The Sculpture of Roland Brener

IN ATTEMPTING TO JUSTIFY the existence of things made willfully by man for no obvious use, we are faced with the necessity of justifying to ourselves our own concept of existence. The more obviously unfunctional, unarchitectural, undecorative, un-anything the thing created, the more acute this necessity becomes. English sculpture in the early sixties was justified by the most literate of its practitioners in terms of the unequivocal status of objects: “Sculpture. . . . must have the generality of the world: the identity of the object: the character of a human individual,” and “Sculpture is a

print December 1968

Phillip King, Sculpture, 1960-1968

IN 1958–9 PHILIP KING WORKED as an assistant to Henry Moore. He was never as much involved in Moore’s work as other of the latter’s many assistants have been, but Moore is a figure of sufficient stature to have made it necessary and helpful for many of the younger sculptors to define their own concepts of sculpture in relation to his. The purging from the new English sculpture of suggestive form represents an extreme reaction. Moore’s work relies absolutely on the evocative potentiality of animal and vegetable forms, and on our ability to recognize and respond to them. Since about 1960, it has