Bill Culbert

Bill Culbert was born in Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in 1935. He studied fine art at Canterbury University School of Art (1953-56) and post-primary teaching at Auckland Training College, New Zealand (1957). He then came to London to study painting at the Royal College of Art (1957-60), gaining a silver medal for painting on graduation.

For the last thirty years, Bill Culbert has been working with light, using it to transform objects and to create new ones. Andrea Shlieker has written, 'Culbert is best known for making hybrids of ordinary domestic objects - wine glass, stool, jug or table, thus forming illuminating (in both senses of the word) and surreal fusions... Yet these bricolages always have a lightness of touch, as well as a sense of humour and playful serendipity.'

At the Royal College, Culbert was a contemporary of the British Pop Artists who were being widely fêted at the time, Allen Jones, David Hockney, Peter Blake and Patrick Caulfield being of their number. In some of his light works Culbert looked to the same subject-matter as Caulfield, even Martin Craig-Martin, but there the similarity ended; his sculptural vocabulary has grown in a different direction, to one that harnesses the possibilities of drawing with light. Shlieker has written further: 'From the outset, colour has been an important artistic objective and device for Culbert. It found perhaps its most buoyant expression in his series of wall sculptures of the early 1990s, such as Colour Theory 1991 and Total 1991. Multi-coloured plastic bottles were speared and illuminated by neon tubes, thereby borrowing the existing colour of the object to achieve chromatic brilliance.'

Culbert has exhibited regularly throughout his career, his first solo exhibition being at the Commonwealth Institute Gallery, London, in 1961. His work has been acquired by public collections, most notably in Britain and New Zealand.