William Tillyer   1938 - present 

Born in Middlesbrough (28 September 1938), William Tillyer studied painting at the Middlesbrough College of Art from 1956 to 1959 before moving to London in the 1960s to study at the Slade School of Art, with painting as his main subject and printmaking as his subsidiary. There, he encountered William Coldstream and Anthony Gross, among others. His work has been shown frequently in the UK and internationally since the late 1950s.

Following his time at the Slade, Tillyer took up a French Government Scholarship to study gravure under Stanley William Hayter, at Atelier 17 in Paris. In 1963 he returned to England. By the later 1960s he was experimenting with constructed works with a conceptual basis, working on ideas of the grid and of the implied performative nature of hardware such as hinges and handles, he made works including Fifteen Drawer Pulls, 1966.

There are at least 15 works by Tillyer in the Tate collection. Examples of his work are also included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Art Museum, the Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas, the Smith College Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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