Past Events
RICHARD
WENTWORTH
9 May – 31 July 2006
Images
Biography
Richard
Wentworth has played a leading role in new British sculpture
since the end of the 1970s. His work centres on the idea of
transformation – of subtly altering and juxtaposing everyday
objects – which has both altered the traditional definition of
sculpture and in turn fundamentally changed the way we perceive
the world around us. By transforming and manipulating industrial
and/or found objects into works of art, Wentworth subverts their
original function and extends our understanding of them by
breaking the conventional system of classification. His palette
is one of ladders and lightbulbs, buckets and tins, tables and
chairs, sometimes with legs partly sawn off and counterbalanced
by a weight as if to defy gravity. “I live in a ready-made
landscape”, he remarked early in his career, “and I want to put
it to use”.
Richard
Wentworth was born in 1947 in Samoa. He attended Hornsey College
of Art from 1965 and worked with Henry Moore as an assistant in
1967. He was awarded an MA in 1970 from the Royal College of Art
and went on to become one of the most influential teachers in
British art over past two decades. He taught at Goldsmith's
College, University of London from 1971 to 1987 and was
appointed by the prestigious German Academic Exchange Programme
(DAAD) to work in Berlin from 1993 to 1994. In 2002 was made
Master of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford
University. He was one of the selected artists in the London
section of the 2002 São Paulo Biennial and in 1999 curated
Thinking Aloud, one of the most creative contemporary
exhibition projects staged in the past five years which was seen
in Cambridge, London and Manchester. He now lives in London.
His works have
been shown in institutions such as the Serpentine Gallery, the
Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Hayward Gallery, London; the Israel
Museum, Jerusalem; the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Philadelphia; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Museum
Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; and the Musée d'Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris.
Links:
Tate Liverpool
The
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art,
Oxford University
Lisson Gallery,
London
