Home
Contemporary British Sculptor
Jonathan Kenworthy FRSBS
From his first solo exhibition in Mayfair in 1969 Movement and Wildlife in Africa to the present day Kenworthy has been the master of movement in sculpture. Now in his eighties he still works at his studio home in the Surrey Hills.
Born in 1943, he went to the Royal College of Art in 1954. Later the Royal Academy Schools, leaving in 1964 with the lion’s share of prizes and scholarships, including the Royal Academy gold medal, at the tender age of 21.
In 1965 Aylmer Tryon sold the young sculptor’s polished black life-size carving of a Stalking Leopard to the Mellon collection for the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. The BBC first aired a one-hour programme on World About Us called Kenworthy’s Kenya in May 1976. It followed the artist on safari, in his studio and at the opening night of his last exhibition at the Tryon Gallery in Mayfair, which included his Cheetah Hunting Series.
In 1979 the Coe Kerr Gallery welcomed Kenworthy collectors to their upper east side gallery in New York. This exhibition, Horsemen of the Hindu Kush, of sculptures and drawings was the result of his travels in Afghanistan two years earlier. The Coe Kerr Gallery had two further sell-out exhibitions of the sculptor’s work with People of the Desert : Nomads of East Africa in 1985 and Survival in the Serengeti in 1991.
Jonathan Kenworthy spent the next seven years working on the Lioness and Lesser Kudu for the Grosvenor Estate. In 2000, Derek Johns Fine Art exhibited drawings and sculpture in their West End gallery. This was the same year that the Lioness and Lesser Kudu was unveiled by the Duke of Westminster at Upper Grosvenor Gardens, London.
In 2002 he had an exhibition entitled Rhythms of Life with Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, which drew together subjects as varied as Afghani Women out Walking in Kabul, Yesterday’s Gods – a sculpture of Horus at Edfu, a Kuchi couple riding to Jalalabad, a Dinka with a pipe, a Turkana father and sons, stretching and yawning tigers from Nepal and a French wine connoisseur.
In 2013 the Pangolin Gallery London held a retrospective exhibition – Jonathan Kenworthy Six Decades of Sculpture – where new and old sculptures spanning a long career were shown. Kenworthy continues to cast his bronzes with Pangolin Editions in Stroud and has a long, happy association with the Peter Stremmel Gallery in Reno. He still draws and sculpts every day when not travelling and is involved with an exciting new project which remains under wraps for now.