Richard Rome

This is the first illustrated overview of the forty-year career of British sculptor Richard Rome (b.1943), who has made an important contribution to the development of modernist metal sculpture since the 1960s. A leading artist whose first one-person show took place at London's Serpentine Gallery in 1975, Rome is most commonly associated with bold and open abstract shapes, often in public spaces and often in steel. His contemporaries are sculptors Phillip King, Tim Scott, Katherine Gili and Justin Knowles, and Rome himself cites as fundamental to his outlook the example of Anthony Caro, a generation older and a common factor in the careers of all these sculptors. Rome's work is also visibly influenced by post-war modernist American art, in particular the sculpture of David Smith. Martin Holman relates Rome's development as a sculptor to the changing scene of sculptural practice, from the contrasting traditions of modernism and the figurative, through the influences of New Generation sculpture in the mid-1960s and the onslaught of Conceptualism and Minimalism at the end of the decade.
Rome's work has not received the critical attention given to his contemporaries and this book will therefore be welcomed by all those with an interest in modern and contemporary British sculpture.