Phillip King, Tate Britain

Taking over from the enormous tumbling sculptures of Phyllida Barlow in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries is Phillip King, artist and sculptor who attended St Martin’s School of Art under the teaching of Anthony Caro before working for Henry Moore in the 1960s.
What do I need to know about Phillip King sculpture?
Dissatisfied with figurative sculpture, King is known for his experiments with abstraction and materials in the early 1960s, investigating how form is created through process. A fantastically innovative use of materials from fibreglass and PVC to sand, clay and plastics to create his famous cones, pyramids and industrial forms, has established King’s vital role in the changing face of British sculpture. Less well known is that he was also one of the first artists to do away with plinths and place his work directly on the floor alongside the audience.
If you enjoyed the blockbuster Tate Modern Matisse exhibition earlier in the year, you will also love King’s pioneering use of colour, which he described as, ‘no longer subservient to the material but something on its own, to do with surface and skin’. This autonomous power of colour in King’s work binds elements of his sculpture together.
Tate Britain Duveens Commision 2014
To mark his 80^th birthday he has been commissioned to exhibit at the Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries, where he will be displaying six works from the 1960s. Look out for key sculptures from the Tate’s Collection including King’s Genghis Kahn (1963) and Rosebud (1962) which was his first coloured sculptured in fibreglass.