Richard Deacon is one of Britain's most distinguished mid generation sculptors, whose work emerged alongside that of contemporaries such as Tony Cragg and Richard Wentworth in the early 1980s. Their sculpture rejected the heroic formalism and sometimes oppressive monumentality of the previous generation, which included Antony Caro and Richard Serra, in favour of an engagement with objects and situations reminiscent of everyday situations and chance occurrences. Deacon can also, however, be seen as an heir to sculptors such as Caro, in terms of the exquisite virtuosity of his constructions in wood or metal which range in scale from the domestic to the monumental. Somewhere between aeronautics and anatomy, many of Deacon's large-scale sculptures recall chassis or ribcages. Some loop and curve out across space like three-dimensional drawings, others hover on the floor like great drops of liquid. The forms he creates evoke the material world of everyday artefacts and the inner world of the body, as a site of sensuality, memory and language. His many large scale public commissions, which have ranged from sets of gates for cities to backdrops for major performance events, to sculptures situated prominently in public squares and parks, are complimented by smaller scale works such as his ongoing series Art for Other People, in which a diverse range of everyday industrial materials are fashioned into familiar-seeming yet absurdly uncanny domestically scaled sculptural forms. | Richard Deacon by Editors Of Phaidon Press, Paperback | Indigo Chapters