William King
Power Tennis: En Garde and Forehand, 1977
Aluminum
Museum Purchase with Student Government Association funds and gift of Alfred Giardino
William King’s simplified images of the human body often possess a humorous bent. Such is the case with Power Tennis: En Garde and Forehand. The large feet contrast with the elongated, slender forms in a comical fashion, and the poses of the player seem chosen for maximum awkwardness, especially bent at the waist over his widespread legs. However silly they appear, though, King’s sculpture also explores serious technical and formal issues.The artist masterfully composes figures out of basic silhouettes and slots together flat planes to create the illusion of three-dimensional figures. His experimentation with flatness and volume link his work to other artists investigating the nature of sculpture, such as the Abstract Expressionist David Smith. King’s sculptures only stand due to his expertise in working with aluminum, a material about which he said, “Aluminum is delicious. I just love it. A nice big, thick piece of aluminum looks like chocolate bars to me. It’s a visceral thing. I like when it goes through the saw. It’s my soul mate in a way. It’s marvelous.”King’s sculptures also interrogate the human body and how it maneuvers through space. He has captured businessmen, acrobats, Shakespearean dramas, and athletes like these tennis players. Like Edgar Degas’ ballet dancers or Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, King exposes the shifting tension in our movements. As art critic Hilton Kramer wrote, a “preoccupation with gesture is the focus of King’s sculptural imagination. Everything that one admires in his work—the virtuoso carving, the deft handling of a wide variety of materials, the shrewd observation and resourceful invention—all this is secondary to the concentration on gesture. The physical stance of the human animal as it negotiates the social arena, the unconscious gait that the body assumes in making its way in the social medium, the emotion traced by the course of a limb, a torso, a head, the features of a face, a coiffure or a costume—from a keen observation of these materials King has garnered a large stock of sculptural images notable for their wit, empathy, simplicity, and psychological precision.”