John Buckley (born 1945 in Leeds, England) [1] is an English sculptor whose best known work is the sculpture "Untitled 1986", better known as "the Shark House" or "The Headington Shark" in Headington, a suburb of Oxford.
Buckley went to sculpture classes in the evenings when studying for his O-levels in a technical college. He went on to Winchester School of Art and Leicester College of Art.
In 1976, his friend Bill Heine invited Buckley to design the sculptural fixtures on the Penultimate Picture Palace. [2] For the facade Buckley chose a dramatic figure reminiscent of Al Jolson with outstretched hands. [3] Mae West's lips were the inspiration for the cinema's door handles and, somewhat later Buckley would erect a male and a female figure above the toilet entrances, whimsically named Pearl and Dean.
In 1978, a work of his (Pagliaccio) was exhibited by Nicholas Treadwell at the Washington Art Fair, [4] and he stayed with Treadwell for some time thereafter. [1]
The "Headington Shark" was erected on the 41st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Made of fibreglass on the farm near Wallingford, Oxfordshire where he was based, the shark itself weighs 203 kilograms and is 25 feet long. Buckley regards it as an integral part of "Untitled 1986" or "Shark House", a work of "Mixed Media, Brick, slates, wood, metal, polyester resin, glass, plaster, oil paint, lace curtaining and window boxes……." [5]
In the village of Checkendon in South Oxfordshire is his public work 'The Nuba Survival' which features two giant skeletons embracing each other. [6] The piece was created in 2001 after he visited the Nuba peoples in Sudan. [7]
John Buckley is a patron of MAG (Mines Advisory Group), [8] a neutral and impartial humanitarian organisation.
Bill Heine was an American-born British radio broadcaster and writer based in Oxford, England.
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism. In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. He is generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism", and its most important theoretician through such writings as "Specific Objects" (1964). Judd voiced his unorthodox perception of minimalism in Arts Yearbook 8, where he says, "The new three dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school, or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement. The differences are greater than the similarities."
The Headington Shark is a rooftop sculpture located at 2 New High Street, Headington, Oxford, England, depicting a large shark embedded head-first in the roof of a house. It was protest art, put up without permission, to be symbolic of bombs crashing into buildings.
Events from the year 1986 in art.
Headington is an eastern suburb of Oxford, England. It is at the top of Headington Hill overlooking the city in the Thames valley below, and bordering Marston to the north-west, Cowley to the south, and Barton and Risinghurst to the east. The life of the large residential area is centred upon London Road, the main road between London and Oxford.
Checkendon is a village and civil parish about 6 miles (10 km) west of Henley-on-Thames in South Oxfordshire and about 9 miles (14 km) north west of Reading in Berkshire on a mid-height swathe of the Chilterns.
Eric Fischl is an American painter, sculptor, printmaker, draughtsman and educator. He is known for his paintings depicting American suburbia from the 1970s and 1980s.
Sadanand Bakre was an Indian painter and sculptor.
Oscar Mellor was an English surrealist artist and photographer. An associate of the Birmingham Surrealists in the 1940s, he founded the Fantasy Press after his move to Oxford in 1948, publishing works by university poets who emerged into prominence during the 1960s. Although best remembered for the latter, he saw himself primarily as an artist whose business activities existed to support his painting.
Oscar Nemon was a Croatian sculptor who was born in Osijek, Croatia, but eventually settled in England. He is best known for his series of more than a dozen public statues of Sir Winston Churchill.
The Bayreuth canon consists of those operas by the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) that have been performed at the Bayreuth Festival. The festival, which is dedicated to the staging of these works, was founded by Wagner in 1876 in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, and has continued under the directorship of his family since his death. Although it was not originally held annually, it has taken place in July and August every year since the 75th anniversary season in 1951. Its venue is the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which was built for the first festival. Attendance at the festival is often thought of as a pilgrimage made by Wagner aficionados.
Nicholas Stone was an English sculptor and architect. In 1619 he was appointed master-mason to James I, and in 1626 to Charles I.
Exlade Street is a hamlet in Checkendon civil parish in Oxfordshire, about 6 miles (9.7 km) northwest of Reading, in the Chiltern Hills. The hamlet is about 445 feet (136 m) above sea level.
Nicholas Treadwell owns the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, which started in 1963 in touring vehicles, after which it was run in buildings in London, Bradford and finally Austria. Treadwell has promoted the Superhumanism art movement, which is defined as an art of urban living, conveyed in a vivid and accessible way. At times, his shows have evoked strong reactions for their provocative content. Since 2016 Treadwell has lived and worked as a gallerist in Vienna's Wieden district.
The Ultimate Picture Palace is an independent cinema in Oxford, England. It is Oxford's only surviving independent cinema, showing a mixture of independent, mainstream, foreign language, and classic films.
John Gibbs was a British Gothic Revival architect based in Wigan, Manchester, and Oxford, England.
Modern sculpture is generally considered to have begun with the work of Auguste Rodin, who is seen as the progenitor of modern sculpture. While Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past, he created a new way of building his works. He "dissolved the hard outline of contemporary Neo-Greek academicism, and thereby created a vital synthesis of opacity and transparency, volume and void". Along with a few other artists in the late 19th century who experimented with new artistic visions in sculpture like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Rodin invented a radical new approach in the creation of sculpture. Modern sculpture, along with all modern art, "arose as part of Western society's attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged during the nineteenth century".
Fred Lionel Orton is an English art historian. His initial training was at Coventry College of Art in painting as a Dip.A,D student. He extended his experience in the History and Development of Art initially at the Courtauld Institute in London and then professionally as a scholar of art history and art theory at the University of Leeds.
Thomas Basset, called Thomas Basset of Headington or Thomas Basset of Colinton, was an Anglo-Norman lord and royal counsellor to King John of England.