Elizabeth King combines figurative sculpture with stop-frame animation in works that blur the boundary between actual and virtual objects. Intimate in scale and made to solicit close looking, her work reflects her interest in the history of the puppet, the automaton, the medical model, and literature’s host of legends in which the artificial figure comes to life. She asks, “What is the figure in sculpture now? The representation of the body and its life: can I absorb the news from biotechnology and cognitive science but keep art’s ancient pact with theater?”
Awards for King’s work include a 2014 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a 2006 Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 1996-97 Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was Artist-in-Residence at Dartmouth College in the spring of 2008, and was among artists in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2017.
King taught in the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University from 1985 to 2015. A documentary film about her work, by Olympia Stone, was released in 2018: Double Take: The Art of Elizabeth King.
