Royal Academy of Arts sculpture comes to Cambridge

When Royal Academicians are elected they donate a Diploma work to the Academy. In recent years many of today’s best sculptors have been elected meaning there has not been space to exhibit all the works in London.

The new scheme, initiated by Kettle’s Yard and the Royal Academy, will bring several RA Diploma works to Cambridge.

The first, Phillip King’s Span, was inaugurated in the artist’s presence. Span, a blue painted steel piece from 1967, is a key work from a period when sculptors like Phillip King and Anthony Caro broke away from the figurative tradition of carving and modelling. Using steel, plastics and colour, they suggested an entirely new relationship between sculpture and the modern world.

With its vistas and open spaces the Sidgwick Site offers the ideal setting for modern sculpture. Allies and Morrison, architects behind the recent Master Plan for the Site, always envisaged that sculpture would form part of the site.

Appropriately , several of the buildings have been designed by Royal Academicians including the Raised Faculty Building by Sir Hugh Casson, James Stirling’s History Faculty, the Law Faculty building by Sir Norman Foster and Ted Cullinan’s Faculty of Divinity.

Phillip King was president of the Royal Academy from 1999 to 2004. He read modern languages at Christ’s College, Cambridge in the mid 50s before going on to St Martin’s School of Art and working as an assistant to Henry Moore.

Major retrospectives of King’s work have been held at the Hayward Gallery, 1981, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 1997. He was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art from 1980 to 1990 and Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools from 1990 to 1999.

The project has been made possible by financial and practical support from the University’s Schools of the Arts and Humanities and Humanities and Social Sciences, and from the Estate Management and Building Service.