William Tucker RA

Highly respected sculptor and Royal Academician William Tucker works directly in plaster to create powerful, suggestive works that strike a unique balance between figurative and abstract sculpture.

Rising to prominence in the 1960s Tucker’s innovative early sculpture presented abstract forms in painted steel or fibreglass and were placed directly on the ground. These works used repeated geometric elements assembled into abstract configurations and used colour to articulate outline and volume.

In 1972, Tucker represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and two years later published his highly successful book ‘The Language of Sculpture’ which had evolved from a series of lectures he gave whilst he was Gregory Fellow in Sculpture at the University of Leeds (1968-70).

Since moving to New York in 1978, Tucker has established his reputation with a series of sculptures whose ambiguity of reference to the human figure brings the possibility of a new kind of figuration in sculpture in which the image emerges from both an inner perception of the body and an outer perception of volume and surface. These works appeal to both touch and sight, suggesting at once part of the body and the whole body, but resisting conclusive definition.