William King

"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."

- Bruce Weber, The New York Times

“The sculpture of William King is a sculpture of comic gesture. It is sculpture that choreographs a scenario of sociability, of conscious affections and unavowed pretensions, transforming the world of observed manners and unacknowledged motives into mimelike structures of comic revelation. Often very funny, sometimes acerbic, frequently satiric and touching at the same time, it is sculpture that draws from the vast repertory of socialized human gesture a very personal vocabulary of contemporary sculptural forms…"

- Hilton Kramer

“The American born, English sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), told us that 'The sole purpose of the arts is neither description nor imitation, but the creation of unknown beings from elements which are always present but not apparent.' William King’s art education was acquired in New York, in advanced art academies, with access to the city’s great museums, and in awareness of the worldwide discoveries of modern artists, yet King chose for personal and intuitive convictions to 'create unknown beings' (ideograms of the human figure) through which to explore the state of mind of modern man and woman, and their tragi-comic relations."

- Gerald Nordland

“Comedy is under appreciated in contemporary art, in part because the distinction between the comic and the merely laughable has become blurred. It is, however, robust in King’s brilliant and witty sculptures, which confirm a thesis of Hegel’s, that 'comic action requires a solution almost more stringent than tragic action does.' Had one of Giacometti’s attenuated figures been placed among King’s tall, skinny, almost-Modernist bodies, it would no longer suggest existential gloom but an unsuspected lightness.”

- Arthur C. Danto