William Tucker: Horses

James and Audrey Foster Galleries, Fourth Floor Hallway Gallery, Sculpture Terrace
September 2, 2006 – January 7, 2007

LINCOLN, MA-William Tucker is an internationally-renowned contemporary sculptor who had already established a significant career as an artist in Great Britain before moving to the United States in 1978. He was included in the seminal New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1964 and represented Britain at the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972.

Tucker’s sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s appear radically different from those made since the mid-1980s, although in reality the evolution is much more considered. The early sculptures were made of steel and wood and were based on abstract, geometric shapes surrounding large areas of negative space. (An example of this type of sculpture is Tucker’s Turning, on view on DeCordova’s Sculpture Terrace.)

By the mid-1980s Tucker changed his approach to sculpture. Instead of framing space he began to fill it with mass and volume. Giving in to the tactile pleasure of handling material, he returned to modeling, something he had not done since his early days as a student. The resulting sculptures hover on the edge of abstraction, often referencing human or animal form, with energy emanating from within the mass of the sculpture.

Tucker first created a series of highly abstracted, expressionist bronze sculptures of horses’ heads in 1986. Returning to the theme in 2003, Tucker produced several new sculptures and a group of gestural charcoal drawings. William Tucker: Horses brings together the work from this series, and includes Chinese Horse, 2003, a large bronze sculpture that has been on view on DeCordova’s Sculpture Terrace for the last two years.

Tucker, who now lives in western Massachusetts, has had solo exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London, the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, The Art Museum at Florida International University, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, UK, among others. A catalogue raisonné of Tucker’s sculpture, The Sculpture of William Tucker by Joy Sleeman, commissioned by the Henry Moore Institute, will soon be published by Lund Humphries.

William Tucker: Horses is curated by Director of Curatorial Affairs Rachel Rosenfield Lafo and is accompanied by a catalogue.

William Tucker will be giving a talk at DeCordova on Saturday, October 21, 3 pm.

For images, please contact Corey Cronin at ccronin@decordova.org or 781/259-3628.

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