Background
David Annesley was born in London in 1936.
David Annesley was born in London in 1936.
Annesley was educated in Zimbabwe, before studying under Anthony Caro at St Martin’s School of Art in 1962.
During 1956 - 1958 David had a national service as an RAF pilot. Annesley also tutored at Croydon College of Art, Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art from 1963 to 1995. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of British sculptors in 1995. Annesley's first solo exhibition was held at the Waddington galleries in 1966, followed in the same year by a show at the Poindexter Gallery in New York. Since then he has had many solo shows in London, New York and Australia, Holland, Germany and the United States. His sculpture is in many public collections, including those of the Arts Council; the British council; Tate; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nagoya Gallery, Japan; and the Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.
The work from the sixties explored the relation of the body to the sculpture, examining the ratio of the parts to the whole. Many of the sculptures work in series, featuring the same motif, repeated or reduced in size. Two sculptures, "Loquat" and "Godroon" relate to each other in this way. Both use wave-like shapes, built up in varying sizes, forms and colour. The lack of a straight edge on which the sculpture should sit gives the illusion of instability and movement.
David Annesley's welded steel sculptures seem to defy the weight of the material from which they are made, largely through their abstract compositions that imply a sense of movement. The forms are layered and contemplative, large, yet delicate and intricate. Many of his works draw on his interest in Jungian psychology, which he was introduced to forty years ago when he came across a series of mandalas drawn by a woman in her fifties. She was undergoing analysis with Dr Carl G. Jung, who printed a selection of these mandalas in order to symbolise the self and harmony within the individual as archetypes of the collective unconscious. The artist was immediately struck by the qualities of these drawings that, to him, were both universal and intensely personal. He took fifteen years to develop a way of making the mandala into a three-dimensional structure, which has, in turn, fuelled his creative life ever since.
David used color to suggest the idea of dynamism and weightlessness in his sculptures, believing that color opened up "a whole new way of articulating and realizing feeling in sculpture."
David was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of British sculptors in 1995.
