George Wyllie (1921-2012)

Born in Glasgow in 1921, George Wyllie trained as an engineer with the Post Office before serving in the Royal Navy from 1942 to 1946. He was a Customs and Excise Officer for thirty years before becoming a full-time artist in his late fifties, pioneering socially engaged artwork such as the Straw Locomotive (1987), which hung over an empty Clyde as a requiem for Glasgow’s engineering prowess; and the Paper Boat (1989), a reminder that over two fifths of the world’s merchant ships were launched in The Clyde in the early 1900s.

Many of George’s major works have become more prescient over time. The aforementioned Straw Locomotive and Paper Boat communicated the hole left in communities after industry was ripped from them in the 1980s. He also built sculptures that depict a home buckling under the pressure of its over burdened mortgage, and his play A Day Down A Goldmine – performed at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre and Tramway, The Whitworth, and the ICA and starring alongside George at various times, Russell Hunter, Bill Paterson and John Bett. ADDAG chronicled the origins of the modern banking system and its inherent inequalities.

George’s sense of social justice and equality was formed, in no small part, by his experiences as a younger man and were compounded by Wyllie’s experiences during the Second World War; serving in the Royal Navy George was one of the first foreign nationals to visit Hiroshima shortly after America dropped the atomic bomb.

By the late 1970s George had retired as a customs and excise worker in order to focus entirely on art. A friendship with gallerist Ricky Demarco led to horizon expanding meetings with other artists and creative figures including Joseph Beuys and George Rickey whose influence can be clearly seen in a range of Wyllie’s later works, including his series of outdoor Equilibrium Spires: wire sculptures which he placed in various locations, ranging from the remote Gruinard Island in the Inner Hebrides to the Berlin Reichstag.

It was during this time that George met Barbara Grigor, the chair of The Scottish Sculpture Trust, and her husband filmmaker Murray Grigor – who went on to make the influential film The Wh?sman about Wyllie and his work. Their ongoing influence and support was hugely important for George as his career as an artist progressed: Find out more at Georgewyllie.com