The Ensemble, from Bethan Huws to Rilke’s Rodin

Lecture – Penelope Curtis

16 February 2015
6:30 – 7:30 pm
Sainsbury Theatre, National Gallery, London

The final lecture brings together the previous four in examining their intersection. It considers the way in which a single sculpture can anchor a spatial structure, and suggests that the furnishings of the church, such as the pulpit and the altar, are forms which still have a purchase on sculptural form. It ends by asking whether the point at which a tree becomes a god, or remains a tree, is the key intersection.

Woman, viewed from below, wearing red dress and sitting on raised shelf

Lucy Gunning, still from 'Climbing Around My Room', 1993, VHS video

About the speaker

In 1988 Penelope Curtis joined the new Tate Gallery in Liverpool as Exhibitions Curator. In 1994 she moved to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, where as curator, she was responsible for a programme of historical and contemporary sculpture exhibitions, collections building in sculpture and archives, and research activity including events, fellowships and publications. In 2010 she took up the role of Director at Tate Britain, before leaving in 2015 to move to the prestigious Calouste Gulbenkian museum in Lisbon.

She has written widely on 20th-century British sculpture, on European art and architecture of the inter-war years, and on many contemporary sculptors including Thomas Schütte, Gerard Byrne and Isa Genzken. She is author of Sculpture 1900-1945: After Rodin (OUP, 1999) and Patio and Pavilion: The place of sculpture in Modern Architecture (Ridinghouse, 2007).