William Tucker

William Tucker was born in Cairo in 1935 and came to England when his family returned in 1937. He studied history at Oxford University (1955-58) and sculpture at the Central and St. Martin's Schools of Art, London (1959-60). Anthony Caro was teaching at St. Martin's at the time, and fellow students included David Annesley, Phillip King and Isaac Witkin. He was awarded the Sainsbury Scholarship in 1961 and the Peter Stuyvesant Travel Bursary in 1965. He spent two years as Gregory Fellow at Leeds University Fine Arts Department (1968-70) and represented Britain at the 1972 Venice Biennale.

Tucker is also a writer and in 1974 published The Language of Sculpture (Thames & Hudson, London), which was released in the United States in 1978 as Early Modern Sculpture (Oxford University Press, New York). Following publication of the book in London he was invited to select the exhibition 'The Condition of Sculpture' at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1975, for which he wrote the catalogue essay. Both the book and the show proved to be landmarks in the development of a certain tradition of British sculpture. He moved to New York in 1978 and taught at Columbia University (1978-82) and the New York Studio School. Further fellowships followed: the Guggenheim Fellowship for Sculpture in 1981 and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1986, the year he became an American citizen. Tucker is currently Co-Chair of the Art Programme at Bard College.

Early sculptures, made from steel or wood, were assembled and altered into abstract configurations in largely geometric form. Such compositions were later cast in plaster or concrete, and concerns for weight and gravity and the potential defiance of those states became increasingly important in his work. His exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1987 and a retrospective at the Storm King Art Centre in 1988 consolidated his reputation in America, with pieces being acquired by the three major New York museums.

'I see the role of contemporary sculpture,' Tucker wrote in 1998, 'as preserving and protecting the source of mystery, of the unknown, in public life. Franz Kafka wrote in Prometheus: 'There remained the inexplicable mass of rock - the myth tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of the ground of truth, it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.''