Language of the Physical Katherine Gili Sculpture
Periclase - 2020-2022
Forged mild steel, waxed (H. 83 x 91 x 66 cm)
Language of the Physical : Katherine Gili Sculpture
A sculpture presents you with a direct experience and defies explanation with words. There are many things in life that are very real, but verbal language cannot represent them. Sculpture inhabits that realm, it speaks but in a poetic sense, its language is physical, see it and feel it, know it that way before any other.
Sculpture and architecture share this language, they consist of material and spaces given volume and mass with powerful expression. But a building you literally enter, to live out the habits of day to day, sculpture has no such purpose. Though you remain outside, you enter it with your eyes, sense its nature, you see it to know it, it becomes visible and felt.
Sculpture is a thing unlike any other thing. The same urge to create fine buildings is also the sculptor’s urge to form and present a direct spatial experience, a straightforward, unmediated, sensuous, spatial experience to lift us out of the everyday. Disturbing, only in the sense of challenging us to abandon what we already know in order to see anew.
The sculptures in this exhibition were made by Katherine Gili over a period of forty or so years beginning in 1980. Having studied at Bath Academy of Art Corsham, in the late 1960’s where her interest in sculpture was kindled. She then went on to study at St Martin’s in London where Sir Anthony Caro was an influential teacher in the early 1970’s. Her career began in 1973, creating sculptures in steel, having set up in an artists’ studio complex known as Stockwell Depot in South London. The Depot was recognised as a powerhouse of contemporary art at the time1 and Katherine’s work received considerable attention at its annual exhibitions. This attention prompted her inclusion in three seminal survey exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery and solo shows at the Serpentine Gallery in London and at Salander O’Reilly in New York. Katherine’s sculptures from this period were purchased by the Arts Council at the time and In 2019 her sculpture “Vertical IV” made in 1975 was acquired by the Tate and is now on show in Tate Britain.
According to the Tate “Katherine Gili was one of few women artists working with industrial steel during the 1970’s in Britain.”2 They go on; quite rightly; to emphasize her enthusiasm for construction as a technique. But the trajectory of Katherine Gili’s career can also be understood in terms of making, of working her material away from the mechanical and bringing it closer to the ways of the hand. Transforming the industrial matter of factness of this seemingly intractable material with heat and hammer. But as she has said “I have never been concerned to indulge in the techniques of steel working. In all my work I am searching for something sculptural through the medium”3 . This vision is for a sense of growing form, of a rhythm of tension and release, of opposition and resolution, a sense of weight and density suffused with force and pace amongst some and calm and delicacy in others. All displaying a distinctive sensibility for formal invention, enabled by an evolving technique which permits an intimate relationship between sculptor and sculpture, and one which is revealed and communicated.
The sculptures in this show, chart the expansion and enhancement of Katherine’s vision and technique with the addition of materials such as paper and clay and observations of the dynamics of the human body, the wellspring of our engagement with the physical world, to further her search for sculptural inspiration. To approach those things with fresh examination, absorb their visual and sensuous significance, take in the emotional knowledge physical experience conveys. Then return to her material, with its properties and limitations, not as a recorder, but as a reinventor and creator of unique, expressive, three-dimensional physical experience.
Robert Persey (Sculptor) 2024
Footnotes:
1 Stockwell Depot 1967-79, By Sam Cornish, Pub. Riding House/University of Greenwich
2 Label for Vertical IV at Tate Britain
3 Conversation With Isabel H Langtry- Catalogue for Escultura Nueva, Reino Unido at Conde Duque Madrid 1988
Front cover: Sprite - 1989-1991 Forged mild steel, hot zinc spray, patinated (H. 65 x 64 x 60 cm)
Back: Aquí - 1981 Forged mild steel, varnished, waxed (H. 36 x 49 x 45 cm)
Huddle - 2003
Fired paper clay (H. 21 x 33 x 20 cm)
Kyanite - 2017
Forged mild steel, hot zinc spray, patinated (H. 63 x 84 x 58 cm)
After Matisse - 1980
Paper cast into bronze 2020, Edition of 5 - (H. 50 x 40 x 81 cm)
Aspen - 1985-1988
Forged mild steel, hot zinc spray, patinated (H. 65 x 63 x 50 cm)
Paper No. 3 - 2021
Patern cutting card (H. 31 x 42 x 33 cm)
Quicksap - 2017
Forged mild steel, patinated (H.46 x 29 x 40 cm)
Solo exhibitions:
Katherine Gili at work in her Kent studio
Born Oxford 1948
Studied Bath Academy of Art 1966-70
St Martin’s School of Art 1971-73
Taught part-time
Norwich School of Art 1972-85, St Martin’s School of Art 1975-84.
Visiting Lecturer various art schools 1978- date.
Serpentine Gallery, London 1977 • Salander O’Reilly Gallery, New York 1981 • A Career Survey, Poussin Gallery, London 2011 • Artist of the Day, Flowers Central, London 2014 • Sparks Fly, Canary Wharf 2019
Six solo exhibitions at Felix & Spear Gallery in Ealing London from 2016-2024
Major Survey exhibitions:
Condition of Sculpture, Hayward Gallery 1975 • A Silver Jubilee Exhibition of Contemporary British Sculpture at Battersea Park in 1977 • Hayward Annual, Hayward Gallery 1979 • British Abstract Art: Sculpture, 1995 • British Figurative Art: Sculpture 1998 • Flowers East Gallery - United Enemies, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds 2011 • Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945, Arts Council Collection Touring Exhibition 2021
Major Group Exhibitions:
Stockwell Depot from 1974 to 79 • The Hayward Annual in 1979 • Sculpture from Stockwell Depot at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts Norwich 1982 • Have You Seen Sculpture from the Body? Tate Gallery in 1984 • Escultura Nueva Reino Unido, Conde Duque; Madrid 1988 • Steel, Canary Wharf; London 2006 • Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions 1996, 1997, 2009 to 2016
In 2013 her sculpture “Ripoll” won the Jack Goldhill Prize at the Royal Academy.
Public collections:
Tate • The Henry Moore Institute • Arts Council of Great Britain • Bradford Museums and Galleries • Chippenham Museum • City of Lugano, Switzerland • Sacred Heart University, Connecticut USA
Private and corporate collections: Britain, Spain and USA
Katherine is represented by Felix & Spear
Ealing Green London W5 5EQ
Tel: 020 3985 8888 Web: pitzhanger@pitzhanger.org.uk
8 Nov 2024 – 9 March 2025
Wednesday - Sunday: 10am - 5pm
First Thursday of the month: 10am - 8pm
Monday - Tuesday: Closed Bank Holidays: 10am - 5pm
9 -10 Market Place Chippenham SN15 3HF
Tel: 01249 705020 Web: heritage@chippenham.gov.uk
15 March – 10th May 2025
Monday – Saturday 10am – 4pm, free entry.
Supported by Felix & Spear.
Copyright: Katherine Gili and Robert Persey. Photography: Orlando Gili