William Turnbull has been making sculptures and paintings for fifty years. This book is the first publication devoted to the artist, it documents his entire career and is published to coincide with an important exhibition of Turnbull's work at the Serpentine Gallery, London. It contains an introduction by the curator of the exhibition, David Sylvester; and an essay by Patrick Elliott, Assistant Keeper at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
A variety of different sources have inspired Turnbull's sculpture, ranging from pre-classical and non-Western idols and ritual objects to highly modern, industrial products. In his latest sculptures he has taken his images of standing figures and heads to a greater degree of simplification and refinement than ever, without diminishing their sense of life and of mystery.
Turnbull's paintings, which have been much less widely shown than his sculptures, will be a complete revelation to many, with their decisive colour and energetic brushmarks within a framework of extreme austerity.