Phillip King

Description

Genghis Khan is one of six sculptures made by King in the early 1960s devoted to the cone form. The first, Rosebud, has a delicate pink plastic shell, cut to reveal an inner form which is dark green. Twilight followed, and is perhaps the most complex of the six: the outer portion of half the cone is cut into ribbons and, whilst still attached at the apex, these are formed into a horizontal plane. The third is Genghis Khan, a dark purple threatening presence, with shapes creeping out from beneath the cone enclosure. The shapes themselves appear similar to those that were cut in Twilight, but put together in a different arrangement. Two such pieces are attached to the apex and sides of the cone as great wings. On first examination they appear to be the same, but the cuts are entirely different in detail.

Tim Hilton in his book The Sculpture of Phillip King (Henry Moore Foundation/Lund Humphries 1992) writes: 'Genghis Khan seems to be clothed rather than stripped. Its fantasy may allude to strange natural forces, water spilling in ravines in remote mountains: hence the allusion to Coleridge's poem. There is also the temptation to call this one of King's most North African subjects, or to think of it in terms of Islamic architecture.'

The cones are perhaps also slightly surrealist in nature, a quality which emerges at different times in King's oeuvre, for example in Cross Over 1979 and Frankfurt Maquette 1989-90.