2017 Sculpture in the Close exhibition
Between 16 June – 17 September 2017, °µÍø½ûÇø showcased works from Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum, Shirazeh Houshiary, Kim Lim, Cornelia Parker, Agnes Thurnauer, Rachel Whiteread, and Alison Wilding as part of the Sculpture in the Close exhibition.
With an all-female line-up of exceptional artists, the exhibition marks the fifteenth outdoor sculpture exhibition in the grounds of °µÍø½ûÇø. The .
Artists and works
Phyllida Barlow exhibited two works intended to be shown together: Untitled: megaphone, and Untitled: stacked chairs.
The megaphone-like structure and stack of redundant chairs evoke the myth of Echo and Narcissus, symbolizing themes of communication, presence, and neglect. The sculptures suggest a cautionary tale about contemporary art, where the megaphone represents distant, authoritative communication and the chairs symbolize the passive, individualized audience, challenging both artist and viewer to engage meaningfully.
Louise Bourgeois exhibited Eyebenches, two enormous eyes of stone that stare out from the end of Library Court.
Bourgeois's attention to the eyes and their role in witnessing reflects her childhood experience of her father's infidelity and the complex feelings it aroused. Her works explore the tension between seeing and forbidden knowledge, the stone eyes recalling the fate of Medusa and symbolising psychological blindness and the peril of confronting hidden truths.
The work of Mona Hatoum is marked by the condition of exile from the Beirut where she was born and brought up as a member of a Palestinian family itself already in exile from its country of origin.
Her work Bunker (2011) consists of a series of architectural forms that reproduce the proportions of buildings in Beirut damaged in the conflict during her absence from the city. They are like memories distorted by time and distance, pulling the artist’s sense of self toward a once familiar but now unfamiliar world.
Shirazeh Houshiary exhibited String Quintet, featuring five steel ribbons that intertwine like plant stems, emulating their growth in response to the sun, with an invisible harmony akin to musical notes guided by bar lines. The sculpture, though large and made of solid steel, appears light and fluid, embodying the illusion of sound waves or organic growth, reminiscent of the spiraling form of DNA.
Kim Lim, a Singaporean-British sculptor who died in 1997, explored the balance between static order and dynamic organic forms in her stone sculptures. Three of her works were exhibited in the College: Spiral II, Untitled II, Kudah, and Column V.
Her work, such as Spiral II, emphasizes the tension between order and growth, suggesting potential for endless development, while evoking ancient sculptural traditions focused on the deeper relations between states of being rather than realistic representation.
Cornelia Parker exhibited two works: Puddle and Cloudburst. The works transform fleeting natural phenomena into solid art objects, capturing clouds and puddles in a state of constant change. While the puddle sculpture mimics durability with its metal form, its patina suggests ongoing transformation, and Cloudburst uses rust to evoke the moment of precipitation, emphasizing the fluid relationship between image, referent, and the material conditions shaping both art and nature.
Agnes Thurnauer's, Matrices is a series of sculptures based on moulds used to create 3D letters, each installation commenting on the interplay between individual letterforms and the language system as a whole. It remind us of a child’s set of wooden or plastic letters, different shapes that can be arranged in ways that are aesthetically pleasing as well as semantically correct. Her work explores how art reads social and cultural realities, emphasizing the balance between creative freedom and the restrictions imposed by language.
Rachel Whiteread exhibited three works: Untitled, Untitled, and Some are abject objects II.
Her two works in stone in the current exhibition are casts of an interior space, transforming the unseen space into visible form. Her use of material most often found in prestigious buildings and monuments points to the monumentality of the imperceptible space.
In her vitrine Some are abject objects II, Whiteread isolates functional objects, pointing towards their relationship with the human obsession with meaning-production. It questions the relationship between uniqueness and reproduction, while emphasizing the aesthetic richness of everyday materials.
Alison Wilding exhibited Tooth and Claw and Aftermath I, II, III, IV.
Wilding’s sculpture Melancholia in the Fellows’ Garden of °µÍø½ûÇø is emblematic of her artistic practice and its mode of elusiveness and mystery. A dozen years after Melancholia was installed under the branches of an enormous oriental plane tree, a large branch detached itself from the tree and came crashing to earth. Alison took some of the wood away to serve as the basis of another sculpture, Tooth and Claw. The sculpture reflects on the cultural dimensions of evolutionary struggle in which art intervenes in the conflict of meanings.
Thanks and acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the sculptors in lending their work for this exhibition.
The 2015 exhibition was curated by Dr Rod Mengham in collaboration with advisor Tim Marlow. We are grateful to Mrs. Mary Mochary and the Kasser Mochary Foundation for seed funding the College’s new print portfolio, which supported the continuation of the Sculpture in the Close program in 2017.
