Richard Deacon: Like You Know – Ceramic Works at New Art Centre, Roche Court, Wiltshire

Another Country, 2001, Glazed ceramic, 55 x 81 x 69 cm

Richard Deacon: Like You Know – Ceramic Works is on view at New Art Centre, Roche Court, Wiltshire

November 27, 2021 – February 20, 2022

The New Art Centre is delighted to present an exhibition of Richard Deacon’s ceramic sculptures.

The very large, complex, inventive works that are at the heart of our exhibition [along with smaller more playful essays in porcelain] were created at Niels Dietrich’s internationally reputed ceramic workshop in Cologne, where Deacon has been working regularly since the turn of the millennium. Coiled, unknowable forms are juxtaposed with angular trapezoids, all dripping with layers of glaze – with typical Deacon contrast of open structures that ‘show their workings’, alongside mysterious sealed forms that hint at a hidden world within.

As with the best of Deacon’s sculpture, these ceramic works urge the viewer to absorb all they see, challenge the work from every angle, and interpret each purposeful yet unpredictable mark, outline and pattern.

Widely regarded as one of Britain’s leading sculptors, Richard Deacon’s career has spanned over four decades and his works can be found in public collections all over the world. He is currently exhibiting in Galerija Kula, a public space in Split, Croatia, showing a selection of works made from a variety of media, a testament to his incessant creativity.

Deacon’s work is characterized by his exploration of material capacities. Working with wood, metal, paper, plastics, cloth, leather, vinyl and ceramic, he has developed a visual language that explores the relationship between depth, mass and volume. This exhibition provides a targeted insight into a specific facet of Deacon’s artistic output – that of his experimental approach to making sculpture in ceramic – yet it also encapsulates many of his wider concerns as an artist.

For Deacon, an artist who often relies on inexactness and experiment as part of his artistic process, the elemental uncertainty of working with ceramics, especially the unknown and uncontrolled reactions that take place in the kiln, is inspiring – and this, in part, explains why his ceramics have become such a vital part of his output in the last two decades.

All of the works in this exhibition are for sale and have come directly from the artist.

Richard Deacon’s work is held in numerous public and private collections, including Tate, National Museum of Wales, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; San Francisco MOMA, Akron Museum and Art Gallery, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Ludwig Museum Cologne, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Stedjelik Museum, Amsterdam, Samsung Museum, Seoul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Setegaya Art Museum, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Auckland City Museum and Art Gallery, Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art. He is noted for his international public installations, most recently a pedestrian bridge made in collaboration with Mrdjan Bajic in Belgrade, Serbia, and, with Eric Parry, the ceramic cornice at 1 Eagle Place, Piccadilly.

Recent exhibitions include Richard Deacon: What You See is What You Get, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA, USA in 2017, New Sculpture, Beijing Commune, Beijing, China in 2018 and On The Surface, in Schloss Rheinsberg, Germany 2021.

He won the Turner Prize in 1987 and was awarded a CBE in 1999, was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France 1997, elected RA 1998 and elected a member of the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin in 2010. In 2005, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leicester.

The New Art Centre was established in Sloane Street, London in 1958. From its inception, the gallery championed young and emerging artists, and this remains a core ambition – alongside continuing to show those artists, now in mid- or late- career, who first exhibited with us decades ago.

In 1994, the gallery moved from London to its current location at Roche Court, East Winterslow in Wiltshire. The house was originally built in 1804 for the family of Admiral Nelson. The park and woodlands which surround the house enable us to focus on exhibiting outdoor sculpture making the New Art Centre a pioneer of the commercially-run sculpture park in the UK.

Since moving in 1994, we have commissioned Stephen Marshall to add four indoor exhibition spaces that have won several international architectural awards. This expansion has enabled us to stage a closely-curated exhibition programme of modern and contemporary painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics and textiles. From the outset, the New Art Centre has been interested in education and we have invited the exhibiting artists to work with us on an extensive programme of tours, lectures and workshops based on the works in the gallery exhibitions and sculpture park.

Contact
nac@sculpture.uk.com

NewArtCentre.
Roche Court, East Winterslow
Salisbury
Wiltshire, SP5 1BG
United Kingdom