William Tucker is well established in the world of sculpture. A pivotal moment in his early career was when he attended an exhibition on Sculpture from 1857-1957 at Holland Park, which first inspired him to start sculpting.
While studying at the Central School of Art and Design, he experimented with steel and wood, creating abstract constructed sculptures. At Saint Martin’s School of Art, he met several crucial artists who would have long-standing influences on his practice, including Phillip King and David Annesley. Their work was to make ‘a radical break with tradition’ (RA), creating large abstract pieces, made from modern industrial materials, and placed directly on the ground; completely different to the long tradition of figurative marbles or bronzes on plinths. This new style of sculpture was exhibited in the influential New Generation exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in 1965 and in other exhibitions in the US and Europe in the 1960s.
By the 1980s, Tucker had moved to upstate New York and focused his craft on a scale directly in tangent with the human figure. These new sculptures were cast in bronze, but often exhibited alongside his earlier works in steel and wood. During the 1990s, he had moved onto drawing as well as vastly increasing the scale of his sculptures. He was interested in how he could portray female and male torsos; notable works include Maia which sits in the riverside park in Bilbao, Spain.
In 1998 he began his series of modelled heads, included in his 2001 retrospective at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Tucker has continued to work in plaster for bronze up to the present day at a variety of scales, and with progressively more reference to the human body, both in image and handling of the material.