Masterpiece London: 26 June – 2 July, 2014 (Preview on 25 June) Phillip King Dunstable Reel
1970/2013 Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
Installation view Phillip King at Le Consortium, Dijon 2013 Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
Installation view Phillip King at Le Consortium, Dijon 2013 Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
Installation view Phillip King at Le Consortium, Dijon 2013 Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
Installation view Phillip King at Le Consortium, Dijon 2013 Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
For Phillip King’s 80th birthday, three London exhibitions open this June celebrating his sculpture, the past President of the Royal Academy who has been at the heart of the London art scene for more than 60 years. A student of Anthony Caro and assistant to Henry Moore, King has taught prolifically at London’s art schools and represented Britain in the 1968 Venice Biennale with Bridget Riley. He has been closely associated with the new British sculpture that developed in the 1960s and his work was included in the seminal 1966 exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, NY alongside Carl Andre, Anthony Caro, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson. He works in a variety of media (steel, plaster, wood, ceramic, plastic) creating abstract, often large-scale sculptures with a signature use of bright vibrant
Exhibitions:
Thomas Dane Gallery (11th June – 26th July): new and iconic sculptures showcasing the range of King’s oeuvre from 1960s to present across both gallery spaces (more details below)
Masterpiece London (26th June – 31st Aug): a solo outdoors presentation of some of Phillip’s largest sculptural works in the beautiful gardens at Royal Hospital Chelsea for the Masterpiece Sculpture Walk
RA Summer Exhibition (from Today 9th June): Phillip is showing a new work as part of the RA’s Summer Exhibition www.royalacademy.org.uk
Phillip King 11th June- 26th July, 2014 Thomas Dane Gallery 3 & 11 Duke Street, St. James’
Phillip King is perhaps our most significant living British sculptor, and is one of the key international sculptors of the last fifty years. His work was included in the seminal Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York in 1966, alongside Carl Andre, Anthony Caro, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson. King represented Great Britain at the 1968 Venice Biennale (with Bridget Riley) and has also been the subject of important exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery (1968), Hayward Gallery (1981) and most recently at Le Consortium, Dijon (2013).
King has worked consistently in many different media from steel, plaster and wood to ceramic and plastics. His formal language is singular and idiosyncratic, incorporating a vast array of references (from the Tunisia of his youth to the gardens of England); it is in turn exuberant and rigourous, eccentric and academic. King’s signature use of colour combined with a formal mastery of materials will be the thrust of the exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery.
The show, conceived as a condensed survey, will comprise some of the earliest wood and plaster works to emerge from his studio in the early 1960s. These embody what King believed to be the most primal of sculptural acts: standing two objects on end leaning against each other to create a triangle or apex. These early sculptures will be joined by more recent triangular works showing the development of this idea over his career. King’s ‘primal’ sculptures are often rendered in unpainted plaster and wood. Their bare materials reveal his obsession with the fundamental building blocks of sculpture and the whiteness of the plaster plays a significant role in stripping down sculpture to its simplest form in order to examine it in closer detail.
Alongside these King will include two major works from his related ‘Cone’ series, an extension of his works with triangular forms. In Rosebud, 1967 King employs the relatively modern material of
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?PVC plastic to create a perfect, pink coloured surface and allegorical form giving rise to one of the icons of 20th Century sculpture. Sure Place, 1976-7 is a brutal, architectural form, wrought in domestic building materials creating a hut-like structure or hiding place.
Blue Blaze, 1967, one of King’s largest indoor works, will occupy most of the gallery space at 3 Duke Street. It is a multi-part timber arrangement immersing the viewer in royal blue. The work draws inspiration from the language of Surrealism, classical architecture and even Lego.
The most recent works in the exhibition Bottom Pink, 2010 and Untitled (Pink Triangle), 2014 show King’s continuing adaptability and breadth as a sculptor. These later works remain rooted in his fascination with the fundamentals of sculpture and colour, but also display a formal precision. These echo Judd, Caro and even Henry Moore though remain unmistakably King’s.
To coincide with the gallery exhibition, an ambitious presentation of Phillip King’s outdoor sculptures is planned in central London this summer. The exhibition will take place in Ranelagh Gardens, in conjunction with Masterpiece, London. The exhibition will feature key large-scale outdoor works from throughout King’s career. Combined with the exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery, it will be a wholly deserved celebration of a remarkable working life that has spanned over 50 years and is continuing to this day.
Phillip King is collected by museums and important public collections internationally including Tate, London; MoMA, New York; Pompidou, Paris; MOCA, LA; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Osaka Museum, Osaka.
