The Scottish sculptor William Turnbull showed an interest in art from an early age. Although forced to leave school at the age of fifteen in order to find work and support his family, he enrolled in an evening drawing glass at Dundee University. Through several jobs in the media he learned about commercial illustration and was introduced to contemporary European art. After having served in the Royal Air Force during WWII, he enrolled at The Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he soon abandoned painting and turned to sculpture. Here, he met Eduardo Paolozzi, who became a close friend and shared Turnbull’s interest in contemporary art. After a few months of living in Paris, where he met a number of fellow artists and attended parties with the Surrealists, in 1948 he settled in London where he spent the rest of his life. His works were included in the seminal exhibition New Aspects of British Sculpture at the 1952 Venice Biennale, a starting point of Turnbull’s wider international acclaim. He had two retrospective exhibitions in London, in 1973 and 1995.

In the mid-1950s, Turnbull created his first sculpture composed of two elements balanced on one another, a motif that would frequently recur through the rest of his career. According to an interview given in 1998, the artist explained that he created the ‘egg shape’ first, and then decided to elevate it to a column-like form. He used pieces of corrugated card to achieve vertical impressions on the tall element, inspired by the lightness of fluted classical Greek columns. Finding his inspiration in Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty, Turnbull takes the image to its ultimate abstract form, bringing the opposing forces — the vertical of the human body and the horizontal of the earth — into a fine, delicate balance.