Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor - Jo Lauria and Tony Birks

01 Jan 2005

n a career spanning more than six decades, Ruth Duckworth has created an immense and important body of work. Her ambition, intensity and defiance of convention have governed her personal journey - fleeing from Nazi Germany to England at the outset of World War II, and settling in the United States in the mid-1960s - as well as her prodigious artistic output. Although Duckworth started sculpting in stone, and has created both intimate and large-scale artworks in bronze and other materials, she has since the early 1960s predominantly worked in clay. It is for her work in this medium thath she is recognised as one of the twentieth century's most innovative and significant sculptors. A true alchemist of abstraction, Duckworth has consistently produced barrier-bending art that is elegant yet at the same time buoyant, visionary works of seductive refinement, austere power and radiant immediacy that masterfully continue the aesthetics of modernism into the twenty-first century.

This volume, which accompanies a major touring exhibition, provides a long-overdue assessment of Duckworth's significance. It reveals the conceptual and iconographic foundations that Duckworth's work shares with other important modernist sculptors including Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Isamu Noguchi, and ceramicists Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. Featuring more than 200 illustrations, this substantive monograph contains and intimate account of Duckworth's early years by renowned author and artist Tony Birks, and an insightful look at the surprising range of the artist's evolving work by Jo Lauria, art historian and co-curator ofthe Ruth Duckworth exhibition tour. A foreword by sculptor Martin Purvyear, a comprehensive chronology and a detailed checklist further enhance the book, which will bring much-deserved recognition to this formidable artist and be a valuable reference source for years to come.

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Facts:
Publication Date: January 2005
Price: £30
ISBN: 0-85331-915-4
Binding: Hardback
Publisher: Lund Humphries, Gower House, Croft Road, Aldershot, Hampshire, GU11 3HR
Tel: 01252 331551
Edition: 1st

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