Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
William Tucker
American (b. British, 1935)
EGYPT (1976)
oak
12” x 12” x 16”

STYLE: 70s SCULPTURE

  
William Tucker was born to English parents in Cairo, Egypt in 1935. Two years later, his family moved back to England where Tucker was raised. He studied history at Oxford University and later attended London's Central School of Art and Design. He graduated from St. Martin's School of Art in 1960 and quickly became one of England's most acclaimed abstract sculptors. Tucker moved to New York City in 1978 and is now a professor of Art at Bard College, where he has written extensively on twentieth century art while curating exhibitions here and abroad. He has also produced a rich body of his own work that maintains a continuing dialogue with the history of art while challenging traditional notions of what sculpture should look like.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Robert Berlind, Art in America, 2/03
“William Tucker's sculptures are emphatic in their sheer, physical presence and at the same time oddly, mysteriously self-absorbed. In their various states, as small studies, large plaster-over-wire-mesh versions, or bronze castings, they are sensuously monumental yet remain ambiguous, awkward and even hermetic. These massive piles seem to exist as much for themselves as for a human viewer. Tucker's mystery is not that of the ethereal but of the primordial.
Walking around each work you get an illogical diversity of readings, none definitive, all pertaining to the body, as when a possible torso is transfigured into a head or a foot. But the torso more than any other reading is fundamental. Even when the image of a face predominates, it does so as a corporeal force rather than as an emblem of the mind. Instead of having stable identities Tucker's sculptures seem to shift polymorphously. They do so, necessarily, at the cost of a certain clarity. If contours are provisional, the sense of their pushing out from a generating center is palpable.
In certain works a singular reading predominates. At over 10 feet high, the runner's foot of Messenger (seen at McKee in plaster and as a drawing at the New York Studio School) is emblematic and unmistakable. Up close, however, it could be an overhanging white cliff or a breaking wave.
Because of their contrasting surfaces and colors, the assembled works at McKee--plaster (Messenger), bronze with a putty-colored patina (Emperor) or a basalt-and-lichen effect (Victory II)--show Tucker to be something of a naturalist in the tradition of Henry Moore, even though Moore was, for Tucker's generation, the father figure to be overthrown.
Curiously, the rough chiaroscuro and single viewpoint of Tucker's drawings, done after rather than as studies for the sculptures and shown at the New York Studio School last spring, convey sculptural mass with greater legibility than their three-dimensional models. By singling out a particular vantage point, the drawings.”