If you’re planning to visit the Bill Woodrow exhibition at the Royal Academy then don’t ignore the small print on the adverts, don’t think I know where the Royal Academy is and don’t rock up at the grand neoclassical entrance on Piccadilly. You’ll be politely redirected back out into the rain to turn right, right and right again. The Woodrow show is actually around the back of the building in the RA’s new Burlington Gardens galleries, which are intended to show works by the Royal Academicians themselves. You can guess why I mention this, but at least it allowed me to see the carpet in Burlington Arcade again. What a great unusuality it is.
Woodrow isn’t calling this show a retrospective, preferring the term ‘a survey to date.’ It is a large survey, with work on display from his early 1970s art school pieces to his current 2013 preoccupations. With over 60 works it is a chance to see his early inventiveness and the breadth of his interests. Woodrow is not an artist who has spent his career investigating one small area. Not for him fifty years of refining a particular technique or the dreary repetition of a successful formula. Instead he has skipped from media to media, at times changing the perceptions of sculpture as he went.
Bill Woodrow RA Untitled, 1979 Telephone, plaster, varnish, 17 x 22 x 28 cm Collection of the artist
It was Woodrow’s work from the late seventies and early Eighties that made his name, and it remains the most interesting in his oeuvre. His attempts to create contemporary fossils work well. In these he embedded modern objects such as phones and vacuum cleaners in plaster and concrete. He then chipped away at this covering, exposing the items within as though they were objects of natural history, before painting the concrete to appear like stone. They are playful and a comment on the never-ending march of progress, but the text on the gallery walls suggests a link with Michelangelo’s unfinished slaves at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. That is a brave comparison and not one that jumps immediately to mind.
Several works from the Cut-out series produced in the Eighties are on display. These are the pieces for which Woodrow is most famous, having taken aviation shears to metal objects such as shell casings and washing machines. The original object is displayed, along with the sculpture that has been created from it, the relationship between the two explicit as they are still linked directly. Mostly using items found on the streets (though I hope that wasn’t the case for The Swallow, below…) these pieces were looking at recycling and reusing at a time when the only other people doing it were the Wombles.
Bill Woodrow RA The Swallow, 1984 Naval shell, enamel and acrylic paint, 117 x 19 x 36 cm Private collection, Devon
It is difficult to sustain an art career based on inventiveness and continual change. Woodrow’s later work has moved in a direction that is less interesting and less inventive than the earlier pieces. The artist deserves kudos for not blindly continuing working in one successful way as there is little doubt he could have continued his mid-career series even after his interest had waned. Instead he turned to welding and bronze, remarking recently about that period, ‘I didn’t want to see another found object.’ His works in metal and mixed media are not as iconic as his previous pieces, which were always going to be hard to follow. The later pieces, some inspired by beekeeping are not as elegant or clever. Woodrow is like a singer spending a career trying to equal his great second album. If he hadn’t been so successful early on the rest of the show wouldn’t feel like an anticlimax.
Introductory tours of the show run every Thursday at 2.30pm until 6th February.
Until 16th February 2014
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