Moon / King

While Moon developed a highly rigorous and productive practice as a painter, King developed his language in sculpture. King’s interest was in the fundamentals of objects, their surfaces and volume. He explored how an object stood up, how one part could lean against another to make an intentional object (thus discovering his most recognisable silhouette: the apex or cone). He described his work as the ‘art of the invisible’, referring to the fact that the majority of a sculpture is hidden within its own volume. 

Moon’s work was heavily inspired by music, particularly jazz, as well as choreography and dance. Repeated patterns of stripes and grids became a way to set up, and then syncopate, rhythm and movement across a surface that subverted the traditional static quality of painting. King too felt this connection with temporality and dance which can most clearly be seen in his Reel series (eg. Dunstable Reel, 1970 and Ring Reel, 2013) and in works such as Green Streamer, 1970, maquettes of which appear in the show.

Phillip King (b. 1934, Tunis, d. 2021, London) was one of the key sculptors of the post-war period. He was an assistant to Henry Moore and a student and then contemporary of Anthony Caro. After graduating he became a key member of the group of young artists who re-imagined sculpture from the 1960s onwards. King’s work was included in the seminal Primary Structures exhibition at Jewish Museum, New York in 1966 (a turning point in contemporary sculpture) alongside Carl Andre, Anthony Caro, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson. King represented Great Britain at the 1968 Venice Biennale (alongside Bridget Riley) and has  been the subject of ambitious museum survey shows at Whitechapel Gallery, London (1968), Kröller Muller National Museum, Netherlands (1974), Hayward Gallery, London (1981), Le Consortium, Dijon (2013) and Tate Britain, London (2014). King's work is in numerous illustrious public collections worldwide including Tate, London; MoMA, New York; Pompidou, Paris; MOCA, LA; and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, among  others. Many works by King are permanently installed in public spaces in major cities around the world including London, UK; Munich, Germany; Osaka, Japan and Rotterdam, the Netherlands. King also has works in sculpture parks including Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK; Kistefos Museet, Norway, Kröller Muller, the Netherlands and Hakone Open Air Museum, Japan. His final public sculpture was unveiled in the French City of Rennes in the spring of 2022.

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Jeremy Moon (b. 1934, Altrincham, d. 1973, London) received a law degree at Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1957. He worked in advertising and enrolled briefly at Central School of Art, before devoting himself to art in the early 1960s. He taught sculpture at Saint Martin’s School of Art and painting at Chelsea School of Art, while exhibiting extensively within the United Kingdom and internationally. He died in London after a motorcycle accident at the age of 39. The first retrospective of his work took place in 1976 at the Serpentine Gallery in London, and travelled to Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Ulster Museum, Belfast; and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. His work is represented in the permanent collections of several international institutions including Tate, London; British Museum, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; Milwaukee Art Museum; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence. In 2022, Luhring Augustine published Jeremy Moon: Starlight Hour, a fully illustrated monograph of the artist’s work which represents the first comprehensive overview of Moon’s life and career.

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