Ruth Asawa

70s Bronze Flower Sculpture Plaque limited edition Signed, Berkley Arts Foundry

1979

"Love of Horses" Bronze and Marble Sculpture 16" x 7" in by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Love of Horses, 2000 Bronze & Marble (Double Face) 40 x 18 cm, Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostl...

"Gloria" Bronze and Marble sculpture 27" x 11" in by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Gloria, 2007 Bronze & Marble 68 x 27 cm, Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his characteristic ...

William King (1925-2015). Reclining figure, ca. 1965. Cast and welded bronze, 7 x 9.5 x 5 inches. Unsigned. William King, a sculptor in a variety of materials whose human figures traced social attitudes through the last half of the 20th century, often poking sly and poignant fun at human follies and foibles, died on March 4 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 90. His death was confirmed by Scott Chaskey, who is married to Mr. King's stepdaughter, Megan Chaskey. Mr. King worked in clay, wood, bronze, vinyl, burlap and aluminum. He worked both big and small, from busts and toylike figures to large public art pieces depicting familiar human poses -- a seated, cross-legged man reading; a Western couple (he in a cowboy hat, she in a long dress) holding hands; a tall man reaching down to tug along a recalcitrant little boy; a crowd of robotic-looking men walking in lock step. But for all its variation, what unified his work was a wry observer's arched eyebrow, the pointed humor and witty rue of a fatalist. His figurative sculptures, often with long, spidery legs and an outlandishly skewed ratio of torso to appendages, use gestures and posture to suggest attitude and illustrate his own amusement with the unwieldiness of human physical equipment. His subjects included tennis players and gymnasts, dancers and musicians, and he managed to show appreciation of their physical gifts and comic delight at their contortions and costumery. His suit-wearing businessmen often appeared haughty or pompous; his other men could seem timid or perplexed or awkward. Oddly, or perhaps tellingly, he tended to depict women more reverentially, though in his portrayals of couples the fragility and tender comedy inherent in couplehood settled equally on both partners. Mr. King's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, among other places, and he had dozens of solo gallery shows in New York and elsewhere. But the comic element of his work probably caused his reputation to suffer. Reviews of his exhibitions frequently began with the caveat that even though the work was funny, it was also serious, displaying superior technical skills, imaginative vision and the bolstering weight of a range of influences, from the ancient Etruscans to American folk art to 20th-century artists including Giacometti, Calder. and Elie Nadelman. The critic Hilton Kramer, one of Mr. King's most ardent advocates, wrote in a 1970 essay accompanying a New York gallery exhibit that he was, "among other things, an amusing artist, and nowadays this can, at times, be almost as much a liability as an asset." A "preoccupation with gesture is the focus of King's sculptural imagination," Mr. Kramer wrote. "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." William Dickey King...

"Enigma" Bronze and Marble Sculpture 25" x 13" in by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Songbird, 2007 Bronze & Marble 64 x 33 cm, Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his characteristi...

"Renaissance" Bronze and Marble sculpture 13" x 9" in by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Songbird, 2005 Bronze & Marble 33 x 23 cm, Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his character...

"Grecian Stallion I" Bronze sculpture 24" x 11" inch by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Grecian Stallion I, 2007 Bronze & Marble Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his characterist...

"Equine Spirit II" Bronze sculpture 23" x 14.5" inch by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Equine Spirit II, 1997 Bronze & Marble Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his characteristic...

"Entropy" Bronze sculpture 22" x 9" inch by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Entropy, 2005 Bronze & Marble Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his ...

"Symphony I" Bronze sculpture 28" x 15" inch by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Bronze & Marble Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his characteri...

"Symphony II" Bronze Sculpture 14.5" x 17" inch by Ibrahim Abd Elmalak Bronze & Marble Signed & Dated Sculptures that mostly depict his characteristic figures of feminine form an...