Richard Wentworth was born in 1947 in Samoa. He attended Hornsey College of Art from 1965 and worked with Henry Moore as an assistant in 1967. He was awarded an MA in 1970 from the Royal College of Art and went on to become one of the most influential teachers in British art over past two decades at Goldsmith's College, University of London, where he taught from 1971 to 1987. He was appointed by the prestigious German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to work in Berlin from 1993 to 1994, and in 2002 was made Master of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University.
Wentworth emerged as a major British sculptor in the early 1980s. His work centres on the idea of transformation, of subtly altering and juxtaposing everyday objects which, in turn, fundamentally changes the way we perceive the world around us. His palette is one of ladders and lightbulbs, buckets and tins, tables and chairs, sometimes with legs partly sawn off and counterbalanced by a weight as if to defy gravity.
In his ongoing series, Making Do and Getting By, Wentworth also uses photography as a means of documenting what might be called 'the sculpture of the everyday': a cigarette packet jammed under a wonky table leg; a makeshift construction to reserve parking space; a bucket jammed on to the side of a dented car so that the headlight can still operate. 'I live in a ready-made landscape', he remarked early in his career, 'and I want to put it to use'.
He was one of the selected artists in the London section of the 2002 São Paulo Biennial and in 1999 curated 'Thinking Aloud', one of the most creative contemporary exhibition projects staged in the past five years and which was seen in Cambridge, London and Manchester.