LONDON.- The first abstract sculptor to be elected Royal Academician in 1974, this exhibition celebrates the importance of Bryan Kneale in the development of 20th Century British sculpture. An indepth monograph will coincide with the show as hommage to his extraordianary life and works.
Born in the Isle of Man in 1930, Kneale left for London to attend the Royal Academy Schools. His spiky, palette-knife paintings gained a strong following, winning the Rome Prize in 1948, and painting the portraits of Michael Redgrave, Richard Attenborough and Norman Parkinson, but other means of creative expression soon pulled him away from painting.
Coupled with an innate fear of repetition of form, Kneale turned to sculpture, learning to forge and weld, working in brass, steel, aluminium, and bronze, yet not in the traditional method. Kneale’s immediate, spontaneous approach to sculpture brings about an unconventional design process, not least through his method of exploding old bombs and melding the fragments into elegant forms, as with Nikkessen (1964). He has created several large-scale public commissions, including his Millenium Three Legs of Man, for the Isle of Man, and has exhibited internationally with works in many important collections including Tate Britain and The Natural History Museum.
Throughout his prolific career, much of Kneale’s focus has been on teaching rather than exhibiting. In 1972 he curated ‘British Sculptors’, the seminal exhibition of Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy, an exhibition of the work of twenty-four sculptors working in the UK at the time, and which has since been described as the most groundbreaking exhibition of contemporary sculpture held in Britain.
Bryan Kneale’s career as a teacher began at the Royal College of Art in 1952, becoming Head of Sculpture in 1985 and Professor of Drawing in 1990. Influencing generation after generation of sculptors it is teaching that has enabled Kneale to stress what he considers to be most important – learning how to draw and how to think through the materials an artist is using.
Recently, the physical demands of making sculpture are no longer viable for Kneale, and so he has returned to drawing and painting with a wholly fresh and revitalised body of abstract work exemplifying his versatility and indefatigable creativity. At times these drawings convey the finesse and complex beauty of his more metallurgic, futuristic sculptures - the vision of which seemed beyond his time - while others are reminiscent of his earlier swift and spiky brush strokes that connect the viewer to the artist’s immediate emotional process.
