17 Jan – 14 Feb 2026
Join us for our Meet the Artist event on Saturday, 7 Feb 2026, 12 pm – 3 pm
A fantastic opportunityto meet Bob Catchpole and learn more about his practice.
Bob Catchpole has spent a considerable period of his life making sculpture and teaching. Born in Norwich, he returned to Norfolk in 1985 to establish his first studio in North Walsham, where he remains.
He has always enjoyed the tension in sculpture between the idea and the technique, and has developed his skills as a maker in response to the demands of his ideas. He has always felt himself to be a constructor by nature, even when some components of the work were carved. For long periods, he used welded steel as his favourite medium, with David Smith as a major influence, before turning to wood and found objects. Surrealism occupied a large part of his sculpture at this time.
His travels in Italy have hugely influenced his current sculpture. He has become fascinated with early Italian frescoes, particularly those of the 12thcentury, pre-High Gothic, and has used them as starting points for the abstraction and transcription of various images, particularly those of heads. The graphic freedom those anonymous artists display has profoundly affected his work. The fresco museum and the lower church of San Fermo in Verona are where he has found most inspiration. He responded strongly to the Philip Guston exhibition at the Tate recently and has incorporated Guston’s approach to abstraction in his Italian works. He has also introduced colour into his work (something unheard of before), probably as a result of the influence of his renewed friendship with Derek Morris.
Recently, he has returned to steel work, employing the freedom that welding gives in order to examine that wonderful graphic quality of the frescoes but also to exploit its structural strength. However, he also now combines it with wood, sometimes painted, in order to allow him more freedom in balancing the compositions, moving again towards the ‘head’ as subject matter.
