1939 -

Sculptor. Born in 1939 in Shrewsbury, he studied at Wolverhampton College of Art (1953-61) and then spent two years at the British School in Rome on a scholarship. In 1963, the directors of the school commissioned Williams to create a fountain sculpture for their garden. He taught at Wimbledon College of Art as head of sculpture in the 1970s and 80s, before moving to the Royal College of Art, where, since 1991, he has been Professor of Sculpture. In the mid-70s Williams made a series of lively abstract wood constructions. Wooden and stone pieces from 1977, such as Rhino, express the qualities of a subject without representing it in a literal fashion. From around 1980 Williams’s work became frankly representational (men and women supporting children, and gymnasts,) but with strongly formalist characteristics, deriving from African and pre-Columbian sculpture. He seemed to be deliberately exploring the same territory that Epstein, Gill and Moore had been through earlier in the century. In the 1980s, he was championed by the critic and editor of Modern Painters, Peter Fuller, who saw in his work a welcome return to traditional values. Since the early 1990s, Williams has been “splicing” and reassembling his images, sometimes still lives, and incorporating colour, with results which look coolly cubist. Public commissions include the Memorial to Henry Purcell in Christchurch Gardens, London (1995) and a statue of Lloyd George (2001-2007) for Parliament Square.