William Kenneth Armitage was born on 18 July 1916 at Leeds. Foxy Walker, one of Armitage’s schoolteachers persuaded his mother to let him take up the arts, for which Armitage remained ever thankful. He studied at Leeds College of Art (1934-37) and won a scholarship to study at the Slade (1937-39). During the Second World War, Armitage served in the Royal Artillery. In 1940 he married Joan Moore. In 1946 he was appointed Head of Sculpture at the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham in Wiltshire, a post he held for ten years. Bronze casting had been in severe decline there because of the austerity of the post-war years and he was instrumental in a foundry being built, so that work by students and staff could be cast. Armitage’s earliest works were carved in stone, but in the post-war years, he began casting in bronze, initially using plaster modelled on metal armatures, later using clay. Armitage first attracted international attention as one of a group of young British sculptors, including Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, who showed at the XXVI Venice Biennale in 1952 and whose work signalled a new, anti-monumental, Expressionist approach. Armitage’s preoccupation was with the human figure, combined with an interest in vertical and horizontal structure. He created small-scale figures, full of droll humour, with broad, flattened bodies, pinheads and sprouting, stick-like limbs. The hieratic, frieze-like aspect of his work was also developed in such sculptures as Diarchy (1957; Tate). His first solo shows were held at Gimpel Fils, London (1952) and the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York (1954). The originality of Armitage’s work was particularly appreciated in his major bronze groups. The earliest of these dated from his time teaching at Corsham – Linked Figures (1949) and People in the Wind (1950, the most famous of his pieces, both at maquette size and later in a larger form). The series of groups continued with Friends Walking (1952), Children Playing (1953) and Diarchy and Triarchy (1957-60) By the 1960s he had begun working with wax, resin and aluminium; later he became interested in the combination of drawing and sculpture, experimenting with photographic, drawn and printed images of figures on three-dimensional surfaces. In 1955-57 he began working in clay, and in the 1960s employed wax, resins and aluminium, and his pieces became darker in mood and more abstract. In 1956 Armitage was awarded the first prize in the International War Memorial Competition in Krefeld, Germany, and at the 1958 Venice Biennale, he won the David E Bright Foundation Award. In 1964, he has held posts at the University of Caracas, Venezuela, at Boston University and from 1974 to 1979 he was visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art. From the early 1950s, exhibitions of his work could be seen in the United States, Europe, Japan and South America, with group exhibitions ranging even wider. Three retrospective exhibitions held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1959), Artcurial, Paris (1985) and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (1996-97) summarised Armitage’s passion for the human form and human condition, movement and trees. His inclination as an artist was always towards abstraction and simplification of form, with bronze as his preferred medium. Armitage would say: ‘Naturally my sculpture contains ideas or experiences other than those that derive directly from observation of the human image. Nevertheless, it is always dressed in some degree in human form.’ It has been observed that parallel themes occur in his drawings and prints. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he made a series of disembodied limbs and ‘furniture-figures’. He also experimented with drawn, screen-printed and photographic figural images on three-dimensional surfaces (e.g. Folding Screen, 1972; University of Nottingham Art Gallery). Between 1975 and 1986 he moved from the figure to nature in his series of sculptures and drawings of oak trees in Richmond Park, London. Armitage was awarded the CBE in 1969. His sculpture Both Arms may be seen in Millennium Square in his hometown of Leeds. Armitage died on 22 January 2002. His work is represented in public and private collections world-wide. At the Slade, the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Prize of £1,000 is awarded to a Slade student periodically by the Kenneth Armitage Foundation for achievement in sculpture. It available to a graduating sculpture student, or a graduate sculpture student.