18/3/2009
Dan Mort
Museum 52, London
Avoision. Interested in the ambiguous narratives he can create Mort fully utilises scale, abstraction and balance to present highly crafted sculptures toying with multiple, simultaneous, readings. His objects are like compounds with a long-forgotten use, outlandish yet made up of tantalizingly familiar components, all twisted, contorted and endlessly cryptic.
Museum 52 is delighted to present Avoision, Dan Mort’s debut solo exhibition in
London.
Interested in the ambiguous narratives he can create Mort fully utilises scale,
abstraction and balance to present highly crafted sculptures toying with multiple,
simultaneous, readings. Ranging from the directly depicted to the intentionally
obtuse, Mort’s objects are like compounds with a long-forgotten use, outlandish yet
made up of tantalizingly familiar components, all twisted, contorted and endlessly
cryptic.
Mort employs a network of intricately cut and constructed elements and combines
these with a delicate use of balance and structure. Maintaining a formal rigor, with
an irreverent and playful use of materials, his works oscillate between the
exactitudes of minimalism and the ambiguities found in abstraction. Ranging in
degrees of complexity, from the simple combination of one or two elements, to a
highly layered structure, such as ‘Breakfast in the Expanded Field’, his works show
sculpture committed to the potential formal relationships of parts to a whole. He
matches classical, handmade, elements alongside found objects ranging from an ink
cartridge to a musical instrument, a wooden egg to a tripod, a plastic cheese to an
anvil, which once pieced together do not lend themselves to any particular narrative
but more point towards the nature of art as machine, as process, as a catalyst
towards a form of understanding.
Mort redesigns the descriptive purpose of objects, turning the viewer’s familiar
associations with them askew, leaving you in perpetual anticipation of the point of
arrival. Figurative elements are used as building blocks in the formal construction of
a new and altogether inverted system of meaning. These elements determine the
form of the sculpture, so that the sculpture ends up both as a parody of itself and as
an embodiment of these narratives and diversions.
Dan Mort (b.1980) is a graduate of both Goldsmiths and Manchester University
and has previously exhibited in Europe and the USA. This will be his first solo
exhibition with the gallery.
Opening march 19th, 2009
Museum 52
52 Redchurch Street - London
Wednesday - Saturday 11am – 6pm