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Richard Wentworth (born 1947) is a British artist, curator and university teacher.

Life and work

Wentworth was born in 1947 in the then New Zealand province of Samoa. From 1965 he studied at London's Hornsey College of Art, then at the Royal College of Art, where Bill Woodrow and Tony Cragg also studied at that time. In 1967 he worked with Henry Moore. Since the late 1970s he became internationally known as an important representative of the movement of the so-called New British Sculpture.

Wentworth was Professor at Goldsmiths College in London from 1971 to 1987 and Professor at the Royal College of Art from 2009 to 2011. From 2002 to 2010 he also taught at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, based at Oxford University. Many of his students, such as Damien Hirst, became known worldwide under the term Young British Artists. His work gained international recognition because it fundamentally changed the definitions of sculpture and photography that were common until then.

The way in which the everyday life of people and society becomes art-worthy in his works became influential. For example, he captures sculptural forms in the everyday world with the camera and also uses objects he found on the street. The symbolic-metaphoric overlaps with the practical properties of the objects represented.

In his series “Making Do and Getting By”, which he began in the mid-1990s, he assumes that “in a globally connected and accessible world, the place on your doorstep may be the most exotic space ever”. He therefore documents the everyday, pays attention to otherwise unnoticed objects and their involuntary and random geometric structures in public space and also depicts uncanny situations in his works that would otherwise not be noticed. By converting industrial objects or found objects into art, he undermines their original function and expands the modes of perception of these objects by breaking up conventional classification systems – for example, very vividly in an object series, in which he stuffs the objects to which a dictionary refers into the respective dictionary. An example from this series is the work “Tract (from Boost to Wham)” from 1993.

These works explore in a sensually perceptible way the question of what becomes of things when they no longer do justice to the function behind their naming and often surround our conceptuality and conception of objects and their use as part of our everyday experience. In Germany, for example, as part of this artistic concept, Wentworth showed plates, which he first smashed and then reassembled to investigate whether the resulting object was in turn a plate or something else