William Turnbull’s large-scale collage of a high wire act at
a circus is the largest and most ambitious of the four known works on paper that
he made of this subject. As with the others it is an abstraction that
nevertheless retains traces of a circus tent and a performer on a monocycle
holding a parasol as part of a high wire act. The subject would also inspire
one of Turnbull’s major early sculptures, Acrobat of 1951.

The work dates from a seminal moment when Turnbull was
finding his voice inspired by his friendships with Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel
Henderson and the time that he spent in France where he got to meet Brancusi,
Leger and Helion. The use of collage suggests the influence of Picasso’s cubist
papier-collés, rather than surrealist collage, whilst the all-over movement
echoes the phenomenological watercolours of Paul Klee who had been the subject
of a solo show at the National Gallery in London in 1945-46.

It has an impeccable provenance coming from the collection
of his friend and fellow artist, Nigel Henderson.