Barry Flanagan (b. 1941, Prestatyn, North Wales; d. 2009, Ibiza, Spain) is best known for his bronze sculptures of hares. Flanagan started out as a minimalist sculptor working with sand, plaster, wood and rope. He participated in some of the most important exhibitions of the 1960s, notably When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern and the ICA (1969). Flanagan began to work in stone and bronze and in 1979 the first bronze hare was cast. Variously inspired by a carcass in a butcher's shop, the sight of a leaping hare in the Sussex Downs, the 1972 book The Leaping Hare, as well as its significance in world mythology, the hare is the central metaphor of Flanagan's life and work. Often anthropomorphised, the hares' expressions range from insouciance, through boredom and melancholia, as they drum, think, dance, box and leap. Peripatetic, Flanagan described himself as an English-speaking itinerant European sculptor.