Michael Sandle

Michael Sandle was born in Weymouth, Dorset, in 1936. He studied at Douglas School of Art and Technology, Isle of Man (1951-54) and did National Service in the Royal Artillery until 1956. During that time he attended evening classes at Chester College of Art. From 1956 to 1959 he studied printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, under Anthony Gross, Lynton Lamb and Ceri Richards, receiving tuition from Andrew Forge, Lucian Freud and Claude Rogers. He then travelled in Europe with the assistance of an Abbey Minor Travelling Scholarship, receiving in the same year (1959) a French Government Scholarship. Periods of teaching in leading British art schools followed throughout the 1960s.

From 1970 to 1973 Sandle lived in Canada. He was Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Calgary, Alberta, until 1971 and held a similar post at the University of British Columbia (1971-72). In 1973 he moved to Germany. Since 1980 he has been Professor of Sculpture at the Akadenmie der Bildenden Kunste, Karlsruhe, the intervening years having been spent teaching in Pforzheim and as the guest of the DAAD Artists Programme in Berlin (1974-75). He was a member of the faculty of engraving at the British School in Rome (1976-82) and currently lives and works in Karlsruhe.

Sandle has exhibited widely and undertaken many commissions, the most significant being the Memorial of the Victims of a Helicopter Disaster, Mannheim (1985) and perhaps his most ambitious project to date, the architecture and sculpture for the Malta Siege Memorial (1989-93), a vast project which included not only a major figurative sculpture, but also a thirteen-tonne bronze bell. Themes of war, death, destruction, inhumanity and media manipulation are constant in his work, as he treads a path outside the fashionable mainstream.

Michael Sandle was elected Royal Academician in 1989 (he resigned in 1998 in objection to the 'Sensation' exhibition) and Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1994.