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Lucy Skaer
Harlequin Is As Harlequin
Does
Courtesy
of murray Guy, New York
LUCY
SKAER
Harlequin Is As Harlequin
Does
18
February to 24 March 2012
Opening
reception: Saturday, February 18 from 6 to 8pm
Murray Guy is very pleased to
announce our first solo exhibition with Lucy
Skaer, Harlequin Is As Harlequin Does,
comprising new sculptures and silkscreened
photographs.
In
the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, the Harlequin (or Arlecchino)
was a wild and rogue servant - a fool who lacked money and
food, and whose comic and cowardly antics interrupted and
frequently unraveled the plot. Originally wearing a
peasant’s shirt and long trousers, the Harlequin evolved into
a highly recognizable figure with a tight-fitting outfit
decorated with triangles and diamonds. This geometric
“harlequin” pattern both designates an individual - a figure
composed of a repertoire of familiar gestures - and a graphic
scheme that suggests an infinitely expandable
décor.
Skaer
suspends various materials - copper, tin, resin,
celluloid, bronze, brass, mahogany, a coin collection -
within or underneath harlequin-like surfaces. Solid
copper ingots are sliced diagonally to form a series of
triangles, while salvaged mahogany is carved and polished into
emerald-cut forms with triangular facets; old coins and small
brass miniatures of Brancusi’s Newborn are cast in
tin prisms, and piles of 35mm film frames are submerged in
resin. As ostensive definitions of “Harlequin,” these
sculptures are like figures that act, interrupt, deflect, and
solicit. Each has the pretense of a narrative: the
mahogany, for example, is over a century old; it was salvaged
from a riverbed in Belize where it had sunk while in transit
to the UK. (Belize was a former British colony, and
mahogany was a staple in Victorian furniture - furniture that
Skaer has altered and animated in many previous
projects.)
Amongst the sculptures Skaer will present a new
series of photographs that depict Leonora Carrington’s house
in Mexico City. Showing only its rather ordinary exterior,
these photographs have been screenprinted over with grey
triangles and planes that highlight and obscure various
details. Skaer has worked with Carrington in the past,
producing a short film of her hands in 2006 entitled The
Joker. Her previous interest had less to do with
Carrington’s surrealist paintings and more with her continued
survival - the seemingly astonishing fact of simultaneity,
that Skaer and Carrington (who famously dated Max Ernst) could
be alive and producing work at the same moment.
Following Carrington’s recent death, these new photographs
emphasize a relationship between inside and outside, narrative
and image; like the sculptures, they are a conceit for the
possibility that an exterior form might (or might not) reflect
some pregnant interior history.
Lucy
Skaer (b. 1975 Cambridge, UK) recently presented a major
public commission in Leeds, England. Entitled Film
for an Abandoned Projector, she produced a film for an
abandoned 35mm Kalee projector in Leeds’ former Lyric Theatre
(a site which is currently used as a church by Zimbabwean
immigrants.) Reanimating the cinematic space, Skaer
treated the projector as a technological object whose memory
or unconscious could be sounded out by her film’s continuous
flow of images. A new version of this film - which Skaer
altered by removing the center of each frame - is currently on
view in Scene, Hold, Ballast, an exhibition of
Skaer’s work at the SculptureCenter, New York, through March
18. (Grouped into distinct “scenes,” many of these
cutout celluloid frames appear in the sculptures at Murray
Guy.) Skaer’s work can also be seen at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, where her film installation Flash in the
Metropolitan, which was made in collaboration with
Rosalind Nashashibi, is on view through August 2012. On
February 28, Skaer will give a talk about her recent work at
the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New
York.
In addition to her exhibition at the
SculptureCenter, Skaer will have a solo exhibition opening in
July 2012 at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. Recent solo
exhibitions include A Boat Used as a Vessel,
Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; The Siege, Chisenhale
Gallery, London; Lucy Skaer, The Fruitmarket Gallery,
Edinburgh; Rachel, Peter, Caitlin, John, Location
One, New York, and Art Unlimited, Art | 42 Basel; and Art Now:
Pygmalion Event, Tate Britain, London. Recent
group exhibitions include Elles, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris; Intensif-Station, K21 Kunstsammlung
Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Leopards in the
Temple, SculptureCenter, New York; For the blind man
in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t
there, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and When
Things Cast No Shadow, The 5th Berlin Biennial. In
2009, Skaer was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, and in 2007,
she represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice
Biennale.
MURRAY GUY
453
West 17 Street
New
York, NY 10011
T: +1
212.463.7372
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