Lock, 1990
Richard Deacon has been working for over forty years and
spawned a generation of art student imitators. Tate Britain’s enormous basement
galleries are perfect spaces to show Deacon’s oversized sculptures, allowing
them to command the rooms without being claustrophobic and overbearing. This exhibition charts the artist’s career
from a series of drawings made in 1978 and which in effect set the artist on a
continuing pathway of discovering and exploration around notions of mass,
volume and space.
It's Orpheus When There's Singing #7, 1978-79
Untitled, 1981
Laminated wood and steel predominate throughout Deacon’s
oeuvre. The mix of steel rivets and bolts juxtaposed against patterned and
untreated wood with dried glue oozing out of the joints offer a visual feast of
materials. As with most large scale
sculptural work, the urge to touch and caress is replaced by an urge to climb
onto or crawl into Deacon’s serpentine shapes.
Despite being open in form, the viewer is restricted walking around and looking
into his sculptures. However, such
restrictions still offers up wonderful mini installations/compositions –
fantastic sketching opportunities for art students!
Struck Dumb, 1988
The scale of Untitled,
1981 hints at an early hands on approach as the artist developed his working
method, which slowing became less and less as the scale of his work increased,
to be replaced by Glasgow shipbuilders in Struck
Dumb, 1988. The artist (and studio
hands) reappear in component works such as After,
1998.
After, 1998
Deacon has never tired of his play of interior and exterior
space and surprisingly, for such masculine looking work in terms of scale and
choice of materials, the traditionally feminine-associated serpentine shape
also predominates. This interaction of
sensuous composition and hard materials on the whole work very well. However, perhaps the combination had become a
little too formulaic in later pieces such as Out of Order, 2003 which for me is just too forced, too
curvilinear, too over-complicated, over-decorated. Just because you can steam word into a curve,
shouldn’t mean that ever single plank must receive the same treatment in the
same sculpture!
Along with Richard Wentworth, Richard Deacon is regarded as
a leading British sculptor and key figure within New British Sculpture since the end of the 1970s.
This exhibition was the first time I have viewed a large collection of the
artist’s work, and unlike last year’s Wentworth retrospective at The Royal
Academy, left me wanting to see more of his work.
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