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In a career spanning more than six decades, Ruth Duckworth has created an immense and important body of work. Her ambition, intensity, and defiance of convention have governed her personal journey - fleeing from Nazi Germany to England at the outset of World War II, and settling in the United States in the mid-1960s - as well as her prodigious artistic output. Although Duckworth started out sculpting in stone, and has created both intimate and large-scale artworks in bronze and other materials, she has since the early 1960s predominantly worked in clay. It is for her work in this medium that she is recognized as one of the twentieth century's most innovative and significant sculptors. A true alchemist of abstraction, Duckworth has consistently produced barrier-bending art that is elegant yet at the same time buoyant, visionary works of seductive refinement, austere power, and radiant immediacy that masterfully continue the aesthetics of modernism into the twenty-first-century.
This volume, which accompanies a major touring exhibition provides a long-overdue assessment of Duckworth's significance. It reveals the conceptual and iconographic foundations that Duckworth's work shares with other important modernist sculptors.
