Catalog Search Results
Summary
Eric Gill was one of the twentieth century's most admired sculptors. He was also a letter-cutter, typographic designer (of Gill Sans, among other typefaces), calligrapher, architect, writer and teacher. His best-known works include the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, carved between 1913 and 1918, and his 1931 Prospero and Ariel for the BBC's Broadcasting House in central London. Gill lived an extraordinary and unconventional life,...
3) The eye
Summary
theEYE is a best-selling series of profiles about contemporary artists. Each film offers a rare insight into an artist's influences and ideas, providing an accessible means of engaging with the pleasures and puzzles of art in the twenty-first century.
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Often using subjects which lie on the border of science and philosophy, Conrad Shawcross's structural and often mechanical sculptures, question empirical, ontological and philosophical systems ubiquitous within our lives. While at first appearing rational and functional, his often complex mechanised systems in the end deny all rational function and so the viewer is forced down philosophical and metaphysical avenues to deduce a 'rasion d'etre'. From...
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In October 2002 Anish Kapoor completed his extraordinary sculpture Marsyas for the Unilever series of commissions in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. A challenging and overwhelming artwork, Marsyas is a vast red PVC membrane stretched between three massive steel rings. The title refers to a satyr in Greek mythology who was flayed alive by the god Apollo. This film follows the making of Marsyas, from the earliest maquettes to the complex installation...
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In a distinguished career since the mid-1970s, Tony Cragg has produced a strikingly diverse range of sculptures in the widest variety of materials. His prolific output embraces organic and industrial creations, abstract and near-figurative images, delicate, powerful, immediate and yet elusive forms. The sculptor, he says, "looks for all the forms that don't exist." Filmed in the UK and Germany, where Tony Cragg has lived since the early 1980s, this...
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"I am armed with madness for a long voyage," states British born, prolific painter, sculptor, writer and visionary Leonora Carrington. Perhaps the last surviving artist of the original Surrealist artist movement, as well as the famously former lover of Max Ernst, Carrington's life and work is arguably not "surreal" at all, nor is it classifiable in any sense of the word. Indebted to Surrealism, Carrington is nonetheless possessed of unique personal...
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Gavin Turk is a leading figure in British contemporary art. His 1991 degree show work Cave, a blue ceramic plaque commemorating his occupancy of a studio, and Pop, the waxwork figure of himself as Sid Vicious, are among the iconic artworks of the 1990s. His "self-portrait" signatures and his finely crafted sculptures of everyday objects (such as cardboard boxes cast in bronze) bring the commonplace into an art space and challenge the viewer to engage...
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Science and Surrealism, ancient myths, Buddhism and feminism are among the frameworks of ideas important to Liliane Lijn’s art. In Paris at the end of the 1950s, in Greece and New York, and in England since 1966, she has worked with light, energy and movement, with archetypal shapes and unconventional materials to produce an art that is clear, complex and strikingly beautiful. Many of Liliane Lijn’s key drawings and sculptures are featured in...
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Rachel Whiteread has created some of the most remarkable and resonant public sculptures of recent years. House (now demolished) cast in concrete the interior of a terraced house in London's East End. Holocaust Memorial is a moving memorial in Vienna to the victims of the holocaust in Austria. Yet she also frequently works on a domestic scale, casting in plaster and resin the spaces inside, around and beneath furniture, floors and staircases. Her art...
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Gereon Krebber’s proposal for a monumental and expensive aluminium object called Tin won the 2003 Jerwood Sculpture Prize. Shot over more than a year, this film follows the creation, casting and placing of the final sculpture. Sitting in the elegant country house garden at Ragley Hall, Tin suggests a kitchen container or a hamburger and yet is at the same time defiantly abstract. Krebber is a young sculptor from Germany who studied at the Royal...
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Marc Quinn remains best known for his sculptures cast from parts of his body. The first of these, Self (initially cast in 1991), was created with nine pints of his frozen blood. Yet, as this profile demonstrates, his art over the past decade has embraced an exciting and diverse range of materials, including lead, ice, wax, glass, frozen flowers and even DNA. His sculptures include both figurative and semi-abstract forms, but each engages with his...
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William Turnbull is one of Britain’s most distinguished sculptors and painters. In the late 1940s he studied art in London and then spent time in Paris, and ever since he has rigorously explored a limited number of archetypal forms as well as the fundamentals of art’s languages. Over more than fifty years William Turnbull has returned again and again to the head and the mask, to the standing figure and the horse, as well as to possibilities of...
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An internationally acclaimed artist, Antony Gormley is best known for his monumental sculpture Angel of the North. This earth-bound figure with its massive wings shares with all of Gormley's work a preoccupation both with the human form and with our shared spiritual potential. Antony Gormley's early lead and iron figures were cast from his own body. They demand a physical and emotional response, but they also raise profound philosophical questions...
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Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, who were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004, have worked together since 1978. Their precise, formally beautiful art explores the networks of today’s global society within a rigorous conceptual and aesthetic framework. They employ a wide range of media, including models displayed as sculpture, wall paintings, furniture and film. Through this diverse output runs a consistent engagement with ideas of space and place,...
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Richard Deacon is widely regarded as one of the principal British sculptors, best known for his innovative use of open form and his interest in materials and their manipulation. For more than two decades, Deacon has created unique sculptures in a wide range of materials such as laminated wood, polycarbonate, leather, cloth and ceramic. Working on both a domestic and monumental scale, his structures combine organic and biomorphic forms with elements...
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Vong Phaophanit showed his strikingly seductive Neon Rice Field when he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1993. Like much of his rich and complex work since then, this installation exhibits a strong interest in language and light, in the painterly qualities of ephemeral materials and in ideas of cultural displacement. He was born in Laos, educated in France and has worked mostly in Britain since the early 1990s. Much of his work now is commissioned...
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For his show as Britain's representative at the 2001 Venice Biennale, Mark Wallinger brought together a typically eclectic group of sculptures, videos and installations. Like Ecce Homo, his much-loved life-size statue of Christ created for Trafalgar Square, the exhibition provoked and challenged and moved many of those who experienced it. Mark Wallinger's art is often witty and immediately accessible yet at the same time it engages with some of the...
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Richard Wilson is an internationally-renowned sculptor and installation artist who often works on an architectural scale. 20:50, his room-sized sea of reflective sump oil, is an overwhelming experience. More recent works like Jamming Gears, made for London's Serpentine Gallery, and Over Easy, built into The Arc Arts Centre in Stockton-in-Tees, offer resonant and profound challenges to our sense of space and of the environment around us. By turns amusing...
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In the early 1960s Anthony Caro led a revolution in sculpture in Britain. His abstract steel constructions, often painted in bold colours, forged a new and internationally influential sculptural language. In the years since his fertile and diverse practice has consistently challenged and extended what sculpture is, and what it might be. At the age of 80, Anthony Caro remains intensely active, working each day in his studio and overseeing every detail...