John Panting Sculpture (Paperback)

This is the first monograph on the sculpture of John Panting, 1940–1974, a New Zealander with a unique and natural talent for sculpture who lived and worked in the UK for his entire short career. In the late sixties and early seventies Panting was one of the most energetic and challenging figures on the London art scene. His early works were quickly acquired by private and public collections. He was amongst the younger artists shown in the important survey exhibition at the Royal Academy, British Sculptors ’72. He was soon to be made a dynamic and influential Head of Sculpture at Central School of Art, only to die in in a motorcycle accident in 1974. Panting was highly regarded and admired by both his contemporaries and his students. However, after a Serpentine Gallery retrospective in 1975, his work was somewhat neglected until the revival of interest signaled by the exhibition ‘John Panting Rediscovered’ at Poussin Gallery in 2007, and by Tate Britain and the Henry Moore Institute acquiring his work. During his short professional career Panting gained a reputation as a tireless and obsessive worker. He produced a very large number of sculptures in a variety of idioms, moving through a sequence of contemporary issues current in the sculpture of the sixties before finding his own striking style in the early seventies. This visually dazzling monograph reproduces over 350 photographs, showing the full range of the artist’s work and the complete arc of his brief but meteoric career. Specialist abstract art essayist Sam Cornish traces the story of Panting’s development and demonstrates his highly original and lucid contribution to post-war British sculpture.