Biography
RICHARD
WENTWORTH
(1947)
Born
in Samoa
Richard
Wentworth has played a leading role in new British sculpture
since the end of
the 1970s. His work centres on the idea of transformation –
of subtly altering and juxtaposing everyday objects – which
has both altered the traditional definition of sculpture and
in turn fundamentally changed the way we perceive the world
around us. 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.
His palette is one of ladders and lightbulbs, buckets and
tins, tables and chairs, sometimes with legs partly sawn off
and counterbalanced by a weight as if to defy gravity. “I
live in a ready-made landscape”, he remarked early in his
career, “and I want to put it to use”.
Richard
Wentworth was born in 1947 in Samoa. He attended Hornsey College
of Art from 1965 and worked with Henry Moore as an assistant in
1967. He was awarded an MA in 1970 from the Royal College of Art
and went on to become one of the most influential teachers in
British art over past two decades. He taught at Goldsmith's
College, University of London from 1971 to 1987 and was
appointed by the prestigious German Academic Exchange Programme
(DAAD) to work in Berlin from 1993 to 1994. In 2002 was made
Master of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford
University. He was one of the selected artists in the London
section of the 2002 São Paulo Biennial and in 1999 curated
Thinking Aloud, one of the most creative contemporary
exhibition projects staged in the past five years which was seen
in Cambridge, London and Manchester. He now lives in London.
His works have been shown in institutions such as the Serpentine
Gallery, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Hayward Gallery,
London; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Institute of
Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Irish Museum of Modern Art,
Dublin; the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; and
the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris.
