Richard Deacon shows Bronze Skin for Ocean Studios show

Sculptor Richard Deacon has chosen to release his ‘singular and prickly work’ Bronze Skin, for A taste of things to come, the opening exhibition at Ocean Studios in Plymouth. 

Deacon has exhibited widely internationally over the past 30 years. A major retrospective of his work, The Missing Part, was shown at museums in France and Germany in 2010-11 and a large-scale survey was exhibited at Tate Britain in early 2014.  A survey of his work over the past ten years ‘On The Other Side’ will open at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, in Switzerland, in August 2015.

Deacon says, “Like many of my works, Bronze Skin and I have been on an ongoing journey to this point.  However, this piece has even more twists and turns than others and I’m pleased that it can find its first showing at the impressive Ocean Studios in Plymouth.”

Here Deacon takes up the story: “In 1994 I ran a one week workshop at the Institut für Gegenwartskunst, based in the Viennese Art Academy. I gave the group of participants the task of producing an exhibition by the end of the week using the huge pile of cardboard we had gleaned from the streets of Vienna as the only material (plus glue, tape and water). I worked alongside them and began cutting the squares containing corner folds out of the flattened cardboard boxes which, by lapping over one face, I made up into small pyramids. I hinged these together using flaps cut again from the cardboard boxes and containing a folded section. Slowly I built up an elaborate carpet of these pyramids which, because of the three axes, was almost universally flexible.

“At the end of the week and of the exhibition I rolled the carpet up (the pyramids nested together) and carried it back to London where I continued cutting and gluing cardboard boxes. Pretty soon it was quite extensive, so I decided to see if I could join it all together to make a bag. I folded it up around a pile of balloons. Bits kept breaking off because the weight was by now considerable and there are limits to what hot glued cardboard can support.

“The resulting volume is as big as I could get it. I stiffened it with epoxy resin and showed the work, titled Second Skin, a few times, eventually at the Royal Academy in the Summer Show of 2001. Helen Simpson, who was working at Roche Court at the time, saw the work there and wondered if I would be interested to have it cast in aluminium – she thought it could look great outside.

“Since there is a historical dimension to casting a work shown at the Summer Show into a more permanent form, I agreed, thinking that the cardboard would be invested and burnt out by the casting process so that one thing literally replaced the other. As it turned out, for the aluminium sand cast (called Second Skin, Second Skin), it was necessary to split the work into parts and make silicone moulds from those to support the sand casting. Since I had the moulds, it was therefore possible to envisage a second cast in another metal and I went ahead and made that (in bronze), because I thought it was interesting to do. The result is Bronze Skin, and which I have never felt that I had found the right occasion to show until now. It’s a rather singular and prickly work and I always thought it needed to be on it’s own – or at least not with any other work of mine.

Deacon adds, “A fascinating sub-text for me during the making was that the work was cast at Morris Singer’s foundry, near Basingstoke. This is a very old established firm that Henry Moore, amongst many others, sometimes used but which had recently gone through great difficulties caused by Saddam Hussein’s failure to pay for the enormous cast hands they had produced for the Victory monument in Baghdad (although they retained a maquette) which I was very interested to see.”

Richard Deacon – In Between, a 90’ film by Claudia Schmidt was released in 2013. Recent public works have been installed in London (Piccadilly 2013, in collaboration with Eric Parry), Winterthur (Footfall 2013 commissioned by the Friends of Winterthur Museum), Gjøvic, Norway (Gripping 2014, commissioned by Sparebankstiftelsen DNB) and Groningen, Netherlands (Rock & Roll 2014, commissioned by DUO Belastingdienst). Apart from curating exhibitions of individual artists, he has curated two major historical exhibitions, Image & Idol, Renaissance and medieval sculpture at the Tate Gallery, London 2001 and Abstract Drawing, a survey of abstraction in drawing from the start of the 20th century at The Drawing Room, London. Since the beginning of the 1970s, he has written extensively on his own practice and in relation to contemporary art in general. So, And, If, But; Writings 1970 – 2012 was published in 2014 to coincide with the opening at Tate Britain.

Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow have worked jointly since 1990 and the combined artist, Woodrow-Deacon, has enjoyed considerable independent success and a string of exhibitions.

Richard Deacon, Bronze Skin 1.16h x 1.26w x 1.29d m Courtesy of Richard Deacon.