The first exhibition in Hayward Gallery's newly reopened HENI Project Space features four recent sculptural acquisitions from the Arts Council Collection by Matthew Darbyshire, Ryan Gander, Amalia Pica and Simon Starling, 25 Jan - 9 Apr 2018.
These newly acquired sculptural works – some of which are exhibited in London for the first time – are concerned in different ways with action and transformation, whether it's a sculpture used to navigate troubled waters, a new form created from once-functional objects, a radically updated version of a classical work, or simply a body at rest.
The shift of materials from one state to another forms a large part of Simon Starling’s work, which he has described as ‘the physical manifestation of a thought process.’ For Project for a Rift Valley Crossing (2015–16), the artist constructed a canoe out of magnesium extracted from the politically charged waters of the Dead Sea, which as he explains is also ‘the most concentrated source of magnesium in the world’. After exhibiting the boat in his solo exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary in 2016, Starling returned it to its source and used it to make the difficult crossing from Israel to Jordan. This work was purchased with funds from the Thornton Bequest, generously given to the nation by the estate of Elfrida Louise Thornton in 1951.
Amalia Pica is concerned with the ways in which art can function as a form of communication. The sculptures in her ongoing series Catachresis are constructed from parts of found objects that have no name of their own, and have instead taken on names for parts of the body. Catachresis #40 (2013) includes the teeth of a rake, legs of a chair and table and head of a screw. The resulting sculptural amalgamation is deliberately absurd. ‘I think of absurdity as a call for complicity’, she explains. ‘If I tell a joke, you either laugh or you don’t. If you laugh, it feels like there’s a moment of complete understanding between us.’