Sculpture grew out of a series of columnar figures, idols and totems that Turnbull began in 1955. They drew on archaeological and anthropological artefacts, religious statuary and pre-classical art that the artist was interested in during the prewar period. Much British sculpture of the time belonged to what Herbert Read called the "geometry of fear": the angular, anxious forms of Lynn Chadwick, Bernard Meadows and others shown at the 1952 Venice Biennale. On the Continent, Giacometti's attenuated figures strode into an uncertain world. Turnbull went another way. His massive, calm totems looked back to the long history of human image-making rather than at the turmoil of the present, and offered a contemplative alternative.

Turnbull was looking for something like the sacred in a secular age. He described the great exhibitions of Pollock and Rothko, Monet's Water Lilies at the Tuileries and late Matisse at MoMA as experiences "close to the exaltation of the sacred", and said he worked with the aim of creating that kind of encounter. At almost 1.5 metres tall, Sculpture commands the space around it. A thick, trunk-like body is topped by solid bronze "arms". The figural references are there, but the treatment is abstract, almost geometric, and shows his growing interest in balanced forms. Turnbull also remembered seeing an image of a man on a West Indian beach balancing a long, thin coffin on his head. He said the image always acted as a trigger for him, and it may lie behind this work.

The rich patina and the ridged, weathered-looking surface make the piece feel timeless. Turnbull made the surface by pressing corrugated cardboard into the wet plaster. Instead of a conventional plinth he gave the work an integrated base, so it stands directly on the floor and reads more as an object than as a piece of "art". The rough, elemental pair of cylinders makes it hard to say when the work was made, which echoes Turnbull's statement that year in the This is Tomorrow catalogue at the Whitechapel Gallery: "now we make objects that might have been dug up at any time during the past forty thousand years. Sculpture = totemic object."

Sculpture is an abstract idol for a secular age. Its upright, frontal presence recalls the religious icon, but it is left open to the viewer's own interpretation. Its balanced forms suggest both movement and stillness. As Amanda Davidson has observed, Turnbull's "calm pieces were a direct answer to the cacophony of the world." David Sylvester felt that some of these figures, placed in "a simple well-lit building", could turn it into a temple. Sculpture is one of those works.