Peter Thursby

(1930-2011)

Former president of the Royal West of England Academy
 

Peter Thursby  had a 50-year career, the Exeter based sculptor Peter Thursby fashioned abstracted forms in bronze, aluminium and latterly stainless steel .  
He was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire in 1930, the only child of an army officer, Thursby studied under Ted Atkinson at Exeter College of Art during the late 1950s before qualifying as a teacher in Ernest Pascoe's sculpture department at the West of England College of Art, Bristol in 1961.During these early years, Thursby exhibited  in annual displays with the Salisbury Group, a Devon Festival show at the Exeter Museum and Art Gallery and a prestigious Young Contemporaries art-student exhibition at RBA Galleries, London (1957). In 1956 he made an auspicious debut at the Royal West of England Academy Autumn Show, Bristol and in 1972 acted as chair of the local Exeter Kenn Group, where he exhibited work alongside that of Exeter art lecturers including Fishwick, Mike Garton and Alan Richards.
A commission from architect William Harvey led to Mural 1 (1966), a jagged though rhythmic concrete relief for the exterior of Sun Life Assurance, Croydon which revealed Thursby's continuing architectural interests. Large outdoor commissions would follow throughout the 1970s and beyond: Looking Forward (1977), celebrating the Silver Jubilee, was placed in Guildhall Square, Exeter; High Levels (1988) was displayed outside McDonald's East Finchley headquarters in London; and Jubilee (1980), was made for a corporate Texan client in Dallas.
In later years, limited by age and opportunity, Thursby produced stainless-steel pieces akin to architectural models or "towers". Among these were the Sarum sculptures of the millennium period which celebrated the great cathedral spire of his Salisbury birthplace. These, appropriately, were displayed in a 2003 solo show at Salisbury museum.