calendario eventi  :: 

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1/7/2005

Three exhibitions

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield

Carlos Garaicoa
Breon O'Casey
Alec Finlay

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Carlos Garaicoa
Bothy Gallery
2 July - 23 October 2005

Carlos Garaicoa is one of Cuba’s leading contemporary artists. This is Garaicoa’s first solo show in the UK. Carlos is of a generation of artists who have experienced Castro’s regime, the fall of communism in the Soviet Bloc, and the subsequent global challenges Cuba now faces without support from the USSR. His installations, models, photographs, drawings and films are beautiful, poignant explorations of faded glory and decaying architecture: the physical reality of political idealism.

Through his work, Garaicoa documents the actual, describes the melancholy of the lost, and creates imagined possibilities. There is also a sense of disassociation, that the fabric of his city is beyond the individual’s control. Garaicoa reveals the spirit that makes a place unique, examining the essence of a place in relation to its inhabitants and their collective experience; the publicness of shared spaces within the context of a political regime.

The works included in this exhibition relate to Garaicoa’s interest in the decay of a city as a metaphor for the human existence. Lightbox images, from the Cuban Garden series 2002, show urban decay in Havana and reveal his belief that gardens are not spaces for meditation or respite from city life: that there is no escape, that gardens are harsh and challenging. They show how nature is capable of destruction of man’s built environment; YSP provides an interesting context for this element of the exhibition, being a listed landscape of 500 acres of man-made leisure gardens and parkland.

Similarly, Garden, from the series A city view from the table of my house 1998,
(a miniature landscape with turf and bonsai tree) refers to the idea of a paradise garden from which mankind has been flung: “contemporary man is trapped. We have been exiled from this idyll and thrown into a violent space. We try pathetically to recreate our idyll, with our flowerpots on our windowsills, our tiny gardens.”

Other works in the exhibition comment on destruction wrought outside Havana, for example New architectures for Cuito Cuanavale 1999, for the city in Angola in which “not a single dwelling or building remains unscathed by the war”. The civil war that raged through the African country for nearly three decades from 1974 drew international troops, including 30,000 from Cuba. Garaicoa’s detailed graphite work, drawn straight onto the wall, and accompanying photograph Instrument to dissolve memory 1997 relate to the concept of control and manipulation.

Carlos Garaicoa is also working on a project for Castleford - 15 minutes drive from Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The town is the subject of a regeneration initiative, partly funded by Channel 4 who are making a series of documentaries about the project.

Carlos Garaicoa was born in 1967 in Havana, where he is resident. He is a self-taught artist and has exhibited widely internationally including the 2005 Venice Bienniale, Moscow Biennale and ARCO Madrid, the Sao Paolo Biennale 2004, Havana Biennale 2003 and Documenta 11 in 2002. Carlos Garaicoa was recently awarded the first Contemporary Art Prize Foundation Pierre Prince de Monaco.

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Breon O’Casey
Garden Gallery and Centre
2 July - 23 October 2005
Press View: 1 July 2005

As painter, sculptor, printmaker, weaver and jeweller, Breon O’Casey works instinctively in each medium, combining the skills of each discipline into a single, eclectic career. The son of playwright Sean O’Casey, he has lived and worked in Cornwall for many years, with close associations to the St Ives School of painters and sculptors.

This exhibition focuses on the artist’s sculpture, prints and painting. Despite having served apprenticeships with both Barbara Hepworth and Denis Mitchell, O’Casey approached sculpture relatively late in his career and began making it in miniature over a decade ago when in his mid-sixties, mainly as a natural development from the animal and human shapes embodied in some of his jewellery. An understanding of the expressive power of simplified shape is perceived within his sculpture, with a bird motif featuring strongly, stripped down to a still, essential form, recalling ancient sculpture. O’Casey’s work is condensed, quiet, but with an immense, almost mystical presence. Over twenty sculptures range from small scale works in silver which recall O’Casey’s work as a jeweller, through iconic bird forms in bronze to almost life-size female forms.

As a painter, O’Casey draws on nature’s simple, rhythmic forms to produce beautiful, spare works, bathed in colour. His palette is rich yet subtle, based on a lifetime’s observation of ‘the harsh burnt sienna red of the glimpsed fox against the umber ploughed field’ or the ‘violets and purples of the bare trees against the grey Cornish skies’. His strong interest in human, animal and bird forms and wider sense for natural shapes and formations influence the abstract work with outlines and tones suggesting landscape patterns or rock striations.

O’Casey’s prints are also largely abstract, with the exception of the recurring bird motif which has a timeless resonance. They show a directness of line and sureness of touch suited to this bold, graphic medium. Revering pattern, he insists designs must be ‘natural’ and ‘organic’, avoiding any line or technical effect which may appear drawn with a ruler or mechanical process.

This exhibition features three limited edition prints available exclusively at YSP.
A YSP anthology of texts by Breon O’Casey, edited by Sophie Bowness and Sarah Coulson will be available.

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Alec Finlay: Visiting Artist 04-05
Avant-Garde English Landscape
Propagator, Summer 2005

Artist, poet and publisher Alec Finlay has been Visiting Artist at Yorkshire Sculpture Park for over a year. During this time he has developed projects and created a body of new work entitled Avant-Garde English Landscape. This summer sees a new project for the open air at YSP.

For 2005, Finlay has made a new installation for Lower Park: Propagator. Through the summer, mesostic poems will be written on the names of flora at YSP and displayed in a greenhouse. The poems will also be planted out in the landscape, alongside the plants to which they refer. A mesostic poem is composed of a name-stem and word-branches, which reveal something of the plant’s character. When visitors have seen all of the poems in the greenhouse, they will then be able to use an accompanying leaflet to find the counterpart poems, planted throughout the landscape at YSP.

Several of Finlay’s books, produced by his publishing company Morning Star, are available in the YSP shop. Two new books, co-published with YSP, include circle poems and mesostics. Mesostic Herbarium is a collection of poems on the names of flora, written across the keyword stem of the name of each plant. t u r n i n g t o w a r d l i v i n g, brings together circle poems: a poetry form written around the circumference of a circle. Both books are £10 each and contain poems contributed by YSP visitors and others who have participated in Alec Finlay’s postcard invitation projects.

Further poems can be encountered on the c i r c l e w a l k, a walk through the landscape at YSP, planned by Alec Finlay. Visitors follow written instructions to find seven letterboxes, each containing a rubber stamp, ink and a circle poem. The stamped circle poems are collected in a leaflet, which, when complete, documents the walk through YSP’s eighteenth century designed parkland.

Alec Finlay continues as YSP Visiting Artist and will realize further projects in 2005. These build on his projects from 2004, which included a display of proposals entitled Fall and a series of renga – a Japanese form of linked verse, composed communally.

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Image: Carlos Garaicoa

For further information and images contact: Jan Wells, Marketing Officer t. 01924 832515 f. 01924 832600, press-marketing@ysp.co.uk

Yorkshire Sculpture Park
West Bretton
Wakefield

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