Three madrigals
David HORTON
Australia born 1973
Three madrigals 2011
Corton steel
Since completing graduate and post-graduate studies at the National Art School, Sydney in 2008, Horton has worked primarily in the modernist idiom of assembled and welded steel as championed in the 1960s by David Smith in the USA and Anthony Caro in Britain.
Horton states that he assigns titles to his works after their completion, but he has also implied that his intention with this work was to interpret musical experience in sculptural form – the madrigal being a secular song for several voices that was popular in the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
Art historical reference is also found in Horton’s work and perhaps most explicitly in a later sculpture whose assembled and welded components, while robustly abstract in kind, are based on figurative and architectural details in a painting by the 15th-century Italian master Andrea del Verrocchio. With these three forms, the folding and juxtaposing of elements alludes to the rhythms and characteristics of a madrigal.