Richard Wentworth, 1947

Born in 1947 in Samoa, Richard Wentworth attended Hornsey College of Art starting in 1965 and worked with Henry Moore as an assistant in 1967. He was awarded an MA in 1970 from the Royal College of Art in London and went on to teach at Goldsmiths College, where he remained until 1987, becoming one of the most influential British art teachers of the contemporary era.

Wentworth has played a leading role in the New British Sculpture movement since the late 1970s. By transforming and manipulating industrial or found objects into works of art, he subverts their original function and extends our understanding of them by breaking conventional systems of classification. Every object that is disregarded in the ordinary course of daily life may undergo transformation through Wentworth’s perspective. By making objects part of another whole, the artist brings a different approach to classical sculpture and thus leads the viewer to reevaluate the purpose of an object’s existence.

A version of “False Ceiling” was shown in its original form as part of the 4th International Istanbul Biennial in 1995. The present work is a later, site-specific version. Wentworth uses books from Eastern and Western cultures to reference both their origins and the Duchampian idea of the readymade. The exact arrangement of the books plays with ideas of cultural closeness and distance. The title of the work and the horizontal positioning of the books that stretch away above us question the extent to which the authority of the printed word is being eroded. No one can reach or easily open the books, creating a barrier that effectively nullifies any knowledge they contain. In this work, books—repositories of truth, knowledge, and lies—are little more than permeable, seductive, and symbolic surface.