Monday to Saturday 11am – 6pm First Thursday 7 August till 9pm First Thursday 4 September till 9pm Open House Sunday 21 September 11am – 6pm Closed Bank Holiday Monday 25 August
Bloomberg SPACE presents the first public exhibition of new collaborative works in glass by two of the UK’s leading sculptors, Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon. Both sculptors have gained an international reputation for their independent practice whilst simultaneously experimenting together to develop collaborative works. Rarely exhibited, the collaborative series are created together over long periods of time without a specific deadline, thereby enabling a rare opportunity for an open exchange of ideas and processes.
The two new series are fabricated entirely from glass using a variety of techniques from moulding to hand-blown forms. The works were made at CIRVA, an experimental glass workshop dedicated to collaborations with artists in Marseille, France.
Days Of The Week is a series of seven floor based pieces. A sheet of glass transects each of the works horizontally becoming a film or surface on which things float or glide and beneath which things melt or coagulate. Evoking a strong sense of landscape and forgotten time four of the pieces incorporate the repeated motif of a glass mammoth and a dark, geometric shape reminiscent of some kind of futuristic building, craft or space oddity. In the other three works elements related to their supporting feet sit on top of the surface like bubbles or ejecta slipping through a viscous matrix.
The galleries at Bloomberg SPACE have been opened up to create a cavernous front gallery in which the low lying works will float as if stranded within a lagoon, exaggerating their sense of landscape, horizon and place. This siting of work will also create a strong and beautiful relation to the light and material qualities of the architecture: the one echoing the other.
In the back gallery the artists will install a series of Bouteilles De Sorciere (Witches Bottles) which cling precariously in individual sealed boxes to the sides of the balustrade in seeming defiance of the vertiginous atrium that towers above and below them. Partly captured as museum displayed artifacts, partly incorporated into the steel and glass fabric of the modernist building, these beguiling vessels with their beautiful silvered glass surface reflect one’s gaze, distorting the viewer and their surroundings. Simple yet powerful, these mesmerising works tread a delicate line between playful and haunting, suggesting that what might be held inside is both magical and dangerous.
New texts by Jon Wood and Jeremy Millar will be published to accompany the exhibition.
