Turtle, 2000-02, Ceramic, 9.5x15.5x13
Sculpture & Works on Paper
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
6pm-7:30pm
Biography
Born in Manchester in 1934, Evans studied at the Slade School of Art (1957–60), exhibiting regularly in London from 1962 until 1991. One of Britain’s most innovative sculptors—a generation younger than Anthony Caro and coming before the New British Sculptors of the 1980s, which included Richard Deacon as well as Tony Cragg and Richard Wentworth, Evans is known for his use of geometric, asymmetrical forms and a commitment to using everyday materials such as plywood, fibreglass and polythene. Evans influenced a generation of British sculptors not just through his innovative approach to sculpture but also as a teacher at Central St Martin’s School of Art.
Influenced early on by American Abstract Expressionism in painting, one of Evans’ central preoccupations was how to create sculptural forms that carried no reference to the world. Pieces such as Untitled No. 37 (1967) show how Evans investigated this, working with the then new, versatile and lightweight medium of fibreglass, to depart from the sculptural traditions in bronze inherited from Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
Evans’ ‘carpet’ pieces of the 1970s demonstrate his testing of a variety of materials including polythene, which he used to form a tactile sculptural membrane in St Mary’s No 1 (1978). Later pieces such as Wedge II (1979), made from the salvaged debris from a collapsed shed outside Evans’ studio, demonstrate the radical departure the artist instigated in British sculpture in the 1970s. Evans’ achievements of the 60s and 70s were perhaps overshadowed by his almost immediate retreat from the British art scene, moving to the USA in 1979. Dramatic new directions are also apparent in the series of 41 drawings he made in the US in 1982. The Yaddo Drawings were made during a five-week residency at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Exuberant and inventive, the drawings introduce a multitude of forms and ‘bodies’ that anticipate later work.
Major Accomplishments
Garth attended the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, London University, in London, England from 1957-1960.
He received various awards internationally including the Arts Council of Great Britain Major Award in 1975, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1986, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 1996.
Since 1988, Garth has been on faculty at The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in New York and since 1995, Garth has been on the Board of Governors for The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.
He has been invited to lecture at an extensive list of universities including Cardiff College of Art in South Wales, National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada, Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI, and Yale University in New Haven, CT.
