William King was an American sculptor who employed bronze, vinyl, wood, and other materials to produce his witty figurative works. The body types and gestures of his figures provided the artist with a limitless means of expressing human emotions. “Everything that one admires in his work—the virtuoso carving, the deft handling of a wide variety of materials, the shrewd observation and resourceful invention—all this is secondary to the concentration on gesture,” the critic Hilton Kramer once wrote of his work. Born on February 25, 1925 in Jacksonville, FL, he built model airplanes and learned carpentry from his father as a youth. He briefly studied engineering at the University of Florida, before moving to New York to attend the architecture program at the Cooper Union Art School. While at school, he saw the sculptures of David Smith and subsequently committed himself to the medium. King had his first solo exhibition in 1954, and was a part of the milieu of artists that included Alex Katz, his first wife Lois Dodd, and Fairfield Porter, who was an early champion of King’s work. He died at the age of 90, on March 4, 2015 in East Hampton, NY. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey, among others.