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Robert Adams (5 October 1917, Far Cotton, Northampton, England – 5 April 1984 Great Maplestead), was a sculptor and designer.[1] From about 1930 -1950 he lived in Hardingstone then a village about four miles outside Northampton.
Education and early life
He left school at 14 and did manual work, some in the engineering industry[2] which may have proved useful in his later artistic creations.
From 1937-1946 he attended evening classes part-time in life drawing and painting at the Northampton School of Art.
Career
Some of his first sculptures were exhibited in London between 1942 and 1944 as part of group shows by artists working for Civil Defence.
In April 1946 he exhibited fourteen of his early oil portraits in the Northampton Public Library.
Between 23rd November 1947 and 3rd January 1948, he held his first one-man exhibition at Gimpel Fils Gallery, 84 Duke Street, London.
From 1949-60 he taught at the Central School of Art and Design and between 1950-80 he was one of Britain's foremost abstract sculptors.
Some of his works are in the Tate Britain collection and the modern art in New York, Rome, and Turin, the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art and several other locations worldwide but he is virtually unknown in his home town. Apocalyptic Figure[3] was commissioned by the Arts Council England for the Festival of Britain in 1951. Some of his large-scale sculptures can be seen at The Custom House, London, Heathrow Airport, and Shell Mex House, London[2].
He had a retrospective at the Northampton Art Gallery in 1971[4].