Richard Deacon

For objects that are fixed and immobile, Richard Deacon’s sculptures are astonishingly full of life. Everywhere you look in this retrospective of the British artist there’s some monumental wooden form curving and coursing through space, some linear shape arcing or undulating, or some solid mass bulging suggestively. It’s exhilarating stuff, yet occasionally also slightly exhausting.

In Deacon’s earliest works, from the 1970s and 1980s, leading up to his 1987 Turner Prize win, you find a giant looping structure that evokes an ear, or a Möbius-like tangle resembling metal ducting. Deacon takes care never to hide the works’ materiality – leaving surfaces covered in measurement marks and pencil scribbles, for instance; or allowing glue to ooze out from between laminated wooden strips.

His pieces from the 1990s onwards, however, are much more pristine, more alien and elaborate – culminating in ‘Out of Order’, a vast, twisting network of furled and jutting armatures that corkscrew and wreathe about themselves. Yet, for all its technical sophistication, this sculpture is oddly unaffecting. By itself, it would probably appear extraordinary. But in the context of the exhibition, it feels overwrought. Like watching a movie packed with special effects, by this stage you’ve become used to such spectacle. Instead, as the show progresses, it’s Deacon’s diminutive works that are most effective, like the ceramic pieces, with their slick, sickly glazes, or the bijou, surreal little objects of his ‘Art for Other People’ series. Deacon may be a big deal but it’s his smaller works that truly unnerve.

Gabriel Coxhead