Richard Deacon is a contemporary Welsh artist known for his writhing abstract drawings and sculptures. Working with a variety of materials, including steel, wood, ceramic, vinyl, and foam, Deacon’s Laocoon (1996), exemplifies his interest in the process of fabricating shapes. “I think it’s difficult to distinguish form from the imaginative ways one constructs form, so I think when it’s successful the material is present, the form is present, the structure is present, the associations are present, and the sense of meaning—or the possibility of meaning—is also present,” he has explained. Born on August 15, 1949 in Bangor, United Kingdom, Deacon studied at a number of schools, including the Somerset College...