BARRY FLANAGAN, the artist best known for his large-scale sculptures of hares, has died. He was 68.
In 2001 he gave a 15ft bronze hare, the Drummer, to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and in 2006 a series of his sculptures was installed along Dublin’s O’Connell Street.
Flanagan, who had a major international reputation, was born in Prestatyn, north Wales, in 1941. About eight years ago he became an Irish citizen and since then had been based mainly in Dublin. He began making sculptures of animals, particularly hares, in the late 1970s. Seeing the hare as an anarchic free spirit, he set out to subvert the sober monumentality of modernist and classical sculpture.
Flanagan studied art in Birmingham and later at St Martin’s School of Art in London. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1982. His sculptures feature in prominent settings in Dublin, New York, London, Ghent, Osaka and many other locations.
