karin Jonzen’s reclining female figure Seated Nude (1951) was the first sculpture by a woman purchased for the Arts Council Collection in 1951 and recently featured in their touring exhibition, ‘Breaking the Mould, Sculpture by Women Since 1945’ (2020–23). The half life-size terracotta figure has a weighty presence that characterises Jonzen’s distinctive sculptural practice in the immediate post-war years in Britain and an engagement with the human body that she sustained until her death in 1998.

This talk addresses Jonzen’s later work from the mid 1950s, after her sculpture was included in the 1951 Festival of Britain on the South Bank, and had already entered national and international collections. This is almost twenty years after she trained under her maiden name of Löwenadler at the Slade School of Art (1932-36) and the City and Guilds Art School at Kennington, preparing for the 1937 Prix de Rome. Jonzen received various Slade prizes and subsequently won the Prix de Rome Sculpture Prize in 1939 – in competition with Kenneth Armitage – only to have her residency thwarted by the outbreak of war.

Through a focus on selected commissions, I explore how Jonzen negotiated the rapid changes in the wider field of British sculpture post 1955 alongside personal circumstances that directly impacted her practice. In particular, this investigation encompasses her working methods and the new spaces that Jonzen’s evolving figurative sculpture inhabited in Britain and abroad, and the associated meanings these engendered. I also discuss how these commissions, in turn, enabled the re-establishing of studio space that was central to her sculptural practice.

Fran Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of Art History at Kingston University, London. She co-authored Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London (Public Sculpture of Britain, Volume 13) and worked with the PMSA and Twentieth Century Society to secure the precedent setting listing of Elisabeth Frink’s Desert Quartet. Her published research on sculpture includes Sculpture Journal the first study of Karin Jonzen’s commissions for the World Health Organisation in ‘Pioneering Women Sculptors’, Special Issue, Volume 32, Number 1; the Sculpture Collection of Stanley Picker, and the work of sculptors Dora Gordine, Ernst Eisenmayer, Carl Plackman and Alison Wilding.