Richard Deacon

Richard Deacon was born on 15 August 1949 in Bangor, Wales. He studied at Somerset College of Art in Taunton from 1968 to 1969, then at St Martin's School of Art in London from 1969 to 1972, where gallery sources credit him with a BA. He went on to the Royal College of Art, London, from 1974 to 1977, earning an MA in Environmental Media. He followed this with part time study in art history and philosophy at Chelsea School of Art, London, around 1977 to 1978.

Deacon's sculptures are built from materials such as laminated wood, welded steel, ceramic, vinyl, and leather, worked into large, biomorphic, often curving forms that sit between abstraction and architecture. He participated in Skulptur Projekte Munster in 1987 and documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992, both markers of his early international standing. He won the Turner Prize in 1987, and was elected a Royal Academician in 1998 and made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1999. In 2007 he represented Wales at the Venice Biennale, and in 2010 he was elected a member of the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin. Tate Britain mounted a major retrospective of his work in 2014, and in 2017 the San Diego Museum of Art presented a major survey of his work in the United States, titled What You See Is What You Get. He continues to live and work in London.

Deacon's 2014 retrospective at Tate Britain received substantial critical attention, including coverage in The Guardian. Critical attention has consistently focused on his treatment of industrial and everyday materials, laminated wood, steel, vinyl, and ceramic, bent and built into forms that suggest bodies, vessels, or architecture without resolving into any single reading. His inclusion in documenta 9 and Skulptur Projekte Munster in the late 1980s and early 1990s placed him early within a European conversation about sculpture and public space, a standing later reaffirmed by his 2014 Tate Britain retrospective and his 2017 San Diego Museum of Art survey, a major U.S. museum presentation of his work.

Richard Deacon's market operates primarily through long-standing gallery relationships, notably Lisson Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Galerie Thomas Schulte, and L.A. Louver, rather than through a high volume of headline auction results. As of this profile's data date, no all-time public auction record for a solo work by Deacon could be independently confirmed with a verified title, price, currency, house, and sale date across available sources. Collectors should treat any auction-price figures circulating for this artist as unverified until confirmed against a primary auction house record.

Deacon's market is anchored far more by institutional standing than by auction visibility: he holds Turner Prize recognition, Royal Academician status, and works in museum collections spanning Tate, the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, SFMOMA, the Hirshhorn, and others, but public auction data for his work is thin and, at the time of this profile, does not yield a clearly confirmed all-time record price. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through his representing galleries matter more than usual. His program remains active, with a 2026 solo exhibition at Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin and a 2022 to 2023 solo show at Lisson Gallery in London, both signs of continued primary-market and institutional engagement.