Two Last Songs (Season Song) (2013)

Tony Carter

precision-engineered tuning forks, one bronze, one steel, mounted in case with removable lid with clasps and bespoke shelf for display

The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds

Classification:

Sculpture

Materials:

Bronze tuning fork, Steel tuning fork, Steel, Bronze

Physical Object Description:

This piece is a re-working by the artist of his artwork 'Season Song' (1977–1978). The new title for the artwork was chosen with his wife Wendy Smith, inspired by Richard Strauss's 'Four Last Songs', as Carter felt that the artwork was now in its final form. The connection to Strauss was not in the original work or its title. Underside of box, taped sticker: TURN OTHER WAY TO OPEN.

Dimensions:

28 (length) cm

Accession Number:

LEEUA 2017.041

Credit:

Gifted by Wendy Smith, the artist's widow, through the Contemporary Art Society, 2017/18

Scheme:

Tony Carter Bequest (2018)

Ownership history:

Gifted by Wendy Smith, widow of the artist, Tony Carter (1943-2016), through the Contemporary Art Society, 2017; presented to The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University Library, University of Leeds, 2018

Relationship:

Tony Carter The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds Wendy Smith

Throughout 2017 the CAS were privileged to work with Tony Carter's widow, the artist Wendy Smith, to find museum homes for some of the extraordinary sculptures that he left behind in his studio, after his death in 2016. In the course of meeting with museum curators from across the country, Wendy gained an understanding of the widespread appreciation of her late husband’s work, and herself deepened the appreciation of his practice through many long conversations.

Tony Carter first gained recognition for his work in the early 1980s, and was included in the exhibition British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century that Nicholas Serota curated when director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981, as well as the important 1986 Hayward annual exhibition Falls the Shadow, where he was included alongside artists such as Jannis Kounellis and Barry Flanagan.

Tony Carter described himself as ‘a still life artist of an unconventional kind’, bringing together everyday objects which were transformed through the elegant and precise way in which he assembled them. Carter’s sculpture is characterised by an intense sensitivity to the symbolic and metaphorical power of objects. Writing about his own work in 2015 Carter said: ‘Objects fascinate me, not because they stimulate the urge to possess but because of their capacity to reflect aspects of our sensory and psychological condition. My work typically incorporates “found objects” and aims to represent the ways they exist within an extended context of associations. Some of these are obvious and others less direct but all are projections of the human mind and psyche. In this respect they dispel the idea of “innocence”, be it that of the “observer” or the “observed”.’

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