Phillip King (exhibition catalogue), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, 1974, another cast illustrated p. 38

Tim Hilton, The Sculpture of Phillip King, London, 1992, another cast illustrated in colour pl𝓡. 1ℱ1

By the late 1960s King had reached a position of eminence in the art world not yet accorded to many British artists of his generation. Teaching at St. Martins, and later at the Slade School of Art, afforded him an authority and an outlet for developing his ideas. A number of public commissions gave him a profile that his relatively small number of monumental works belied. Indeed, it was during the late 1960s that sculptures by King were placed in museums and public spaces from Leicestershire to Adelaide. A cast of the present work was purchased by the Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels and another by the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

Moving to Clay Hall Farm, near Dunstable in Bedfordshire enabled King to work on large scale sculptures in steel such as the present work, a closely related sculpture Dunstable Reel (Tate, London, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and Leicestershire Education Authority, Leicester) and Green Streamer (Tate, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York). These three works exemplified a new style of work which Tim Hilton described as: ‘remarkable for their clarity, economy and use of colour. [In Reel, Dunstable Reel and Green Stramer] King’s three-dimensional art makes its closest approach to painting, perhaps as a result of visits to Matisse exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery (1968) and the Grand Palais (1970). This closeness to painting is not so much in colour as in the sculptures’ open rhythms and discursive composition’ (T. Hilton, op. cit., London, 1992, p. 58).