Phillip King

Phillip King was born on 1 May 1934 in Tunis, Tunisia, to a French mother and an English father, and moved to England in 1946. He studied modern languages at Christ's College, University of Cambridge, from 1954 to 1957, then turned to sculpture at Saint Martin's School of Art in London from 1957 to 1958, where he studied under Anthony Caro and briefly worked as an assistant to Henry Moore.

King rose to prominence with the group of sculptors later termed the "New Generation," shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1964, and included two years later in "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum in New York, a landmark survey of minimal and geometric sculpture. In 1968 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale alongside the painter Bridget Riley, the same year the Whitechapel Art Gallery mounted his first retrospective. A further retrospective followed at the Hayward Gallery in 1981, and Tate Britain presented a career survey in 2014.

King's institutional role grew alongside his exhibition record. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1977 and a full Royal Academician in 1988, served as Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools from 1989 to 1999, and then served as President of the Royal Academy of Arts from 1999 to 2004. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1974 and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 2012. He continued to exhibit into his final years, with shows at Galerie Ceysson et Benetiere and Thomas Dane Gallery. King died on 27 July 2021 in London at the age of 87; his death was announced by Thomas Dane Gallery, which represented him.

King's early work, made with fiberglass and plastic in flat planes of strong color, was read at the time as a decisive break from the material language of Moore and Caro's generation, and helped define the "New Generation" sensibility of 1960s British sculpture. His inclusion in "Primary Structures" in New York in 1966 placed him within the broader international conversation around minimal and geometric form. Later writing, including ArtReview's 2021 obituary describing him as an artist who "revolutionised British sculpture," has continued to treat him as a pivotal transitional figure between the modernist sculpture of Moore and Caro and the more materially experimental British sculpture that followed.

King's auction record is Genghis Khan, which sold for GBP 127,875 at Christie's London on 11 July 2013, a result Christie's itself flagged as a world record price for the artist at auction. No later sale has been confirmed to exceed that figure through the present. His secondary market is small and concentrated in the United Kingdom, and public sale results remain infrequent relative to the scale of his museum presence, so any single result should be read in that context rather than as evidence of a deep or liquid trading market.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Phillip King, and his estate's market is currently handled through Thomas Dane Gallery and Galerie Ceysson et Benetiere, which continue to mount solo and collaborative exhibitions of his work. Provenance and gallery or estate verification matter more than usual here because the number of public auction results is small, which means the recorded price history offers limited guidance on typical market value. His museum presence, spanning Tate, MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, and institutions across Europe, Japan, and Australia, is the clearest and most durable signal of his historical standing.