Portfolio

Bent Penny Bottle is made entirely of 3,152 one-penny pieces, individually bent by hand and welded together, the work is an ironic view on the monetary value of art.

©RichardTrupp,2010,all rights reserved, licensed by DACS

Size 45cm x 20cm x 20cm

Born in Birmingham, Richard Trupp has been strongly influenced by a city that once rejoiced in the sobriquet ‘the workshop of the world’. He relishes the monumental ironworks still surviving there, and relates his own attitude as a sculptor to the ‘hands-on’ attitude still found in this ‘city of makers’. When Antony Gormley’s defiant yet vulnerable Iron Man was installed so dramatically in Victoria Square, the vociferous response from the people of Birmingham fuelled the young Trupp’s burgeoning sculptural ambitions.

Richard Cork - Art Crtic (Times and Tate Galleries)

Industrial materials duly became the focus in his 1999 solo show at the Royal Society of British Sculptors in London. He treated the three rooms at his disposal as an arena for his Fixing Blocks, doughty steel structures with the large cast-iron nut and bolts attached. Trupp wanted to play with the space, using the structures as a visible means of binding the rooms together. He also lifted up the floorboards and placed a seperate sculpture in the cavity beneath, teasingly hidden from view. ‘It’s still there now’, he explains with amusement, ‘gathering dust and imprisoned by cobwebs’.

Richard Cork - Art Crtic (Times and Tate Galleries)

Size 150cm x 300cm x 25cm

“Richard has clearly absorbed the ethic of work, for he worked very hard, as if the sheer proximity of Brimingham’s industrial ambitions had become a legacy worn proudly as a second skin.

 Growing up surrounded by the relics of great industrialisation often induces a nostalgia for heavy industry; lost also is the invention and ambitoon that powered growth.  For Richard Trupp’s generation the liberation of ambition for invention has a real meaning and purpose.

 Re-inventing the heavy industrial dependency by a switch of scale in his Royal Society of British Sculptors installation allowed Richard to unsettle the cosy domestic scale of the RBS galleries with his huge fastenings plates and bolts.”

Hamish Black  - Sculptor

A simple but striking concept. The Massive cast iron bolt heads are attached to sheet steel and the surfaces have oxidised to a rich brown color allowing the viewer a close up experience of the untreated metal surface. This is a site specific piece. By bringing such large steel contructions, which one might otherwise only experience in the structure of a bridge or ship, into an indoor enviroment, the power and strenght of the steel, and specifically the bolt heads and their ability to hold together gigantic forces, become a tangible experience.

John Plowman - Sculptors Bible

Richard’s site specific work brought to attention the architecture and ornamental of the society’s 19^th Century aesthetic movement building. Using the space as his raw material, and his sculpture as a mechanism for fixing these blocks of space together, Trupp readjusted the fabric of the building. Floorboards were removed to reveal a conflict betwween real and imagined space, and huge nuts and bolts were used in contrast to the existing fixtures and fittings.

RBS Statement

“Trupps most recent ideas in relation to the way things join and get revealed are promising and original. The result is very stimulating for visitors”

Sir Anthony Caro

^{The ‘flat-pack’ of his studio at the Picker Gallery has all the wit and inventon of the RBS piece.}

 ^{It is this, physical sculpture encounter, the result of painstaking attention to the total, that marks Richard’s work as that of a fine sculptor.}

^{Hamish Black - Sculptor}

“Climaflex is an insulator that is mass-produced for domestic and industrial use intended to save energy.  I decided to turn this on its head and use the material to generate sculptural energy, which is continuously feeding itself, creating a journey of sculptural form.”

Richard Trupp

Size 300cm x 150cm x 50cm

Trupp always reacts powerfully to the sites at his disposal. At the moment, he is producing ‘a wedge’ for a space outside a gallery in Norwich, a permenant sculpture in cor ten steel, which ‘looks as if it is going into the building and lifting it up at an angle’. This dramatic intervention reflects his interest in Gordon Matta-Clark, who was prepared to use entire buildings as the vehicle for his art. Without seeking to mimic Matta-Calrk in any way. Trupp has learned from his pioneering example and believes that ‘the site feeds the practice, and I’m very responsive to architectural spaces in general.’

Richard Cork - Art Crtic (Times and Tate Galleries)

Size 100cm x 125cm x 30cm per wedge, 10 in total

Size 25cm x 25cm x 20cm

Trupp has also ventured into more contemporary realms. A brightly-painted red bronze balloon functions both as a realist work in its own right and as a witty play on the eponymous 1960s movement. Trupp also intends it as a comment on the fragility of life and the threat to our environment. Moreover, playing as it does with notions of scale, POP may yet be realised as a monumental outdoors piece, a respectful homage to Oldenburgh or what Trupp envisions as a contemporary sculptural exclamation mark within the landscape.

Tom Flynn - Art Critic

Size 40cm x 40cm

Size 40cm x 40cm

Size 40cm x 40cm

Size 210cm x 210cm x 150cm

His most recent work is an ambitious piece entitled ‘Anticipating Mars’, it draws on what Trupp sees a primal connection between the discipline of sculpture and the process of ‘vulcanisation’ the curing of rubber through the application of heat, discovered by Charles Goodyear in 1859 and named after the Roman god Vulcan.

Inspired by Vulcanation skill in forging richly ornamented armour for Mars, the god of war, and jewellery for Venus, Trupp’s forged rubber pieces are decorated with classical ornament, evoking fragments of ancient Roman armour. But they also work as a visual pun on the shared attributes of rubber and bronze.

Tom Flynn - Art Critic

Size 210cm x 210cm x 150cm

Size 210cm x 210cm x 150cm