Richard Deacon Profile and Interview

Dynamic abstract forms and a variety of materials characterise the work of British sculptor Richard Deacon. Graphic works also play an important role in his oeuvre. At the beginning of October, Thaddaeus Ropac opened a solo exhibition by the artist titled Tread, where Silvie Aigner met Richard Deacon for an interview.

Richard Deacon, Turner Prize winner, Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Commander of the Order of the British Empire, was born in Bangor, Wales, in 1949. He became known in the 1980s for his striking abstract sculptures made of bent wood and objects made of metal, plastic and other materials. These were later joined by ceramic objects, which have been an integral part of his oeuvre for over 20 years. Through a sensitive relationship between hollow space and mass, Deacon has succeeded in reinterpreting a characteristic of British sculpture - the rhythm of closed and open form. "These intricacies in the sense of inside and outside," explains Deacon, "are an important aspect of my sculptural forms, to which I always return."

PARNASS: In your work, colour has usually been an integral part of the material. Its texture, such as the wood grain, characterised the surface. Has the relationship between material and surface changed? What determines the formal aesthetics of your sculptures?

RICHARD DEACON: The surface is always at the centre of my thinking. If you try to find out what's behind the surface, all you see is another surface and mass, and we can't see the material's properties. But it is precisely these properties, the behaviour of the material, that shape the possibilities in the working process and the form of the sculpture. It is also the fascination and the mystery of sculpture that you work with materials that behave in a certain way. I have spent a long time exploring what you can do with various materials and how you can bend and shape them. But the material should be part of the work. Because the way the surface appears is significant. Its elegance also lies in how it reacts to different light conditions. Basically, "The surface is the work".