She has been called “the mistress of splodge”, an epithet for which she confessed a surprising fondness. Now, at the age of 71, the artist Phyllida Barlow has put the seal on the late flowering of her career by being selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale next year.
The Newcastle-born sculptor, who was a mentor to some of the young British artists, known as the YBAs, who reinvigorated the art scene in the 1990s, including Rachel Whiteread, said it was an honour to be chosen for the competition.
Barlow, who was appointed CBE in the New Year Honours list, has enjoyed increasing, if belated, recognition in recent years, when she has been described as an “overlooked talent”.
She told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “It’s a massive honour. And I’m completely astonished because in a way I’ve been that thing called a minor British artist — I guess an MBA — for most of my working life and now I’m getting things that were once beyond my wildest dreams.
“So it is completely extraordinary and I thank the British Council for selecting me. It’s quite fantastic and it is a great honour.”
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Barlow, who taught at the Slade School of Fine Art for more than 30 years, creates large-scale works assembled from bits of what look like scrap material such as plywood, cardboard and polystyrene. Her works have been exhibited at Tate Modern in London.
The Venice Biennale is regarded as the most important contemporary arts festival in the calendar. Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Henry Moore are among those who have exhibited there.
Describing her work, Barlow told the programme: “The materials are often actually brand new, but I think my way of assembling them is very spontaneous and very quick.
“I like perilous things, I like the sense of sculpture that is only just holding itself together, is balancing. I’m very interested in that way in which things can be about to fall, or have fallen.
“I think the metaphor has grown, I think I am one of those artists who doesn’t quite know what my work is about at the outset but it begins to discover itself as I make it.”
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She once said she rather liked being called “the mistress of splodge” in recognition of her preference for sculpting rounded works, and did not even object when one critic described a piece as “like snot thrown on the wall”. She said: “I think the disgustingness of a spillage or a splodge has its own beauty, and fascinates me.”
Maria Balshaw, director of the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and a member of the committee that selected the artist, said: “Phyllida Barlow’s selection as the artist for the British Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale will surely raise a spontaneous cheer from across the many generations of art lovers, artists and students who have had the joy and critical pleasure of encountering her work. It is recognition of a long and illustrious career as a sculptor that challenges our perceptions of that form.”