SAATCHI

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME: NEW SCULPTURE
27TH MAY 2011 – 16TH OCTOBER 2011

The exhibition of 20 leading and emerging international sculptors has just concluded.

Kris Martin: On top of each large megalith-like boulders that compromise ‘Summit’ is a small paper cross crowning each peak. The pun metaphor portrays man conquering the limits.

David Almejd: ‘The New North’, almost four meters tall, allows the artist to create microcosmic worlds within it, using hair, wives, mirrored rhomboid shapes and quartz crystals.

Dirk Skreber: Crashed cars disquiet the observer. ‘Untitled (Crash1) and (Crash2)’ recycle a subject of terror into a distorted metaphysical art.

Thomas Houseago: The syncretic absorbance of a multitude of styles dominate the scene. ‘Joanne’, a simplified proto-figured form with a sinister face peeking out from a plaster cocoon.

Berlinde De Bruyckere: An unsettling reconfigured concept of the body takes centre stage in ‘The Black Horse’. Abject deformation is transformed into beauty, wrestling shape from abstract form.

John Baldessari: ‘Beethoven’s Trumpet’ epitomises the paradox of communication’s incomplete nature, a sculptural sound piece about a deaf composer.

Peter Buggenhout: Large fuzzy masses look like a rubble found at a building site, an archeological dig or at the scene of an earthquake. ‘The Blind Leading The Blind’ has incredibly realistic renderings.

Roger Hiorns: Sculptural practice meditates on the act of artistic creation, observing what happens when the process is handed over to reactive living materials. ‘Copper Sulphate Chartres And Copper Sulphate Notre-Dame’ combines ordinary and esoteric materials to explore transparency as a sculptural property.

Folkert de Jong: A touch of ironic Old Master tableaux vivant-style entertains the passer-bys who run into ‘Les Saltimbanques’. The polyurethane foam mannequins have an arresting life-like quality.

Rebecca Warren: Ranging from the amorphous to more clearly recognisable forms, ‘Croccioni’ tributes Robert Crumb and Boccioni through a bold new figure for the female nude.

Matthew Brannon: ‘Nevertheless’ is an adverb comprised of three words. The installation’s suggestive props contrast with a rope cordoning off the piece preventing anyone from entering it.

David Thorpe: The actualisation of pattern and the tension between exquisite decorativeness and home craft-mauals id explored in ‘Private Lives’.

Sterling Ruby: Sculpture’s assumed relationship to human scale, in contrast to the pure conceptual forms of minimalism, is embodied by ‘Headless Dick/Deth Till’, with a messy aesthetic, both alluring and overtly ugly.

Björn Dahlem: A sprawling web of mood and neon tubes symbolises ‘The Mily Way’, abstract concepts of space and matter, transform thoughts models and mental habits.

Anselm Reyle: ‘Untitled’ redefines Modernism through a light installation, of objets trouvés arranged in seemingly chaotic fashion to suggest madness held in check, but disconcertingly on the verge of being out of control.

David Batchelor: ‘Brick Lane Remix’ chooses the lurking familiarity of leftovers of modern life. It reconsiders the tension between form and the very materiality of colour, with a wink to earlier kinds of light and neon art.

Matthew Monahan: ‘Sweet Grunt’ as sculptural plinth assemblage is chock full of mystifying information. It showis the folk character of the Green Man as a frowning evil-spirited golem, stomping all over a guileless classical  countenance.

Oscar Tuazon: ‘Bed’ makes few distinctions between sculpture, architecture and Do It Yourself self-sufficiency. It thusly re-conceives the most intimate domestic space, emblematically turning it into a spartan minimalism.

Martin Honert: The Giants, ‘Riesen’, is inspired by the memories of the artist’s childhood. The Cyclops are like mythical wandering characters from a fairytale and at the same time social outsiders, fearsomely fending for their own survival.

Joanna Malinowska: The oversized elephant in the room, ‘Boil’, is shaped similarly to a talisman from the Bamana culture in West Mali, the hidden powers of the object revitalise its metaphysical potential.

Richard Wilson: ‘20:50’ is the permanent installation of the Saatchi Gallery since 1991, the room entirely flooded with recycled engine oil transforms the place in a site of epic illusion.

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk

by Chiara Spagnoli