Richard Wentworth

Richard Wentworth has played a leading role in New British Sculpture since the end of the 1970s. His work, encircling the notion of objects and their use as part of our day-to-day experiences, has altered the traditional definition of sculpture as well as photography. By transforming and manipulating industrial and/or found objects into works of art, Wentworth subverts their original function and extends our understanding of them by breaking the conventional system of classification. The sculptural arrangements play with the notion of ready-made and juxtaposition of objects that bear no relation to each other

Richard Wentworth’s sculpture typically takes mundane objects and transforms their role and identity. He gives everyday items like chairs, tables and buckets a double role, to disrupt their conventional significance. Shower demonstrates Wentworth’s affection for the commonplace, combining a 1950s table and a model ship’s propeller. The propeller is fixed to the table, as if to a boat, like childhood games in which items of furniture become imaginary vehicles. The plate suggests that the table is anchored to the floor. The title refers to a memory of seeing tilted tables outside a café during a heavy shower in Spain. As shown below.

Wentworth’s sculptures often utilise common objects and easily available materials, combined in extraordinary ways. ‘Like a gaucho’s bolas, one chair ensnares the other’, the artist has said of this work. The title relates to the French word for a seat (siège) as well as the English idea of being under siege. Wentworth has explained that the sculpture stemmed from ‘a very different moment in gender politics, and it is now more common to discuss how pathetic men are. I used to think most of the time that I feel pathetic – and why shouldn’t one make work about that?’ As shown below.

Wentworth uses common and utilitarian objects in his sculptures in a way that can be both witty and unsettling. He has observed ‘humour is trying to find pockets of breathable air in a stifling atmosphere’. Wentworth gave up making a sculpture for a while in the 1970s, thinking that it had become ‘as dry as broken biscuits’. He emphasised the difficulties in making sculpture when saying ‘I hate the way I work, the anxiety in waiting for enthusiasm to meet method, material to meet image, idea to meet language’. As an inveterate collector of discarded objects, Wentworth regards their presence in his studio as enabling him to create an imaginative order rather than one which is typecast. As shown below.