calendario eventi  :: 

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10/12/2010

Two exhibitions

Modern Art Oxford, Oxford

Thomas Houseago
What Went Down

Modern Art Oxford presents new and recent sculptures by British artist Thomas Houseago in his first major solo exhibition in a UK public gallery.

Thomas Houseago has come to public prominence in recent years with his monumental, figurative sculptures that are charged with a remarkable energy and vitality. Houseago works primarily with media that demonstrates a sensibility towards classical sculptural materials and processes; primitive, totemic sculptures are hewn from giant timbers, Hessian is slathered in plaster and crudely wrapped around steel armatures, and large- scale, free-standing works are ambitiously cast in bronze. Houseago’s sculptures possess a daring urgency, a tactility and brute physicality that expose the process of their own making. The visible ‘touch’ and ‘imprint’ of the artist are nakedly evident: a fist of plaster is gauged out to create an eye socket, a deft chiselling of redwood to suggest a shoulder blade.

Houseago’s work is unapologetic and relentless in its evocation of classical and modernist sculptural works. His somewhat crude and direct working belies a sophistication that is rich in a layering of cultural, mythological and art historical references. In a time of fast-paced technological change, Houseago’s art takes on the psychological role of an awkward, unresolved reminder of the past – cumbersome and insistent in its emotional presence.

Alongside his presentation at Modern Art Oxford, Houseago will present a number of sculptures in the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. These pieces will be placed in the newly redeveloped Cast Gallery, the Human Image gallery and elsewhere around the Museum, providing visitors with surprising and dramatic discoveries, and highlighting the relationships and tensions between the past and the present found in Houseago's work.

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David Austen
End of Love

Modern Art Oxford presents End of Love, the latest in a series of films by artist David Austen. Austen’s practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, and more recently film, and shows an unceasing fascination with people through myriad observations of thoughts, actions, relationships and performances, reaching from the tender to the absurd.

These depictions appear in diverse form from swift studies to intense narratives, but all resonate with a directness and rawness that typifies Austen’s practice. Imbued with a nostalgic quality and steeped in the languages of 19th and 20th century film and literature, and crime and science fiction novels, Austen’s work emerges as something wholly original.
In recent years Austen has produced short films; whilst formally distinct, they run in close parallel to his work in other mediums. The ambitious new film End of Love created for his Stanley Picker Fellowship embraces themes of human impulse and emotion explored in two previous films: Smoking Moon and Crackers, both made in 2007.

Austen describes End of Love as ‘a musical without music, performed at the end of the world’. The location is the stage of a London theatre where there is no audience. We meet twelve characters that all seem lost, hurt, or broken – an old moon, lovers on the run, a dark angel, a homeless man, a lonely astronaut, an imprisoned woman, a love-torn dandy, a betrayed Cyclops and an aged Jack the Giant Killer. They are marginal figures, outsiders; all of them are homeless, travellers or wanderers and present themselves to us in a vulnerable and exposed way. They may sometimes appear brutal, but like the human figures in Austen’s drawings, participating in an encyclopedia of sex and violence, they are also fragile, childlike and tenderly depicted.

Referencing theatre, literature, expanded cinema and performance, as well as the artist’s personal practice, End of Love is a poetic expression of love’s elusiveness, the non- linearity of time, and fleeting facets of personal memory. A stellar cast including Vicky McClure (This is England, 2006; This is England ‘86, 2010), Elliot Cowan (Macbeth, Globe Theatre, 2010) and Joseph Mawle (Red Riding, 2009) are amongst the professional actors that appear in Austen’s latest film.

Austen’s exhibition will extend into The Yard, with the evocatively titled Smoke Town. Giant billboard posters of the film’s protagonists and short enigmatic texts that read as film titles or characters’ names will clad the walls, illuminated by a series of spectacular hanging lights made from circles of interlocking steel. Smoke Town will transform The Yard into a space suggestive of an other-worldly station platform or the threshold to a theatre.

A fully-illustrated catalogue will be produced to accompany the exhibition.

Image: Thomas Houseago, 'Baby', 2009. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery © Thomas Houseago

For further information and images please contact: Kayleigh Hellin, Press and Marketing Assistant, Tel. 01865 813804, Email. kayleigh.hellin@modernartoxford.org.uk

Modern Art Oxford
30 Pembroke Street Oxford OX1 1BP
Opening hours
Tuesday 10am – 5pm
Wednesday 10am – 5pm
Thursday 10am – 10pm
galleries close at 7pm
Friday 10am – 10pm
galleries close at 7pm
Saturday 10am – 10pm
galleries close at 7pm
Sunday 12pm – 5pm
Monday Closed
Admission is free

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