Barry Flanagan (1941-2009) studied at St Martins School of Art and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1982. He had an extremely playful and experimental approach to materials and art. In 1979 he discovered the motif of the hare, which was to become an incredibly important visual emblem in his bronze work. For Flanagan the hare symbolised the freedom of the artistic spirit and he often invested the hare with human traits and forms. The hare imbued his sculptural output in later years and the leaping hare became in particular a dynamic visual motif for the artist. In this etching, Flanagan places two hares side by side and there is an intimate dynamic between the two. The tilt of the heads seems to humanise the hares as does the contact from one to another which gives the creatures an emotional dimension, and infers the relationship between the two to be highly charged. Once again, on a small scale, we are given through this etching, an excellent distillation of the powerful work of one of Britain’s leading sculptors of the 20th Century.