William Tucker is a sculptor who was born to English parents in 1935 and now living in the US.
At the University of Oxford he studied modern history from 1955 to 1958. He moved to London and studied sculpture both at the Central School of Art and Design and at Saint Martin's School of Art, where Anthony Caro was teaching. In 1965 he was one of nine sculptors included in the important New Generation: 65 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and one of seven from that exhibition whose work was included in the Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York in the following year. Tucker spent two years as a Gregory Fellow at the Fine Arts Department of the University of Leeds (1968–70) and represented Britain at the 1972 Venice Biennale. He was given the first one person exhibition at the Arts Council Serpentine Gallery in 1973, and in 1975 curated the exhibition The Condition of Sculpture at the Hayward Gallery.
Tucker taught at Goldsmiths’ College and St Martin’s during the 1960s. In 1974 he published The Language of Sculpture (Thames & Hudson, London), which was released in the United States in 1978 as Early Modern Sculpture (Oxford University Press.
He moved to New York in 1978 and taught at Columbia University and at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. His sculptures became larger and more frontal in aspect with such pieces as Tunnel (1975), now in the collection of the Tate Gallery, and Angel commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council for Livingstone New Town in 1976.
Working in Brooklyn, New York, Tucker continued to show constructions in steel and wood on an architectural scale, such as An Ellipse (now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum) and The House of the Hanged Man (the Museum of Modern Art, New York). Permanent installations of work from that period include The Rim in Atlanta, Georgia, and Victory, commissioned for the Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In the early 1980s Tucker moved his studio to upstate New York, and started to work directly in plaster on a scale directly related to the human figure. Cast in bronze, these sculptures were shown with earlier steel and wood constructions in William Tucker, the American Decade at the Storm King Art Center in 1987. 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.
During the 1990s he made many large charcoal drawings and a series of massive sculptures suggestive of male or female torsos, such as Frenhofer at the Goodwood Sculpture Park, and Maia, commissioned for the riverside park in Bilbao, Spain. In 1998 he started a series of roughly modelled heads, which were included in his 2001 retrospective exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park; he has enlarged several to heroic scale, such as Emperor, Messenger, based on the image of a foot, was recently shown in the Crucible exhibition at Gloucester Cathedral.
Tucker’s work has been recognized by various awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship for sculpture in 1981 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1986, the Sculpture Center (New York) award for Distinction in Sculpture (1991), the Rodin-Moore Memorial Prize, Second Fujisankei Biennale, Japan (1995), the annual award from the New York Studio School (1999), the RA Summer Exhibition Sculpture Prize (2009), and the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement Award (2010).
Tucker became an American citizen in 1985.
Recent one-person museum exhibitions included Tucker: Mass and Figure at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao in 2015, and William Tucker at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland in 2016.
William Tucker is also reprensented by Buchmann Galerie (Berlin-Lugano)