Black Leaf Form

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Whitehall

William Turnbull was known primarily as a sculptor but remained interested in painting his whole life. His travels in Asia with the sculptor Kim Lim, whom he married influenced his practice towards minimalism imbibing it with an East Asian aesthetic. His experience as a pilot in the Second World War offered him a very different perspective on landscape and ideas of space. He observes that it ‘had an effect on how you thought about space as a thing, almost an object’ he has also remarked on how the view of the landscape from the skies offered a view of ‘endless abstraction’. These ideas have informed his practice and how he deals with and treats space in his sculptures, paintings and prints as above.

William Turnbull was born in Dundee. He left school at 15, attended evening art classes and got a job as an illustrator for the publishing house DC Thompson, who were known particularly for the children’s comic book classics such as Beano. He joined the RAF in 1941 during the Second World War, where the experience of flying was to influence how he saw the world and made art. After the War he enrolled at the Slade School of Art in London, initially for painting but then moved to the sculpture department, meeting Eduardo Paolozzi there. Unusually for the mid-twentieth century, he lived a well-travelled life, spending time in Europe, the US and East Asia. He met and remained connected with the many artists and sculptors, who he met on his travels, from Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti in Paris to Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler in the US. In 1952 he participated in the acclaimed Aspects of British Sculpture exhibition at the Venice Biennale and at the influential This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London. Turnbull continued also to explore painting, with one eye on developments in this area in the United States. It is considered he made ‘some of the boldest and extraordinary paintings in Britain in the 1960s and 70s, many of which were included in a major retrospective on his work at the Tate in 1973. His work has been, and continues to be, widely exhibited in the UK and overseas.

Places

Subjects

abstract, leaf

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), lithograph

Artist

William Turnbull (1922 - 2012)

Title

Black Leaf Form

Edition

35/75

Date

1967

Medium

lithograph on paper

Acquisition

Purchased from Waddington Galleries, September 1972

GAC number

9667