Throughout his career, Turnbull consistently turned to the stimuli and images of his early career, where, as a student, he spent hours walking between the Neolithic tools and carved figures of the vast collections of the British Museum. Here, he pondered the timelessness of totemic statues, an influence that inevitably manifested in his sculptural output. Turnbull’s consequent refinement and control over both form and materiality produced works that stand as signs of vitality and imposition.

William Turnbull was born in Dundee in 1922. Before attending formal art school at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1946, Turnbull was drafted as an RAF pilot, travelling internationally between 1941 until 1946. He held teaching positions at the Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1964 – 1972, which allowed him to work in new materials, such as steel, Perspex and fibreglass. In 1972, he was commissioned by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation to create a public sculpture for the City Sculpture Project in Liverpool. He had a major retrospective in 1973 at the Tate Gallery, as well as another at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2005, and exhibited again at the Tate in 2006. Turnbull’s work is displayed in institutional collections around the world, including: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Tate and Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran and Städtisches Museum, Leverkusen, Germany. His most recent solo exhibition, Origins (1946-1959), ran successively at both the New York and Los Angeles venues of Karma Gallery in 2026.

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