

There’s quite a bit of sculpture around the commercial galleries at the moment, for some reason (not just another way of saying that painting is a bit dull either). Topping the bill later this month there’s a big show of Richard Deacon at The Tate Madam. Everyone knows about Deacon of course, he’s had the big Phaidon monograph treatment (two editions, if memory serves) but the survey seems timely. He was one of the wave of Brit Sculptors from the early eighties (Cragg, Kapoor, Woodrow, etc) that really kicked things on after a respectable gestation period (pretty much the 70s, post the Wilson-Conceptual axis) and then got a bit overlooked with the Saatchi-Hirst roadshow through the 90s-00s. I don’t think Saatchi ever bought in (?) – probably because Serota was sold. Oh those two! It’s a shame, because aesthetically that team trumps Hirst and the Koons/New York nexus. I’m tempted to write something but I doubt I’ll have time to do the research. We’ll see.
