Figure 1

Stamped with the artist’s monogram, dated and numbered Bronze with a rich dark patina and green highlights Height: 63.5″ (161.3 cm) Conceived in 1992 and cast in an edition of 6 ABOUT THE ARTWORK Born in Dundee in 1922, William Turnbull left school at the age of fifteen during the Depression and worked as a labourer in a shipyard while attending evening art classes. This early exposure to industrial materials and large-scale construction would later inform his sensitivity to structure and form. In 1941, he joined the RAF and served as a pilot in Canada, India and Ceylon, later turning down the opportunity of a commercial flying career in order to pursue art. In 1946, he enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he discovered his vocation as a sculptor and formed a close friendship with Eduardo Paolozzi. In 1948, before completing his studies, Turnbull moved to Paris, where he lived until 1950. There, he became acquainted with Alberto Giacometti and encountered first-hand the work of Brancusi, while also travelling extensively. By 1950, he had exhibited at Galerie Maeght, and soon after his return to the UK, he exhibited with Paolozzi at the Hanover Gallery in London. William Turnbull, Ancestral Figure, 1989, Yorkshire Sculpture Park During the 1950s, he emerged as a key figure in British art. Turnbull’s international reputation was established with his inclusion in New Aspects of British Sculpture, held in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952, where he exhibited alongside Robert Adams, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Kenneth Armitage, helping to usher in a new wave of British sculpture. He was a founding member of the Independent Group at the ICA in London, where he held a solo exhibition in 1957, and participated in the radical exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, a seminal moment that signalled a transition from post-war art. During this period, he developed his celebrated Idol sculptures—works of striking, primal presence, shaped by his study of Cycladic, African, and other non-Western art forms, deepening his appreciation for cross-cultural influences that enriched his work. Turnbull’s work has been featured in the collections of numerous museums and galleries including the Tate Britain, London, the Getty Museum, Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A major retrospective at Tate in 1973 confirmed his standing as one of the most influential modern British artists, and in 1984, he and Kim Lim were in a joint exhibition at the National Museum of Art Gallery, Singapore. An exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1995 brought renewed public attention to his work, and in 2005, William Turnbull: Retrospective 1946–2003 was held at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield. William Turnbull, Large Horse, 1990, Yorkshire Sculpture Park Over the course of his career, Turnbull also worked with industrial materials such as steel, Perspex and fibreglass. In the early 1980s, he returned to bronze, which remained his preferred material. While Turnbull’s figures of the 1950s often conveyed a more primitive strength and rougher surface texture, his later bronzes developed a smoother elegance and greater formal clarity. Created in 1992, Figure 1 is marked by restraint, clarity, and a sustained interest in the expressive power of simple, archetypal forms. Rising vertically, the sculpture has a quiet monumentality, its upright structure giving it a strong, grounded presence in space. Turnbull reduces the human figure to a few essential elements: a tall central shaft, a circular body, and a horizontal block suggesting a head. The bronze surface is subtly worked, with fine striations and tonal variation that catch and diffuse the light. This textured finish softens the geometry of the form, introducing a sense of material presence and preventing the sculpture from becoming overly austere. While highly abstract, the sculpture retains the unmistakable suggestion of a standing figure, continuing Turnbull’s long engagement with the human form, first explored in his earlier Idol works. Here, that earlier language is distilled to its most refined expression. The result is a work that is both modern and timeless, combining a pared-back sculptural vocabulary with a sense of stillness and permanence reminiscent of ancient art. Figure 1 is a mature and resolved work, and a particularly elegant example of Turnbull’s later practice.