Helen Chadwick

16 - 20 July 2025

Life Pleasures, the major retrospective of pioneering British artist Helen Chadwick is now on at The Hepworth Wakefield. To celebrate the event, we are launching a special five-day online exhibition of her limited editions.

The exhibition features 7 works highlighting Chadwick’s experimental approach.

To purchase please contact carolina@richardsaltoun.com
Helen Chadwick

Allegory of Misrule, 1986

Lithograph

46 x 33cm

Edition of 30

Signed, unframed

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HEC363

In 1986 Chadwick completed a two-month residency at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK. The focus of her attention was a small 18th century oil painting Allegory of Misrule by Johann Georg Platzer, which was in the museum’s permanent collection. Working with her own photocopied image and photocopies of frozen, dead animals from the museum's Natural History department, a slide projection of the original painting and a second slide projection of an atomic explosion; Chadwick rearticulated the historical painting into her own contemporary version.
Helen Chadwick

Black Hole, 1989

Screen print on mirror with pink flocking and brass fittings
32.8 x 23.8 x 0.6 cm
3.7 cm (hole diameter)
Edition of 20

Signed, FRAMED

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HEC147

Black Hole (1989) refers to the artist's 1987 artwork Tre Capricci. The Italian word ‘Capriccio’ means to complain or have a tantrum. In Tre Capricci we see three (tre) projected images of the Chadwick whining, complaining; in some kind of distress, her face embedded into the image of a traditional cameo; a recurring motif in the artist’s work.

In Black Hole the arabesque motif alludes again to the traditional cameos. The rococo cartouche is empty: instead of a classical silhouette, the main feature is nothing but a black hole.
Helen Chadwick

Anatoli, 1989

Etching and aquatint with relief on wove paper

95 x 67 cm

Edition of 250

Signed, unframed

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HEC142

Helen Chadwick was one of six contemporary artists selected by the critic Richard Cork to create prints for display in hospitals and other public health buildings for the King's Fund Hospital Project in 1989.

Her contribution was Anatoli (1989), which takes its title from a town in the north-west region of Greece. The composition is similar to that of Meat Abstract No 1, a work she also referred to as 'Black Sun'. In contrast to the sombre pallet in the photograph, Anatoli offers a fiery yellow sun floating through the sky in a golden haze. It was printed at the Oxford Printmakers Cooperative.
Font Fuck (1992) merges notions of the sacred and the profane. The image depicts a baptismal font brimming with strawberries, above which a phallic pestle hovers, poised to crush the fruit. Chadwick reimagines the tension between softness and severity, reverence and playfulness, prompting reflection on the nature of pleasure. What unsettles us and what we yearn for may not, in the end, be so easily distinguished.

Helen Chadwick

Font Fuck, 1992

C-print
28 x 28 cm
Edition of 50

Signed, unframed

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HEC362
Coitus is a digital collage of a photographic image of daisies in a field ‘splashing’ onto a light sky-blue background. The fluid shaped stain of the daisies ‘in bloom’ playfully denote the associations anchored by the title of sexual intercourse. Daises are historically a symbol of purity and innocence and here Chadwick’s literally deflowers the ‘flower' of its sexual innocence.

Helen Chadwick

Coitus, 1993

Offset lithograph
28 x 28 cm
Edition of 100

Signed, unframed

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HEC353
Helen Chadwick

adore abhor, 1994

Screen print on paper
46.5 x 61 cm

Unsigned, unframed

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HEC204

adore abhor (1994) was printed by letterpress in landscape orientation on white paper. It consists of the two words 'adore' and 'abhor' placed centrally on the page as though mirroring each other around a vertical axis. 'Adore', on the left side, is in a forward-slanting cursive script while 'abhor' on the right, slants backwards. This same configuration of the two words is used as a decorative patterning at top and bottom of the page in lines that slant down towards the centre and then back up again. The artist's individual title for this image is Adore >< Abhor, using the mathematical symbols for 'greater than' and 'less than' also evoked by the textual patterning at top and bottom of the page. It was derived from Chadwick's notes and drawings for a sculpture produced in the same year titled Adore – Abhor.
Helen chadwick

Like a Virgin, 1994

Ink etching and blind embossing on cream paper

Printed by the artist at the Royal College of Art in an edition of 50 numbered copies.

27.5 x 27.5 cm

Signed, unframed

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HEC156

Like a Virgin (1994) is an ink etching of a cockroach, a creature commonly associated with squalor and filth. Closer inspection of the insect reveals a resemblance to the male phallus, normally associated with virility and dominance yet here relegated to the level of a mere bug. The paper has also been blind embossed with the outline of a woman's hips, in which the cockroach has been strategically placed in the centre as if upon entry. The title 'Like a Virgin' refers to female cockroaches who do not need a mate to reproduce, hence experiencing virgin birth and are devoid of the threat of extinction.
Portrait of Helen Chawick 1992 by Kippa Matthews.

Biography

British artist Helen CHADWICK (1953 - 1996) embraced the sensuous aspects of the natural world, breaking taboos of the ‘normal’ and ‘traditional’. Considered a ‘mother’ to the YBAs through her teaching posts at the Royal College of Art, Chelsea School of Art and the London Institute, her experiments with material were innovative and unconventional and captured a world in a state of flux. Aesthetic beauty created out of an alliance of unconventional, often "vile", materials is what typified her work.

She was one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987. Chadwick’s 1986 exhibition ‘Of Mutability’, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, is considered a seminal point in the breakthrough of the YBA movement.

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Helen Chadwick

To purchase please contact carolina@richardsaltoun.com

Helen Chadwick

Signed, unframed

Helen Chadwick

Signed, FRAMED

Helen Chadwick

Signed, unframed

Helen Chadwick

Signed, unframed

Helen Chadwick

Signed, unframed

Helen Chadwick

Unsigned, unframed

Helen chadwick

Signed, unframed

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