calendario eventi  :: 

X

5/11/2007

Cathie Pilkington

Marlborough Fine Art, London

White Elephant

The Directors of Marlborough Fine Art are delighted to announce their first London exhibition of sculptures by Cathie Pilkington. Cathie Pilkington is a sculptor whose figurative tradition has been picked out sideways rather than historically, assembled from disparate lowly or debased sources, folk museums, souvenirs, self-taught road side sculptors and the like. With her seamless combination of intensively assisted readymades and modeled polychrome figures Pilkington fixes awkward cracks and gaps within contemporary sculpture, crafting, tinkering, cobbling together, mending, and improvising with great skill and integrity. White Elephant consists of an entirely new body of work with a theme of childhood.

Pilkington’s recent shows have involved sprawling and excessive installations, in White Elephant, sculptural objects are presented independently, with a formality that suggests the hallowed context of a museum or the contents of an eccentric private collection. In the title piece Punch appears as a liveried manservant-cum-cheerleader, advertising the show and offering viewers a heap of tiny elephants on a tray. This dish of sacred oddities is an hors d’oeuvre for the rest of the show.

In other rooms the show is populated by a diverse community of statues and figurines: a chrome-plated biker, a Welsh golly, a 1950’s sci-fi super-monster. A museum vitrine contains cherubs and/or possibly child-gods drawn from various pantheons. Throughout the show the surfaces of things demand attention. Some dolls are hairy, matted and fetish-like, some are exquisitely painted for a connoisseur’s perusal, others are coated with a glossy syrup of unspecifiable origin.

The show climaxes with a baroque explosion of sculptural joy. In The Motherlode a monstrous infant reclines like Olympia on a bed of sub-sculptural bric-a-brac. An imperious, decadent fatty squashing her entourage of monkeys and gnomes, she might be a fragment from some vast frieze. A fully illustrated catalogue of the works will be available. For further information

Image: Cathie Pilkington, Majolica (detail), 2007

Marlborough Fine Art
6 Albemarle Street - London

stampa

permanent link