Bill Woodrow, Royal Academy

When Bill Woodrow’s Twin-tub with Guitar (1981) first burst onto the art scene - an old washing machine with a guitar cut into its metal housing - it was a pre-Young-British-Artist-era moment that brought wit, warmth and insight into an art world that had become cerebral, priest-like and inward-looking. This new Woodrow retrospective at the Royal Academy’s new Burlington Gardens space is a true celebration of the artist’s irreverence.

    For the rest of the 1980s he was celebrated, along with contemporaries Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon (exhibiting at the Tate Britain this Feb 2014), as part of a bold new generation of British sculptors working with found and discarded materials – including old car parts, furniture and fridges – and transforming them. Woodrow in particular gave these ‘found objects’ new life and new purposes, as in his Life on Earth (1984), which sees a group of vinyl chairs morphed into a theatre. Playful as it is, though, Woodrow’s work is not without comment on the wastefulness of a consumer society addicted to throwing away.

    As well as these earlier pieces, the Academy show celebrates Woodrow’s later work – pieces in welded steel and bronze including the well-known Regardless of History – a metal tree growing over a book that was installed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2000-2001. In Awe of the Pawnbroker (1994) Woodrow transforms the pawnbroker's three-ball symbol into an installation of rings – symbolic of one of the first things to be pawned in times of hardship – and this piece is a great example of his style of sculpture which tells a story as it goes. The 50 works in this exhibition provide a wonderful opportunity for a new generation to be enthralled by Bill Woodrow, now himself a Royal Academician. This is also a fantastic opportunity to stake out Burlington Gardens, the Royal Academy’s hot new venue for contemporary art.

Ticket price: £9

Address & map:  6 Burlington Gardens  W1S 3ET

Nearest tube stations: Green Park and Piccadilly circus