William Tucker: Unearthing the Figure 

Pangolin Gallery

London N1 

5/5

“SHAPE comes before form,” asserts sculptor William Tucker, and a quick look at the work exhibited here makes it easy to understand what he has in mind. 

Only focused attention at close quarters reveals the image within each shape — a head, an arm, a foot — but the revelation can dissolve in a blink of the eye, reabsorbed back into the overall shape. 

Intriguingly, the discoverers of the Venus of Berekhat Ram in the Golan Heights in 1981, dated between 230,000 and 700,000 BC and regarded as the earliest sculpture ever to be found, observed the same phenomenon. Its image too is obscured by the form of the shape. 

In pushing the figurative to the edge of abstraction — or maybe it’s the other way around — Tucker creates perplexing yet reassuring work. Its inviting familiarity encourages and rewards proximity and observation. 

“Organic, primordial forms that show a sensual tactile quality,” the press release comments and why not — the impression is of an archaeological find of scattered remnants of sculptures weathered by cataclysms and shrouded with the patina of ancient time, hence the exhibition’s title. 

Tucker admits to have been deeply affected by the find of the Riace bronzes, recovered from the Calabrian Sea in the 1970s. But it was the physical longevity and “unearthed” condition of the two extraordinarily detailed Greek bronze statues of naked bearded warriors dating from 450BC that put things into a new perspective for him. 

Formally, he rigorously keeps his work at the “threshold of legibility” in what he calls “a familiarity that resists recognition,” favouring a gut response over one guided by the intellect. 

A significant influence came from the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who used the imagery of the absent skin to evoke an encounter between subject and object, which Tucker appears to have literally and successfully employed in the “body parts” sculptures. 

The effect is particularly poignant in Bibi, named after Rodin’s male model for Man 

with the Broken Nose (1865). Bibi, destitute and disfigured by poverty, is rendered by Tucker as having barely readable features — a “skinless” face-head. 

From a distance, the mediation of a human hand appears to be absent. It’s a characteristic that confounded the discovers of the Venus of Berekhat Ram and is a riddle that asks to be sensed. 

This show will engage you best if you haven’t extinguished the child in you or if you can bring one along young enough to to infect you with a sense of wonder. 

Runs until November 29. Free. Opening times: pangolinlondon.com