Documentary | 01 September 2005

William Turnbull is one of Britain’s most distinguished sculptors and painters. In the late 1940s he studied art in London and then spent time in Paris, and ever since he has rigorously explored a limited number of archetypal forms as well as the fundamentals of art’s languages. Over more than fifty years William Turnbull has returned again and again to the head and the mask, to the standing figure and the horse, as well as to possibilities of pared-down, often monochromatic painting. His simple objects, which draw on both primitive and classical ideas, often combine presence and poetry in unique ways.