Sculptor born in Heston, Middlesex. He studied at Brighton College of Art under James Woodford (1947–51) and then at the Royal Academy Schools under Maurice Lambert (1951–53). Woodford converted him from painting to sculpture, while also encouraging him to explore mythology and symbolism. Lambert interested him in animals and birds, as well as in visionary and legendary figures. He was greatly influenced by Lambert’s Pegasus of 1951. He was also probably influenced by Anthony Caro, a fellow-student at the RA Schools. He won the Prix de Rome in sculpture in 1953 and continued his studies in Rome and elsewhere in Italy and southern Europe between 1953 and 1955. He travelled to Italy every year and was greatly influenced by Italian classicism and Italian landscape. He met contemporary Italian artists, including Renato Guttoso. He soon began to produce welded sculptures from scrap metal and offcuts, often based on violent images of civil unrest (see, for example, Untitled (Riot Policeman), c.1981, Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool). However, his baroque exuberance and technical virtuosity in casting, welding and forging many different metals, together with his interest in myth and legend, were the main characteristics of his work.
He taught at the West Sussex College of Art from 1955 until 1959 and then at Nottingham College of Art until 1963. In that year he moved to Liverpool College of Art, where he was responsible for the teaching of sculpture in metal, and ultimately became the head of the sculpture department. He established his studio in Southport, and his 3-metre-high Crucifixion of 1965 for St Margaret’s Church, Anfield, in Liverpool was his first important public commission. The Atkinson Art Gallery in Southport bought one of his fabricated steel pieces from an exhibition there in 1967. In 1970 he moved his studio to Walton in north Liverpool, where a bronze foundry and metalworking equipment enabled him to work on substantial commissions, such as his 4.9-metre-high bronze, Noah and the Four Winds. This was Rice’s winning entry for a 1972 competition organised by the Constance Fund to design a fountain sculpture for London Zoo. Although the scheme fell through, the bronze was eventually installed at Chester Zoo in 1977, at the expense of the zoo’s founder, George Mottershead.
Rice’s first exhibitions took place at the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, and with the Midland Group in Nottingham in 1966. He sold all his sculptures from the Bluecoat Gallery exhibition, an unusual achievement in the 1960s. He soon started showing his smaller sculptures more widely in Liverpool, London and elsewhere, achieving his first one-man London exhibition at the Alwin Gallery in 1967 and an exhibition at the Tib Lane Gallery in Manchester in 1968. He also had many solo exhibitions at Carrara Massa, Italy, from 1984. He continued to paint throughout his life. His success with many private patrons enabled him to cease teaching at Liverpool in 1980, although he was later head of the department of three-dimensional design at Wrexham College from 1985 to 1989. His Cormorants Diving and Spirit of the Atlantic at the Atlantic Tower Hotel in Liverpool of 1972, together with his Stations of the Cross of 1993–95, commissioned for the Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool through Archbishop Derek Worlock, are his best known works. He also made a 3.3-metre-high Poseidon in bronze for Gravesend in 1976 and a life-size bronze David for Nebraska in 1978. In 1983 he contributed two figures to the Myrtle Gardens (Minster Court) redevelopment in London. The Atkinson Art Gallery in Southport has various works by him.
Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 17–18, 336; P. Davies, Liverpool Seen, Bristol. 1992, pp. 128–40; Independent, 15 January 1997 (obituary); E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. xxx, 46–47, 59–60; Sean Rice, Tib Lane Gallery Manchester, 1968; J. Willett, Art in a City, London, 1967, p. 121.
Emma Roberts, 2012