- 17
Bill Woodrow
Estimate
Estimate Upon Request
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Description
- Bill Woodrow
- SITTING ON HISTORY I
- inscribed Bill Woodrow, dated 2003 and numbered 10/10
- bronze
- 100 by 150 by 200cm.
- 39 3/8 by 59 by 78 3/4 in.
Provenance
Acquired from the artist by the present owner
Literature
Tiddy Rowan, Art in the City: London, London, 2008, illustration of another cast in colour p. 111
Gill Branston & Roy Stafford, The Media Student’s Book, London, 2010, fig. 0.1, illustration of another cast in colour p. 1
Claire Shea & Kate Pratt (eds.), Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, 2012, illustrated in colour pp. 20-21
Claire Shea (ed.), Cass Sculpture Foundation, Ostfildern, 2012, illustrated in colour pp. 24-25
Gill Branston & Roy Stafford, The Media Student’s Book, London, 2010, fig. 0.1, illustration of another cast in colour p. 1
Claire Shea & Kate Pratt (eds.), Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, 2012, illustrated in colour pp. 20-21
Claire Shea (ed.), Cass Sculpture Foundation, Ostfildern, 2012, illustrated in colour pp. 24-25
Catalogue Note
One of the most eminent sculptors working in Britain today, Bill Woodrow’s work has featured in many seminal exhibitions and has helped to shape the thriving British sculptural practice alive today. His early works featured objet trouvées which, through being embedded in plaster, took upon a wider significance; becoming visual identifiers of their times. Woodrow’s use of the object has gradually encompassed grander themes and larger objects, in particular the eager consumerism of industrial products which characterised the latter half of the 20th Century. In 2000 Woodrow was asked to place a sculpture on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, resulting in commission of the bronze Regardless of History - a sculpture which shares much with the present work. Sitting on History I was first conceived in 1990 and exhibited in 1996 at Woodrow’s solo exhibition at Tate Gallery.
In the Cass Sculpture Foundation’s retrospective catalogue published in 2012 the entry for the present work discussed the artist’s intentions: ‘Woodrow's idea was to have a sculpture that was only completed conceptually and formally when a person sat on it. Sitting on History, with its ball and chain, refers to the book as a receptacle of information. History is filtered through millions of pages of writing, making the book the major vehicle for research and study. Woodrow proposes that although one absorbs knowledge, one appears to have great difficulty in changing one’s behaviour as a result. The real books from which the original maquettes were made came from a box of books given to Bill Woodrow by a London bookseller, discarded, as they were no longer saleable. To Woodrow’s wry amusement, in this haul were three volumes on the history of the Labour Party, which he chose to use for the maquettes. Woodrow finds books one of the most powerful democratic tools in the world and still the most advanced form of communication’ (op. cit., Ostfildern, 2012, p. 302).
Casts of the present work occupy important sites across England, including one purchased for the British Library in 2007 and another which is located on the King’s Road in London.
In the Cass Sculpture Foundation’s retrospective catalogue published in 2012 the entry for the present work discussed the artist’s intentions: ‘Woodrow's idea was to have a sculpture that was only completed conceptually and formally when a person sat on it. Sitting on History, with its ball and chain, refers to the book as a receptacle of information. History is filtered through millions of pages of writing, making the book the major vehicle for research and study. Woodrow proposes that although one absorbs knowledge, one appears to have great difficulty in changing one’s behaviour as a result. The real books from which the original maquettes were made came from a box of books given to Bill Woodrow by a London bookseller, discarded, as they were no longer saleable. To Woodrow’s wry amusement, in this haul were three volumes on the history of the Labour Party, which he chose to use for the maquettes. Woodrow finds books one of the most powerful democratic tools in the world and still the most advanced form of communication’ (op. cit., Ostfildern, 2012, p. 302).
Casts of the present work occupy important sites across England, including one purchased for the British Library in 2007 and another which is located on the King’s Road in London.