Frenhofer 27

In his work spanning more than half a century, the British-American artist William Tucker explores the essence of sculpture. While his early sculptures, in which he uses industrial materials such as steel and plexiglass, are geometrically abstract, his more recent works, modelled in plaster and subsequently cast in bronze, have an immediate visual corporeality. The latter is also true of the two bronzes selected for Blickachsen 13. “Frenhofer” and “Tauromachy” seem at first sight to be non-representational and yet, with their bulges and rough, chapped surfaces, animate. Their titles alone provide a clue to their meaning: in the case of “Tauromachy” (Bullfight), very directly. “Frenhofer”, on the other hand, refers to a short story by Honoré de Balzac, which tells of an artist’s quest for the perfect illusion of life in art, whose masterpiece is however revealed by two painter friends as merely a confusion of lines and colours.
William Tucker, who has lived in the United States since the early 1980’s, already took part in documenta in 1968, represented Great Britain in 1972 at the Venice Biennale, and was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1992. His works have been acclaimed in numerous exhibitions around the world.