Celebrating Bill Woodrow on his Birthday

Bill Woodrow
Celloswarm, 2002
Bronze, stone and gold leaf
211 x 95 x 96 cm
6ft 11 x 3ft 1 ⅜ x 3ft 1 ¾ in.
Edition 4 of 8 plus 4 APs

Today we are wishing a very happy birthday to Bill Woodrow, from all of his admirers at Roche Court.

Bill Woodrow is a pivotal figure in British contemporary sculpture. His ‘swarm series’, as shown in Celloswarm here at Roche Court, was an intense body of work that involved covering ordinary objects with frenzied masses of golden bees. The series was a response to Woodrow’s experience of a cluster of bees coating his hand at a beekeeping course in the late 1990s. He recalls being fascinated by the physicality of a swarm in his hand - its warmth, its weight, its constant movement and changing shape. The result has the humour of his earlier surreal, cut-out sculptures using everyday items.

The New Art Centre has exhibited work by Bill Woodrow regularly for many years. His first solo exhibition at Roche Court Sculpture Park, In Awe of the Pawnbroker (2000) was shown in our, at the time, newly built Gallery.

Woodrow has exhibited extensively with solo shows at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; Palacio Nacional de Queluz, Oporto, Portugal; Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, Germany and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, at the end of 2013. He has received several honorary distinctions during his career including: representing Britain at the Biennales of Sydney in 1982, Paris in 1982 and 1985, and Sao Paulo in 1983 and 1991; he was a finalist in the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery in London in 1986; in 1988 he won the Anne Gerber Award at the Seattle Museum of Art; he was a trustee of the Tate Galleries 1996-2001; in 2002 he was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts.

His work is in public and private collections including the Government Art Collection, UK; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Moderna Museet, Sweden; Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal and the Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, Netherlands.