Leaping Hare with gold Leaf, 1991.
Barry Flanagan studied art and architecture at Birmingham College of Art and St. Martin’s School of Art in London. In 1991 was elected to the Royal Academy and he received the OBE.
Flanagan’s use of the hare motif was born through an experience of seeing a hare running on the Sussex Downs- which he described as ‘Magical’.
His work resides in numerous public collections, including the Stedelijk Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthaus (Zurich), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Nagoya Museum, and the Tate Gallery. Flanagan is best known for his bronze hares which he first started to exhibit in the eighties – which ‘spring into life’ and have also been exhibited in many outdoor spaces, most notably on Park Avenue in New York in 1995-6 and at Grant Park, Chicago in 1996. Flanagan’s hare statue “Large Left-Handed Drummer” was on display in Union Square in New York City through June of 2007.