Quill at the old location in the Zuiderpark, photo Vincent Mentzel
Placing Quill at the Parklaan, November 2003
draft original setting
Parklaan, 2006, photo Pieter Vandermeer
The Artwork
Quill was initially located in the Zuiderpark, where it was soon used by children as a climbing frame. Unfortunately, the sculpture could not withstand that. Moreover, as the surroundings became more and more wild, the work disappeared from view. It then stood in the wide median of the stately Parklaan, to which some residents objected. The wandering of the quill through Rotterdam came to an end with the reinstallation of the sculpture in the Zuiderpark in 2009.
With a group of young sculptors in the 1960s, Philip King set himself apart from the grand old man of British sculpture: instead of the stylized life forms of Henry Moore (his work Wall Relief No. 1 on Weena is part of SIR’s collection), he wanted pure abstraction with brightly colored geometric forms. But where his peers opted for coarse industrial materials, his work became more playful and graceful. The cone was a predominant element in his earlier work, but after showing his work in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1968, he began to create more open structures with flowing lines. Quill is a good example of this. Like all of King’s sculptures, it has no pedestal: the forms seem to rise directly from the earth.
