Garth Evans: The Anti-Virus Sculptures

Garth Evans: The Anti-Virus Sculptures at Leeds Art Gallery opens with a piece from a distinctly different era than the majority of works on view. Splayed out across nearly two square metres of the narrow space, Untitled No. 38 (1967–8) occupies the entranceway: four large orange extruded triangles, identical in profile, each tilted at a different angle from the others, achieve an improbable equilibrium – disparate in orientation, coherent as an ensemble. It belongs to the time when Evans, born in Stockport in 1934, was testing ideas about scale and composition while teaching at St Martin's School of Art in London. The piece is confident, even a little confrontational. Then you turn the corner and find 53 sculptures you could fit comfortably in an Ikea shopping bag.

The connection between the two bodies of work, Evans told me, was less about period or aesthetic register than elemental arithmetic. Sam Cornish, who curated the show, had initially proposed a different early work, White Cones (1968) – drawn partly by the logic of colour, white linking it to the plasters and the Jean Arp works on display elsewhere in the building. This idea was abandoned for logistical reasons, but I felt that the orange piece worked better regardless: composed of four identical elements put plainly together, it possesses a strange and otherworldly balance of form. Most of the Anti-Virus Sculptures are built from two, three or four found components — 'rarely five, generally three or four and sometimes just two.' This same structural economy spans sixty years of otherwise quite disparate work.

In the next, main gallery, a long table holds 53 sculptures arranged in loose clusters of three or four, giving the whole display the feeling of a series of interrupted conversations. Nothing about the groupings is systematic or orderly. Evans and Cornish installed them together, and at a certain point, Evans said, ‘we were taking turns to make a move, you know. Like chess.’ The analogy is certainly a fitting one for this body of work: the series began, Evans explained, with an intention to make just enough pieces for a chess set. That ambition quickly dissolved as the series took on a life of its own and the works have multiplied ever since, now numbering well over two hundred in total, with only a modest selection on display in Leeds. Circling the table – the only way to effectively survey the terrain – you take in an ongoing world of small encounters, rivalries and alliances, all conducted at roughly the height of a coffee cup.

Up close, the works are playful and disquieting by turns – part abstract form, part consumer product, many resembling small creatures with distinct personalities of their own. Evans described the sculptures possessing this quality from the very beginning: that the first piece had ‘come into my studio and was quite cheerfully sitting there... saying, here I am, and I'd like some friends.’ The series began in the first Covid lockdown at his Connecticut home in the United States. Evans’ aim during this period of isolation and uncertainty was ‘to make visible what is felt and cannot otherwise be shown’. The wall text puts it more personally: ‘I had this fantasy that I could create an army of sculptures that could somehow protect the world, or at least protect me.’ Talking to him, he deflated this statement with characteristic precision: ‘it was purely selfish.’ What the making did accomplish was to keep him, as he put it, sane.

The Anti-Virus Sculptures very much wear their formal means on their sleeves. Most are cast in Hydrocal plaster from moulds made of incidental studio objects: packaging, plastic bottles, measuring beakers, Tupperware, rubber gloves, whatever else offered itself from the kitchen or the garage. These fragmented shapes were then cut, sanded and collaged together. A few are 3D-printed, some painted lurid colours; a rare handful cast in bronze, but the material variety produces no hierarchy. Evans described the collage method as unfamiliar territory. His usual practice had always been additive and reversible: ‘making a mark and erasing it, making another mark and erasing that.’ Glued plaster offers no such revision: ‘once you glue a couple of pieces together, that's it.’ Something of this finality is legible in the objects, a quality of being arrested in the middle of becoming. You could imagine all of them at a much larger scale – they have a monumental composure that would survive the enlargement – but they are emphatically not maquettes. Nothing here is being proposed for elsewhere. It’s all on the table.

Towards the back of the gallery, a video documents the ritual by which Evans arrives at titles: the artist stands in white overalls beside a plinth on which a piece is displayed, while family and friends propose associative names. Gentle pressure is applied, tongues are loosened, and a name is conjured, seemingly from the formal qualities of the work itself. Then the piece is set aside and revisited in the morning. Most of the time, Evans said, he comes downstairs thinking: ‘oh my God, that is so right, so perfect.’ The names gathered here at Leeds span a wide emotional register — from the tender (Hope, Trust, Nestling, Love) to the sinister (Trojan, Effigy, Executor, The Last Memorial), by way of the matter-of-fact (Doubt, Indecision, Stare) and the oddly affecting (So, Bother, Spigot, Proletariat). Evans described the naming process as giving him access to what others find in what he's made: ‘they'll see things in it that I had no idea might be there, and the associations that come up really helped me enormously to see what I've done.’ Cornish, making his selection from photographs, worked mostly without reference to titles until the shortlist was established – except in one unknown case, where a piece was included partly because of its name. The implication is that the works sustain their charge independently of what they're called, though the names, once attached, become very hard to separate from the objects. 

Visitors to Leeds are invited to suggest names for two as-yet-untitled pieces, with Evans making the final choice. It is a small gesture, but it extends what is most interesting about the whole project: that meaning here is explicitly collaborative, externalised, subjected to other people's associations rather than held privately. The series started as a talisman against an uncontrolled situation and has remained, in some sense, open to the world. Evans left Britain for America in 1979 and has worked in rural Connecticut for decades. That he came to Leeds to install the show himself, and that the series is still ongoing rather than retrospective, says something about what the project became: less a finished body of work than a flock of creatures that require careful tending – and that, by the artist’s own account, have tended to him just as much.

Elliott Higgs, CAS Curator of Digital

Garth Evans: The Anti-Virus Sculptures
Leeds Art Gallery
22 May 2026 – 4 October 2026