Kenneth Armitage, R.A. (1916-2002)

The present work is an early sculpture from a series of works that the artist began to develop in the 1960s. For much of this decade Kenneth Armitage was concerned with the theme of grouping figures into a single form. Armitage talks about his work in the following statement 'I wanted to merge them (the figures) so completely they formed a new organic unit - a simple mass of whatever shape I liked containing only that number of heads, limbs or other detail I felt necessary. So in a crowd we see only the face or hand that catches our eye, for we don't see mathematically but only what is most conspicuous or important or familiar' (Kenneth Armitage's statement in P. Selz, New Images of Man, p. 23).

There is another cast of The Visitors in The Kreeger Museum, Washington, D.C.