Richard Deacon (Contemporary Artists) (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Richard Deacon has occupied the foreground of British sculpture since the 1980s. His virtuoso constructions in wood or metal range in scale from the domestic to the monumental, their structure recalling both engineering and anatomy. The forms he creates evoke the material world of everyday artefacts and the inner world of the body, as a site of sensuality, memory and language.
The survey by British writer and curator Jon Thompson traces the genealogy of Deacon's work in relation to language; the artist talks with Italian scholar Pier Luigi Tazzi, co-Director of Documenta IX, about the context of space and place; US art critic Peter Schjeldahl reveals the complexities of a single sculpture, Keeping the Faith (1992). Deacon's selected text, by renowned anthropologist Mary Douglas, is on dirt 'as matter out of place'. His own writings are on subjects ranging from Rilke's poetry to the car as public sculpture. This revised and expanded second edition includes over fifty additional pages documenting Deacon's work from 1995 to 2000. Deacon's recent writings - a key text, 'In Praise of Television', and an interview with critic Ian Tromp - accompany an update essay by Penelope Curtis, Curator at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. Curtis approaches Deacon's recent work through an examination of the links between his drawings and collages and the three-dimensional sculptures. She reveals the continuing experimental nature of Deacon's work, which despite being the subject of international public commissions, resists the formulaic and the monumental.