RICHARD JOHN FORBES: PRAXIS
PUBLISHERS
Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture /
University of Johannesburg Press
YEAR 2025
PLACE Johannesburg
EDITOR Sven Christian
CONTRIBUTORS
Sven Christian, Richard John Forbes, Ashraf Jamal, Sean O’Toole, Chloë Reid
DESIGN Norgard Luftensteiner
COVER Hardcover
PAGES 199
ISBN 978-0-7961-4095-1
SUPPORT The Claire & Edoardo Villa WIll Trust
This publication includes three interviews with editor Sven Christian, and three essays by Sean O'Toole, Chloë Reid, and Ashraf Jamal. Each focus on a different aspect of Forbes's work. In O’Toole's essay we learn about Forbes's work in rose quartz, showcasing the artist's 'understanding of moderation as a necessary gesture in sculpture.’ Jamal's essay, in turn, focuses on Forbes's Shy Restrained Pink Thing (ongoing) and Black Room (2020). Sometimes inflated, sometimes deflated, the former is described as an ‘anthropomorphised intimate’ that makes evident the ‘wear and tear’ of life through a ‘choreography of movement and stillness, liberation and abduction’. Reid's essay, "The many revolutions of Richard John Forbes", reflects on his largescale installation Synaesthesia of Water (2019), his Vortex series and his spinning-top workshops and prints, produced in collaboration with participants around the world, where ‘minor imbalances and asymmetries in the tops, in the techniques or gestures of the participant, in the plate itself, and on the surface beneath, contribute to a field of spiralling marks, each infinitely unique.’