calendario eventi  :: 

X

16/7/2014

Two exhibitions

White Cube Bermondsey, London

Gilbert & George
SCAPEGOATING PICTURES for London

South Galleries and North Galleries, Bermondsey

‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth’
Oscar Wilde (1891)

For nearly five decades the art of Gilbert & George has created a visceral and epic depiction of modern urban existence. At its centre are always the artists themselves, who have dedicated their adult lives to their calling as ‘Living Sculptures’ – witness participants within the moral and vividly atmospheric world of their vision, as it is revealed in their art.

The ‘SCAPEGOATING PICTURES’ unflinchingly describe the volatile, tense, accelerated and mysterious reality of our increasingly technological, multi-faith and multi-cultural world. It is a world in which paranoia, fundamentalism, surveillance, religion, accusation and victimhood become moral shades of the city’s temper. Gilbert & George take their place in these ‘SCAPEGOATING PICTURES’ as shattered and spirit-like forms – at times masked, at times as grotesquely capering skeletons, at times dead-eyed and impassive. These ‘SCAPEGOATING PICTURES’ consolidate and advance the art of Gilbert & George as a view of modern humanity that is at once libertarian and free-thinking, opposed to bigotry of all forms and dedicated to secular realism.

Dominating the SCAPEGOATING PICTURES, becoming almost the imagistic signature of this new group of pictures, are images of the sinister bomb shaped canisters used to contain nitrous oxide, also known as ‘whippets’ and ‘hippy crack’ — recreationally inhaled to induce euphoria, hallucinations and uncontrollable laughter. Gathered by the artists on their early morning walks from the side streets and back alleys that surround their home, the presence of these canisters, mimicking that of ‘bombs’ pervades the mood of the SCAPEGOATING PICTURES to infer terrorism, warfare and a stark industrial brutality.

Echoing the maxim of the great Victorian architect, A.W.N. Pugin, ‘Not a Style, but a Principle’, the vision of the SCAPEGOATING PICTURES both affirms and intensifies the historically iconic art of Gilbert & George, in its tireless, emotional and profound engagement with the viewer and the modern world.

---

Rachel Kneebone
399 Days

9 x 9 x 9, Bermondsey

‘...the works’ ivory-porcelain bodies delineate a psycho-sexual hinterland in which conventional boundaries between language and ideas, modelling and collage are irrevocably blurred in a determined refutation of history – or at least of the passage of time. Anagrams of passion and violence, they distil the beauty of visceral experience in the timely process of their making.’
David Elliot (2010)

White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Rachel Kneebone. The largest and most ambitious single installation the artist has yet produced, 399 Days consolidates and extends Kneebone’s practice, developing her unique formal language and exploration of the human condition.

In this large-scale monochrome work, a series of highly detailed porcelain tiles with intensely worked figurative scenarios are constructed to form an intricate architectural sculpture. The work follows on from Kneebone’s earlier large-scale installation entitled The Descent (2009), but whereas The Descent sought to communicate fear through making its visceral equivalent in beauty, 399 Days endeavours to create a sense of ‘nothingness’ through an overabundance of form and an excess of detail. Huge in scale, it makes reference to such iconic architectural monuments as the 19th-century plaster cast of Trajan’s Column in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Zoroastrian Towers of Silence, but uses its own immense size to enact a dissolve of meaning and, simultaneously, its own complex form to express formlessness.

As always with Kneebone’s sculpture, the body is ever-present although here it frequently appears fragmented, abstracted or collapsed. Blurring the boundaries between the conscious and the subconscious, the real and the imagined, the work sets up dualities between the micro and macro, life and death, everything and nothing, placing emphasis on the physical expression of ideas and a process of active looking whereby the whole cannot be grasped in one single measure. Informed by the writings of Bataille and RD Laing (and, in particular, his 1970 work Knots), 399 Days visibly embraces the uncontrolled, exploiting the natural capabilities and restrictions of porcelain to create areas of highly controlled figuration against freer, expressive areas of modelling which allows the tactile qualities of the material to be present. This physical manipulation of clay, evident at the top of the sculpture where the structure appears to dissolve away, creates an emphatic push/pull with both material and form; a highly singular and complex language that both attracts and repels the viewer.

Image: Gilbert & George, SWEET AIR SWEET AIR, 2013, 89 x 124 13/16 in. (226 x 317 cm)

Preview: Thursday 17 July, 6-9pm

White Cube
144 – 152 Bermondsey Street - London SE1 3TQ
Opening times
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm
Sunday 12pm – 6pm

stampa

permanent link