Gillian White

Gillian White, born 1939 in Orpington, Kent, has gained wide recognition for her work of monumental steel sculptures, the majority of them located in public spaces in Switzerland. White was educated first as a dancer at the Elmhurst School for Dance 1949-55 and later as a visual artist at the St Martin School of Arts (1956-60) and the Central School of Arts and Crafts (1959) in London, and at summer courses with Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg and at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris. She has been living and working in Switzerland since 1972. Her oeuvre consist mainly of large-size sculptures in steel, but also of smaller works in various materials, murals and mosaics. Although White's contribution to contemporary sculpture is strong and highly individual, this rich oeuvre has hardly been documented so far. "Gillian White. Dance in Steel" fills this gap and presents her work in a large number of images, mostly in colour. The focus is on her monumental sculptures in public spaces and the art-in-architecture works, but her paintings and the small sculptures, playful and precisely composed, are shown as well. Essays by expert authors and personal texts by writers and artist friends of White complement the images.