Nicholas Pope Biography

Nicholas Pope was born in 1949 in Australia. He studied art at the Bath Academy of Art in the early 1970s before being granted a Romanian Government Exchange Scholarship in 1974. During this period Pope relied on chalk and other natural materials since they were cheap.

His most important early shows included his solo exhibition at the Garage Gallery (1976), his exhibition at the Anthony Stokes Gallery (1979), and Three stone slabs and other sculptures at the Art & Project Gallery in Amsterdam (1979). Pope’s professional success was validated by the decision that he represent Britain at the 39th Venice Biennale.

Pope’s work from the 1970s has a powerful abstract quality that is softened by his use of natural materials, chalk and wood. This tension prevents him from being defined as either a modernist abstract sculptor with ties to Anthony Caro and the St. Martin’s School of Art, or a conceptual sculptor in the tradition of assemblage, land art, and performance.

In 1981, he traveled to Zimbabwe as a British Council Cultural Visitor. While in Africa, Pope also made a trip to Tanzania where he studied with the Makonde carvers before he contracted an encephalitic virus. The virus was severely debilitating and hindered him from working for a significant period.

Though his practice revived in the early to mid 1980s, in 1987 Pope voluntarily withdrew from the art world and abandoned his studio work. This period of inactivity continued until 1992, at which point he began producing naïve looking clay works, like Ten Commandment Pots (1992).

Religion and Christianity became a strong theme after his hiatus and continues to inform his work today. Pope’s important contribution to the Artnow exhibition series at the Tate Gallery in 1997, for example, was ‘The Apostles Speaking in Tongues.’ This work featured thirty-three figures; 12 apostles and twenty-one other figures to represent the ‘multitudes’. The apostle figures had open flames on their heads to represent the Holy Spirit, through which they were able to speak in tongues.

In 1981 the Rijksmuseum Kroller Muller in Holland mounted a retrospective of Pope’s career. Pope now lives and works in Herefordshire.