High Chair
Robin Blau (Born 1946

Materials: lost wax cast bronze; welded, fabricated & waxed mild steel
Date: original 1988; re-design for NewActon 2008

The concept of ‘High Chair’ is one which draws upon the connotations of a child’s high chair adjacent to the family table, with the innocence and beauty of the missing small child implied. With the wings attached to the chair via a yoke form, the absent child becomes associated in the viewer’s mind with the classic images of the Baroque cherub, repeated again and again in the wall frescoes and painted domes of churches and palaces in a form where the winged child is cheeky, very much alive, and in liturgical terms, ‘close to heaven’.

The emptiness of the tall chair in this sculpture, with black steel/polished bronze-tipped wings formed around the elegant bronze bones cast from the wing bones of a large bird, is simultaneously intended to be playful, very beautiful, and yet obliquely resonant with something slightly sinister in the sense of absence of the child. As a work in a public place, it can be read on a variety of levels by different viewers, ranging from simple delight in the making of familiar forms—e.g. monumental chair and wings—to a more lingering reflection on the intent of its combined images.