Cathie Pilkington (b. 1968, UK) is a London-based artist whose work engages passionately and critically with the canonical history of figurative sculpture. Crossing the borders of traditional, modern and contemporary idioms, her work combines intensively modelled and painted sculptures within immersive installations comprising a diverse array of props, materials and studio furniture. Her site-responsive installations are balanced ambivalently between chaos and precision and have been described as a kind of art historical fly-tipping.
She studied at Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland (1986-91) and the Royal College of Art, London, UK (1995-97). She was elected a Royal Academician in 2014 and became the first female professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools in London, UK (2016-2019). In 2020, she was elected Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools. Her work is held in the collections of Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland; Ömer Koç Collection, Istanbul, Turkey; and the Roberts Institute of Art, London, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Weird Horses’ Karsten Schubert, London, UK (2023); ‘Estin Thalassa’, Karsten Schubert, London, UK (2021); ‘The Covering’, Karsten Schubert, London, UK (2019); ‘Working from Home’, Pallant House Gallery, Chicester, UK (2019) and ‘Life Room: Working from Home’, Dorich House Museum, Kingston, UK (2018); ‘Doll for Petra’, Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, Ditchling, UK (2017); ‘Anatomy of a Doll’, Royal Academy Schools Life Room, London, UK (2017); ‘Life Room’, Brighton University Galleries, Brighton Festival, Brighton, UK (2017); and ‘The Value of the Paw’, V&A Museum of Childhood, London, UK (2012). Recent site-responsive interventions include: ‘The Ancestors’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2020); and ‘The Covering: Cathie Pilkington, Pierre Molinier and Morton Bartlett’, Karsten Schubert, London, UK (2020).