New Sculpture at Saachi's
20 Artists working with sculpture installations: Kris Martin, David Altmejed, Dirk Skreber, Thomas Houseago, Berlinde De Bruyckere, John Baldesarri, Peter Buggenhout, Roget Hiorns, Folkert de Jong, Rebecca Worren, Mathew Brannon, David Thorpe, Sterling Ruby, Bjorn Dahlem, Anselm Reyle, David Batcherlor, Matthew Monahan, Oscar Tuazon, Martin Honert, Joanna Maiinowska.
Saachi Gallery in London, presents “The Shape of things to come: New Sculptures, from the 27th of May to the 16 of October 2011.
David Batchelor, Brick Lane Remix I 2003, Sheltering units, found light boxes, fluorescent light, vinyl, acrylic sheet, cable, plug boards. Dimension variable.
David Batchelor makes sculptural installation from objects found in the street of London, hollowed, stacked and given a new life as empty but brightly colored light boxes or unlit composites. Consistent throughout his work is the lurking familiarity of he leftovers of modern life, from factory scrap to discarded domestic items, re-purposed into hypnotic, beautifully patterned objects presenting a distillation of colors’ presence in our everyday environment.
His dazzling installations (such as Brick Lane Remix I, 2003 an Parapillar 7, 2006) reconsider the tension between form and the very materiality of colour, perhaps with a wink to earlier forms of light and neon art. Courtesy of the artist and Saachi Gallery. “When I make works from light boxes (such as Brick Lane Remix, 2003), or old plastic bottles with lights inside, I hope the illumination suspends their objecthood to some degree and makes the viewer see them a little differently – see them as colours before seeing them as objects.” The brightest possible palette fills the range of neon-lit columns, modular crates, spherical shapes, and unlit clusters (such as Parapillar, 2006), the artist’s “vehicles for colour.”
Batchelor is interested in reconsidering colour theories from a contemporary context, which he explores in Chromophobia (2000), a book dedicated to the subject. His dazzlingly saturated objects reconsider the tension between form and the very materiality of colour, perhaps with a wink to earlier forms of light and neon art. “I often use colour to attack form, to break it down a little or begin to dissolve it. But I am not at all interested in ‘pure’ colour or in colour as a transcendental presence… So if I use colours to begin to dissolve forms, I also use forms to prevent colours becoming entirely detached from their everyday existence.”
Dirk Skreber, Untitled (Crash I), Untitled (Crash 2) 2009 Installation
In Dirk Skreber’s sculptures, such as Untitled (Crash I) (2009), the crashed car is recycled from a subject of horror into a kind of metaphysical art. Skreber’s spectacular fabrications are impossibly twisted distortions of the familiar object, crushed and curiously wrapped around supporting columns.
It is as they have been caught, mid-fight, through an invisible centripetal speedway, and are being held in a state of unreal suspension and impersonal destruction, as if in an anxious automotive purgatory.
Skreber’s choice of subject stems from the industrial landscape of Northern Germany where he grew up, which inspired in him a sculputural and mechanical outlook more than a painterly one. Exploring the formal potential of the car, and bending its natural anatomy away from any pre-determined functional sense, became a central preoccupation for Skreber. “ While making these works my concern was not at all about accidents but rather to use a massive and complete real transfer of energy as an opening door to a perspective on the flow of physical laws and metaphysical energies, loading and unloading, transforming and retransforming like batteries or spiritual bodies”. Courtesy of the artists and Saachi Gallery, London
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Skreber obsessively painted cars wrapped around poles before moving onto the real thing. “Although I was satisfied with the paintings, I wanted to go closer to the material reality of my subject. I started thinking about a simulated crash, which was staged according to my sculptural vision… While making these works my concern was not at all about accidents but rather to use a massive and completely real transfer of energy as an opening door to a perspective on the flow of physical laws and metaphysical energies, loading and unloading, transforming and retransforming like batteries or spiritual bodies. |
Sterling Ruby works prolifically in a wide range of mediums, from glazed biomorphic ceramics and poured urethane sculptures to large-scale spray-painted canvasses, nail polished drawings, collages and videos. Through his varied practices he conducts an assault on materials and social structures, referencing marginalised societies, maximum security prisons, modernist architecture, artefacts and antiquities, graffiti, bodybuilders, the mechanism of warfare, cults and urban gangs.
.Monument Stalagmite/Headbanger (2008), Recondite (2007), Kiss Trap Kismet (2008) and the suggestively bloodied Headless Dick/Death Till (2008) are large enough to raise questions around sculpture’s assumed relationship to the human scale. In contrast to the pure conceptual forms of minimalism, Ruby’s messy aesthetic, with its spray marks, dripping paint and worn down edges presents iconoclastic graffitied objects as visceral, organic systems that possess a manmade quality and an allure despite their overt ugliness.
His works are unique hybrids of sources, media, glosses on tradition and autobiographical notation. “Recondite is modelled after a small desktop meditation fountain given to me by my mother. I had just come back from a trip to Germany [where Ruby was born], and I realized this small fountain reminded me of some of the fascist architecture I had just seen. The monument plays a big role in much of my work because it is defined as a structure built for the sole purpose of remembering something that has been lost. I came up with Recondite as a title, as it refers to esoteric or specialized knowledge. I was addressing the way artists of my generation felt trapped by a kind of post-modern burden of ideas, theories, and histories. It seemed impossible to make a sincere gesture anymore. This was my monument to all of that
The 22th june 2011, Nina Lumer art gallery in Milan inaugurates a new art exhibition of artists Yerbossyn Meldibekov and Nurbossyn Oris. These days presenting their works in Venice for the 54th International Art Exhibition of Biennale in the Central Asia Pavillion, the two Kazakhs artists will open Peak of Lenin, a work that represents a new step in their research, exploring the central asian cultural identity.
A double personal exhibition devoted to the work of the artist Vanessa Beecroft will be held in the Lia Rumma Galleries in Milan and Naples.
The personal exhibition of Vanessa Beecroft’s work in the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples is to open only a few days after the exhibition devoted to the artist in Lia Rumma’s Milan gallery. The heart of the exhibition will consist of the video projections VB 66 and VB 67, made by the artist in 2010 at the Mercato Ittico (fish market) in Naples and the Studi Nicoli in Carrara respectively, and her photographs, mainly large-scale works, taken from the first of the two performances.In February last year, when Vanessa Beecroft performed VB 66 at Palazzo Cosenza, the premises of the Naples Fish Market, in front of an enthusiastic and particularly numerous audience, the city was presented with a “transitory monument”. 43 models painted entirely in black, 21 life-size plaster casts of women and about 60 anatomical fragments went to make up a complex composition that occupied the centre of the building on an unusual stage assembled from large marble tables and metal counters of the market. In a perfectly complementary combination of nature and artifice, the bodies and their doubles covered with a blanket of black proved to be a particularly effective way of raising the dramatic tone of the scene. They re-evoked the bronze statues of Herculaneum and the bodies discovered at Pompeii buried under the ash of the volcano, as well as the fragility of the body and its mutilations.