.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In 1973 the Tate Gallery gave William Turnbull a retrospective exhibition. Spanning a thirty year career at this time, it gave Turnbull a chance to reflect and an opportunity to reassess his works’ evolution. Many pieces from his early days in Paris and subsequently in London, exhibiting with the Independent Group, were collected together for this exhibition allowing Turnbull to see these works again after many years.
Having concentrated on painting during the early 1970s Turnbull returned to sculpture, looking to combine the spontaneity of creation that he found in the 1950s with a refined subtlety of shape, texture and colour. Ancient tool forms and Cycladic figures coalesce, creating mystically imbued utilitarian objects. Turnbull uses classical references such as Agamemnon, Oedipus and Leda in the titles for these sculptures and in the case of the present work: Venus.
In doing so he directly references our western classical traditions, in both mythological and visual frameworks. Venus, the Roman Goddess of love and fertility, is immortalised in the Venus de Milo, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Turnbull references these classical ideas of beauty and combines them with natural forms and ancient primitive objects from non-western cultures. Palaeolithic adzes, Aboriginal 'bull roarers' and Japanese swords all feature in his sculptures from the 1980s.
The present work, conceived in 1984 is particularly interesting in this series as Turnbull initially intended the sculpture to be horizontal. He added the base and balanced it on its end in 1994. This alteration in the way a work is viewed was something that Turnbull had been experimenting with since the 1950s, most notably with Permutation Sculpture from 1956. In giving Venus a vertical, totemic presence, the sculpture transforms from something found, something casual, to a more formal, ceremonial being. This ambiguity and metamorphosis of the object through presentation, title and form are consistent themes that can be traced throughout his career. Simultaneously drawing from ancient cultures and classical western traditions Turnbull manages to combine what appear to be mutually exclusive entities to create beautiful, timeless sculptures.
Having concentrated on painting during the early 1970s Turnbull returned to sculpture, looking to combine the spontaneity of creation that he found in the 1950s with a refined subtlety of shape, texture and colour. Ancient tool forms and Cycladic figures coalesce, creating mystically imbued utilitarian objects. Turnbull uses classical references such as Agamemnon, Oedipus and Leda in the titles for these sculptures and in the case of the present work: Venus.
In doing so he directly references our western classical traditions, in both mythological and visual frameworks. Venus, the Roman Goddess of love and fertility, is immortalised in the Venus de Milo, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Turnbull references these classical ideas of beauty and combines them with natural forms and ancient primitive objects from non-western cultures. Palaeolithic adzes, Aboriginal 'bull roarers' and Japanese swords all feature in his sculptures from the 1980s.
The present work, conceived in 1984 is particularly interesting in this series as Turnbull initially intended the sculpture to be horizontal. He added the base and balanced it on its end in 1994. This alteration in the way a work is viewed was something that Turnbull had been experimenting with since the 1950s, most notably with Permutation Sculpture from 1956. In giving Venus a vertical, totemic presence, the sculpture transforms from something found, something casual, to a more formal, ceremonial being. This ambiguity and metamorphosis of the object through presentation, title and form are consistent themes that can be traced throughout his career. Simultaneously drawing from ancient cultures and classical western traditions Turnbull manages to combine what appear to be mutually exclusive entities to create beautiful, timeless sculptures.