Richard Deacon has occupied the foreground of British sculpture since the 1980s. His virtuoso constructions in wood or metal range in scale from the domestic to the monumental, their structure recalling both engineering and anatomy. The forms he creates evoke the material world of everyday artefacts and the inner world of the body, as a site of sensuality, memory and language. The survey by British writer and curator Jon Thompson traces the genealogy of Deacon's work in relation to language; the artist talks with Italian scholar Pier Luigi Tazzi, co-Director of Documenta IX, about the context of space and place; US art critic Peter Schjeldahl reveals the complexities of a single sculpture, Keeping the Faith (1992). Deacon's selected text, by renowned anthropologist Mary Douglas, is on dirt 'as matter out of place'. His own writings are on subjects ranging from Rilke's poetry to the car as public sculpture. This revised and expanded second edition includes over fifty additional pages documenting Deacon's work from 1995 to 2000. Deacon's recent writings - a key text, 'In Praise of Television', and an interview with critic Ian Tromp - accompany an update essay by Penelope Curtis, Curator at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. Curtis approaches Deacon's recent work through an examination of the links between his drawings and collages and the three-dimensional sculptures. She reveals the continuing experimental nature of Deacon's work, which despite being the subject of international public commissions, resists the formulaic and the monumental.

Richard Deacon (Contemporary Artists) (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Arts & Photography

Peter Schjeldahl

Jon Thompson

Pier Luigi Tazzi

PENELOPE CURTIS

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

Eric Bainbridge

eric-bainbridge-penelope-curtis

Cornerhouse Publications

After Nora

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Les Fugitives

Thomas Schutte

Schütte, Thomas

History & Criticism

Institute

"In The Pliable Plane, curator and historian Penelope Curtis traces the ways sculpture infiltrated architectural thought over the post-war period. Her study identifies the wall as a particular locus of creative thinking – a surface which produces both continuity and separation, and which similarly unites and distinguishes the two disciplines. Surveying a series of walls – carved, cast, applied, imagined, and even conceptual – in such places as bomb shelters, caves, war memorials, and public buildings, Curtis introduces a cast of renowned and lesser-known practitioners who defined the three-dimensional conception of the years 1945 to 1970. With close readings of the work and lives of Henry Moore, Anni Albers, Frederick Kiesler, Jorge Oteiza, and Mary Martin, among others, Curtis’s fluid and perspicacious history encompasses the developments of wartime production, the discovery of the Lascaux Caves, and the rise of relief art. Turning away from familiar pairings and dichotomies, it considers spaces and surfaces of coalescence and influence. Curtis compels us to understand the wall as support as much as partition, arguing for the centrality of this very pliability to the entwined development of both sculpture and architecture."

PENELOPE CURTIS THE PLIABLE PLANE: THE WALL AS SURFACE IN SCULPTURE AND ARCHITECTURE ,1945–75

MACK BOOKS

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