William Turnbull

Private Collection, U.S.A.

Waddington Galleries, London, William Turnbull, Recent Sculpture, 25th September - 19th October 1991, cat. no.11, illustrated (another cast).

Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, cat. no.266, p.176, illustrated (another cast).

Structurally sound; some minor surface dust and spots of oxidation to the base of the 'neck'; otherwise the work appears in good overall condition. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work
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Throughout his career, William Turnbull has been concerned with creating sculpture that is symbolic of both our past and current condition of human existence. Indeed, the history of sculpture itself could be described at the history of creating archetypes: our desire and need to make three-dimensional forms -  etched with patterns or daubed with feathers, animal fat, blood -  both to describe and understand our presence in the world and to act as intermediaries between our lives and the divine. It is this deep and powerful history, what Turnbull has called the ‘consistent themes of sculpture’ that can be seen in any museum of world culture, that his work seeks to access.

Sculptures with titles such as Aphrodite or Venus seem to allude to the Classical world but their forms often reference much earlier Greek sculpture  (the kind considered too ‘primitive’ to be of interest to the Renaissance and subsequent centuries of neo-Classicism): the simplified, powerful figures that stood at the heart of holy places, wreathed in incense and smoke, or out on the sides of roads, offering protection and good luck, and marking boundaries between this world and the next.

In Female Figure, the body is delineated, tattooed even, within the geometric form of a way-marking stele, the lines soft and in shallow relief, as if already worn by centuries of wind and rain or the touch of hands. Only the most important facets of the body are described: face, breasts, navel, sex. This is the female body reduced to a map of its most numinous places. As the critic David Sylvester wrote of these works, they are ‘hieratic’ in ‘the word’s true sense, consistent with its etymology…to do with what is priestly…with what pertains to sacred persons or functions.’ (William Turnbull- Sculpture and Paintings, exhibition catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, London, p.9)

However, as primal and totemic as works such as Aphrodite and Idol 5 in the 50s or later pieces such as Female Figure or Paddle Venus  might look, what is remarkable about all of them is how easily and clearly they communicate to the contemporary, urban viewer. As such, they seem to fulfil one of Modernism’s key ideas (based on the work of the psychologist Carl Jung), that of the primacy of ‘universal forms’: shapes and symbols that describe the deep, underlying nature of human experience, which are lost to industrial Western culture but preserved and very much ‘alive’ in non-European tribal art or the artefacts from ‘primitive’ cultures.