"Truly, sculpture is always going on. With proper physical circumstances and the visual invitation, one simply joins in and makes the work." —Barry Flanagan

Transcending earlier explorations of different media and the conventions of composition, Flanagan’s ceramics, stone, marble, and sheet metal sculptures of the 1970s gave way to his use of bronze in the following decades. His most recognizable and important motif in this material is that of the hare, indebted both to the experience of seeing a hare run on the scenic Sussex Downs in South East England and to George Ewart Evans and David Thomson’s influential 1972 book The Leaping Hare. Flanagan’s first leaping hare sculpture, now held in the Tate Collection, was conceived in 1979 and first exhibited in 1980; in the four decades since, his monumental hares have been shown in public venues including Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany; the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom; Park Avenue, New York; Grant Park, Chicago; O’Connell Street and Parnell Square, Dublin; Union Square, New York; and the Kasmin Sculpture Garden, New York. Seamlessly blending the mundane, the imaginary, and the fantastic, Flangan elsewhere realizes bronze sculptures of animal forms including elephants, dogs, and horses—an archetype of classical sculpture, and the subject of the 1979 exhibition The Horses of San Marco at London’s Royal Academy of Arts which left a profound impression on the artist.

Following his representation of Britain at the 40th Venice Biennale in 1982, Flanagan has been the subject of major retrospectives and institutional solo exhibitions at “La Caixa” Foundation, Madrid (1993), traveling to Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes (1994); Tate Liverpool (2000); Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Germany (2002), traveling to Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice (2002–03); the Irish Museum of Modern Art in association with Dublin City Art Gallery The Hugh Lane (2006); a retrospective of early works at Tate Britain, London (2011–12); Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands (2018); and a career-spanning survey at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2019). In 2019, monumental sculptures by Flanagan were included in ARTZUID Amsterdam Sculpture Biennale, Sculpture Milwaukee, and Frieze Sculpture, The Regent’s Park, London. An outdoor sculpture exhibition was staged at Chatsworth House, United Kingdom in 2012, in addition to several important exhibitions at Waddington Custot, London since 1980. In 2022, Flangan’s sculpture Camdonian, publicly installed at the northeast corner of London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields since 1980, was fully restored after 42 years on display.