Hugh Townley
Born 1923, West Lafayette, IN
Lives and works in Bristol, RI
Group of Three, the Pembroke Piece, 1969, concrete, 108" x 96" x 80"
Gift of the Artist, DeCordova Permanent Collection 1969.38
A professor emeritus at Brown University where he taught art for many years, Hugh Townley is an established sculptor known for his weighty large-scale works and powerful formal compositions. Townley's sculptures communicate through a personal vocabulary of forms that emerged in the artists' work over forty years ago.
The artist's large and small scale sculptural works fall into three basic types that utilize this common vocabulary of recurring familiar shapes: indoor and outdoor free-standing works, wall reliefs made of exotic and common varieties of wood cut into abstract shapes to compose a complex layered jig-saw puzzle surface, and suspended pieces with component forms assembled on a supporting chain.
Group of Three, the Pembroke Piece is part of the Sculpture Park's permanent collection, and the three large-scale concrete elements that form this sculptural grouping spell "ART" in an abstract manner. Townley's works have been influenced by his interests in anthropology, Eastern philosophies, and Native American history, and are often reminiscent of ancient archetypal images found in petroglyphs.
