Sculpture King: Tate Britain unveils new Installation

What do I need to know about Phillip King sculpture?

Dissatisfied with figurative sculpture, King is known for his experiments with abstraction and materials in the early 1960s, investigating how form is created through process. A fantastically innovative use of different materials such as fibreglass, PVC, sand, clay and plastics to create his famous cones, pyramids and industrial forms, has established King’s vital role in the changing face of British sculpture. Less well known is that he was also one of the first artists to do away with plinths and place his work directly on the floor.

King first discovered sculpture when he found himself in Paris in his early 20s as a young conscript. Sketching in the Louvre, King fell in love with the art of the invisible, running his fingers over the old masters to get some idea of their underlying form. Exploring the mystery of surface and and what hides beneath has driven King for over 60 years, as he has sought to imbue sculpture with the same physicality as painters like Rothko and Pollock. The famous cones that have come to define King as an artist were the result of leaning two leaves together, a response to the sculptor Brancusi and his method of adding one thing to another to make things to stand up. 

If you enjoyed the blockbuster Tate Modern Matisse exhibition earlier in the year, you will also love King’s pioneering use of colour, which he described as, ‘no longer subservient to the material but something on its own, to do with surface and skin’. This autonomous power of colour in King’s work binds elements of his sculpture together.

Today King is regarded as one of the key members of the movement that rejuvenated British postwar sculpture: his work can be found in important public collections such as MoMA, New York and he represented the Britain at the Venice Biennale, 1968. As a teacher at St Martins, King became good-cop to his colleague Anthony Caro's bad, always offering positive advice to young artists like Gilbert & George and landscape artist, Richard Long. 

Now retired from his position as President of the Royal Academy, Phillip King CBE has curiously blended the ivory tower of the established art world with a unique and provocative style that has completely remade our idea of sculpture.

Tate Britain Duveens Commision 2014

To mark his 80th birthday King has been commissioned to exhibit at the Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries, where he will be displaying six works from the 1960s. Look out for key sculptures from the Tate’s Collection including King’s Genghis Kahn (1963) and Rosebud (1962) which was his first coloured sculpture in fibreglass. 

As such a crucial figure in British sculpture, this retrospective is long over due and a hot pick for new exhibitions in London this Christmas.