Brutalist welded metal sculpture

Sold for £4,400

Brutalist sculpture collectors had a striking lot to compete for, and the bidding proved it, this raw, welded scrap-metal crustacean form sold for £4,400. Constructed from jagged, soldered plates and angular metal rods fused into a sprawling, multi-legged silhouette, the piece channels the rugged, industrial assemblage aesthetic most famously associated with French sculptor César Baldaccini, echoing the spirit of his celebrated welded “compression” and insect-form works such as La Punaise, though this piece is offered in that manner and idiom rather than as an attributed work.

Hand-formed from layered sheet and bar metal with a heavily oxidised, dark bronze-brown patina, the sculpture’s crab-like or insectoid form bristles with elongated, tapering “legs” radiating from a stacked, plated body, each weld and seam left exposed as part of the raw, textural finish. The deliberately unpolished, industrial construction sits firmly within the mid-20th-century brutalist sculptural tradition, where salvaged metal was reworked into bold, organic forms. The strong price achieved reflects the growing collector appetite for postwar sculptural metalwork in this distinctive idiom.