PHILLIP KING

Phillip King is a major protagonist in the history of sculpture during the second half of the 20th Century. His work was noticed as early as 1966, during the Primary Structures exhibition at the Jewish Museum of New York, alongside Carl Andre, Anthony Caro, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson. King represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1968 and a number of major retrospectives of his work have been organised including at the Whitechapel Gallery (1968), Hayward Gallery (1981), the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (1997) and, more recently, in France, at the Consortium de Dijon (2013). Phillip King works with a wide range of materials such as steel, plaster, wood, ceramic and plastic. He uses a very unique formal language, incorporating a large palette of personal references ranging from the Tunisia of his childhood to English gardens. His work is simultaneously exuberant and rigorous, eccentric and academic. The use of bright colours combined with a formal mastery of the materials is at the very heart of his work.

Phillip King was born in 1934 in Tunisia and studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London from 1957-58 under the direction of Anthony Caro. He worked as an assistant to Henry Moore, and then went on to teach at the Royal College of Art and the Royal Academy School. Today he lives and works in London, where he continues to produce sculptures of a remarkable richness, both in terms of the variety of their shapes as well as the materials he uses. His work forms part of the permanent collections of most of the major international museums and notably the Tate (London), the MoMa (New York), the MNAM Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the MOCA in Los Angeles, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Osaka museum.

A very detailed monograph published by the Presses du réel following the exhibition at the Consortium de Dijon is available from the gallery.

Requests for visuals: presse@galerie-lelong.com