1 May–15 June 2013 Artist's Talk: Tuesday 30 April, 6–6.30pm Preview: Tuesday 30 April, 6.30–8.30pm
The Showroom presents a new exhibition by Dutch artist Falke Pisano. Sculpture, video, print, drawing and installation work are brought together in the latest iteration of Pisano’s The Body in Crisis series (2011- ), an ongoing investigation into the human body at historical moments of crisis. It will be the most significant presentation of her work in the UK to date.
Pisano’s research centres on six historical moments: Pergamon 199; Amsterdam 1571; Paris 1793; Mons 1915; Paris 1974; Houston 1984. Each marks a change on body experience (be these institutional, administrative or physical); from the Roman theory of the four ‘humors’, to the shift from feudalism to industrialisation, to the experience of shellshock in the First World War, to the privatisation of prison labour. Histories of housing, medicine, architecture, gender, art, economic and social environments intersect within Pisano’s research.
The backbone of the exhibition is the work Structure For Repetition (not Representation) (2011- ): a large-scale wooden and fabric structure, which is both a sculpture in its own right and also provides a display architecture for images and text. Two video works explore “bodies in conditions of hunger, poverty, war and exclusion”. Archival visual material and texts illustrate structures that have been used to present and represent the body at different historical moments.
A limited edition print made for the exhibition, My Body is Coming Back to Me (2013), will be on sale at The Showroom.
Falke Pisano: The Body in Crisis is supported by Arts Council England, The Embassy of the Netherlands, Mondriaan Fund and The Showroom Supporters. With thanks to Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam and Hollybush Gardens, London
For more information, or high-resolution images, please contact Eve Smith at eve@theshowroom.org or call 020 7724 4300.
The Showroom 63 Penfold Street London NW8 8PQ t +44 (0)20 7724 4300
"I use light as a material to work the medium of perception, basically the work really has no object because perception is the object. And there is no image because I am not interested in associative thought."
- James Turrell
PIPPY HOULDSWORTH GALLERY, London presents RUTH CLAXTON - Specular Spectacular
7 June - 6 July 2013
Specular Spectacular is a complex maze that occupies the 'centre stage' of the gallery.
Interconnecting structures hold mirrors that both become part of and reflect the installation itself.
Worlds within worlds are housed here, and inhabited by found figurines that are themselves swallowed up by amorphous reflective masks.
Icelandic nature is prominent in Eliasson's work, and his artistic relationship with it often involves collection or documentation that is scientific in tone. The country becomes a sensory laboratory where ideas can be developed and evolved into art, as evidenced in the multiple photographic series that would seem to witness a near compulsive need for collecting.
