Photograph copyright The Sculpture of Reg Butler, 2006

British sculptor. Butler worked as an architect then also as an engineer and blacksmith, before turning to sculpture in 1944. He had his first solo exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1949, and in 1952 his work was included in a group show of new British sculpture at the Venice Biennale. In 1953 he won the first prize in a London international competition for a monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner. The model, a vertical structure of welded rods with three little cast figures at its base, should have, but never did, become a vast construction, possibly on the cliffs of Dover. Butler at this time made sculpture combining welded elements with modelled figures, but subsequently her celebrated his fascination with the female figure in his plastic sculptures that seem vividly naturalistic in form and colouring yet reveal themselves as explorations of distortion and exaggeration.