David Annesley

David Annesley was born in London in 1936 and educated in England, Australia and Zimbabwe. After National Service as an RAF pilot (1956-58), he studied sculpture at St. Martin's School of Art (1958-62). Successive periods of teaching at Croydon College of Art, the Central School of Art, St. Martin's and the Royal College from 1963 to 1995 supported his sculpture. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1995. Annesley's first solo exhibition was held at the Waddington Galleries in 1966, followed in the same year by a show at the Poindexter Gallery, New York. Since then he has had many solo shows in London, New York and Australia, Holland, Germany and the United States. His sculpture is in many public collections, including those of the Arts Council; the British Council; Tate; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nagoya Gallery, Japan; and the Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.

Annesley's welded steel sculptures seem to defy the weight of the material from which they are made, largely through their abstract compositions that imply movement. They are layered and contemplative, large, yet delicate and intricate. Forty years ago he came across a series of Mandalas (in Jungian psychology, a symbol representing the self and harmony within the individual) drawn by a woman in her fifties. She was undergoing analysis with Dr Carl G. Jung, who printed a selection of them as Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. The artist was immediately struck by the qualities of the drawings that, to him, were both universal and intensely personal. He took fifteen years to develop a way of making the Mandala into a three-dimensional structure, which has, in turn, fuelled his creative life ever since.