Gillian White was born in Orpington, Kent, in 1939 and studied at St. Martin's School of Art, London (1956-60) and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London (1956-60). Her teachers included Anthony Caro, Elisabeth Frink and William Turnbull. In 1960 she attended a summer academy in Salzburg with Oskar Kokoschka, before studying at the École National des Beaux Arts, Paris, with Ossip Zadkine and Rene Collamarini. In Paris she worked in the studio of Françiose Stähli, where she met the Swiss sculptor Albert Siegenthaler, who she married in 1962. White developed her career…
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Gillian White was born in Orpington, Kent, in 1939 and studied at St. Martin's School of Art, London (1956-60) and the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London (1956-60). Her teachers included Anthony Caro, Elisabeth Frink and William Turnbull. In 1960 she attended a summer academy in Salzburg with Oskar Kokoschka, before studying at the École National des Beaux Arts, Paris, with Ossip Zadkine and Rene Collamarini. In Paris she worked in the studio of Françiose Stähli, where she met the Swiss sculptor Albert Siegenthaler, who she married in 1962.
White developed her career as a sculptor in Switzerland, receiving a number of prizes and honours since 1974. Following her debut in the 'Young Contemporaries' show in London in 1958, she has exhibited regularly, notably at the Salon de la Jeune Sculpture, Musée Rodin, Paris (1962) and the Biennale of Swiss Art, Zurich (1973). White has also had a solo exhibition at the Art Cellar, Berne, in 2000.
Gillian White's abstract shapes are surely informed by her early education at the Elmhurst School for Dance in Camberley, Surrey, and an ongoing interest in contemporary dance. Captured in steel, the dancers become vibrant forms of line and gesture. Her confident use of this material - she prefers corten steel as it ages more beautifully than untreated steel or painted metal, the patina developing over time to a soft velvet red or dark brown - is in part contributed to the teaching of Anthony Caro, but the forms are entirely her own. She is also secure in working on a large scale, as some of her public commissions testify: a piece for a medical unit in Koenigsfelden, made in 1994-96, involved the creation of an entire environment including landscaping and planting to link various buildings.
