Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1959 Dagestan, USSR (now Russia)

Year of Migration to the UK: 1980

Biography

Sculptor Tolleck Winner was born to Jewish parents in Dagestan, USSR (now Russia) on 30 July 1959. He grew up in a close-knit Jewish community that was surrounded predominantly by larger Muslim and smaller Christian communities. Winner’s great-great-grandfather had built the very first synagogue in his birth town in the early 1700s. As a child, he made his own toys, scooters, games, and always spent time outside. An artist from a young age, his mother had recalled seeing him mixing mud and water into sculpted human figures in the garden at the age of five. Having finished his eight years of schooling, Winner’s parents followed the majority of other Jews who were leaving the Dagestan community between 1969 and 1975, migrating to Israel in 1974. There he lived for six years and met his British-born wife Angela on a kibbutz, after which he migrated to the UK (Surgeoner interview, 2022).

In England, Winner was initially running his own property firm. However, following a life-changing car crash in 1996, after which he endured three-and-a-half years of physiotherapy and rehabilitation, he pursued his long-held dream of being a sculptor: ‘The accident made me realise that something had to change’, he is reported as saying. ‘There was no point feeling sorry for myself. I had to get on with my life, so I started sculpting while I was recovering’ (Jewish Chronicle, 2009). In 1999, Winner made history when he celebrated his bar mitzvah in a trio alongside his son, Elliot, and father-in-law Ivan Robin, at Ilford Synagogue in Essex. As his wife explained, Winner was ‘born in Russia, where he wasn’t allowed to practice Judaism’, so the event was significant for reclaiming an experience lost (Baum, 1999).

Self-taught, Winner began creating sculpture from his Essex-based studio, his work focusing on intergenerational passages of time, loss, and reuniting popular symbols (such as the skull) with their traditional meaning ‘in order to remind us of the vulnerability of human existence’ (Flickr; Artist’s Blog). In 2003 he held his first solo exhibition, Tolleck Winner: Sculpture at the Diorama Gallery, London. This was followed by a number of public installations, including at the BUPA Nursing Home in Kensington, London (2003, officially unveiled by the Mayor of Kensington in January 2004), at Octavia Housing – Miranda House in London (2003), and as part of Sculpture in Paradise at Chichester Cathedral (2008). He became involved in many solo and group exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including Beyond the Big Bang and Vanitas at Alon Zakaim Fine Art, London, in 2006 and 2007. The following two years, Winner exhibited at the Sculpture Festival at ArtParkS Sculpture Park in Guernsey. His position and artistic reputation growing, his People sculpture, made from carbon steel, was placed alongside works by Antony Gormley and Anthony Caro, among others, in the Peterborough Sculpture Park in 2009. Inspired by the reflection in a river of two people walking together, People is designed to change as the elements effect it through oxidisation (Peterborough Sculpture Trust). In 2014, Winner held two solo shows in London at the Albermarle Gallery and the Pontone Gallery, where he also participated in the Grand Summer Exhibition in 2015.

After his solo show at Albermarle, for some years Winner decided that he wanted to produce rather than exhibit his work. He consequently created a vast oeuvre, not showing his sculpture until he was invited to exhibit in a solo exhibition at Brunswick Art Gallery, London in 2020 after the COVID-19 lockdown. There he displayed objects suspended and cast in clear acrylic cubes. Continuing to live and work in Ilford, Essex, Winner is an Associate Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors, and he has been inducted in the British Jewry Hall of Fame. Much of Winner’s work is held in private collections around the world, including Korea, Japan and the USA. In UK public collections, his sculpture is held by the Peterborough Sculpture Trust and at the ArtParkS sculpture park at Sausmarez Manor in Guernsey.

Related books

Bernard Dolman, Who's Who in Art, Vol. 33 (Havant: Art Trade Press, 2008), p. 1074
Tolleck Winner, Tolleck Winner: Vanitas (London: Alon Zakaim Fine Art, 2007)
Suzanne Baum, 'Barmitzvah Trio at Ilford', Jewish Chronicle, 22 January 1999, p. 15

Public collections

Peterborough Sculpture Trust

Related organisations

British Jewry Hall of Fame (inductee)
Design and Artists Copyright Society (member)
Royal Society of Sculptors (associate member)

Selected exhibitions

Tolleck Winner, Brunswick Art Gallery, London (2020)
Grand Summer Exhibition, Pontone Gallery, London (2015)
Tolleck Winner, Albemarle Gallery, London (2014)
Tolleck Winner, Pontone Gallery, London (2014)
RBA Annual Open Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London (2011)
Russian Art Fair, Park Lane Hotel, London (2010)
Sculpture Festival, ArtParkS Sculpture Park, Guernsey (2008 & 2009)
Sculpture in Paradise, Chichester Cathedral, Chichester (2008)
Vanitas, Alon Zakaim Fine Art Gallery, London (2007)
Beyond the Big Bang, Alon Zakaim Fine Art Gallery, London (2006)
Still Inspired, ICI Headquarters, London (2004)
Sculpture by Tolleck Winner, Charity Fair, Business Design Centre, London (2003)
Fresh Fair, Business Design Centre, London (2003)
Tolleck Winner: Sculpture, Diorama Gallery, London (2003)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Tolleck Winner]

Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Tolleck Winner artist