We are pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures and photographs
by Richard Wentworth previewing at 52-54 Bell Street. This is his sixth solo
show at the gallery with his last show in 1999.
Richard Wentworth has developed a 35-year career out of being an alchemist
of the everyday, a connoisseur of the commonplace, an anthropologist who
repeatedly sees the world around him and everything in it, for the first time. Yet
he is also a ‘nosy-parker’ with an insatiable fascination to create provocative
object poetry that “exposes the quirky peculiarities of our culture,” states Nicholas
Logsdail. His work and exuberant personality are intertwined and
interdependent as he continues to question the traditional definition of
sculpture. By manipulating found objects, his effortless and light-handed
approach subverts their original function and challenges our understanding of
conventional systems of classification. This can be seen both in its formal
understanding and our own internal system of logging objects and their
meanings. Consider the work, Mirror, Mirror 2003, how might we think of
different language dictionaries sitting alongside each other and the multi-lingual
conversations that begin within this new argumentative proximity, a new world
amp that overpowers you as if on the brink of collapse. [See above illustration]
Wentworth’s work is far from illustrative, as it thrives on the multi-layering of
meanings, word plays and associations. These sculptural-equations play with the
juxtaposition of obscure objects to form a new kind of algebra. Tantamount,
2005, includes a bale of straw that was specially commissioned at an irregular 6ft
diameter to represent the harvest of an acre of land, which in turn was
conceived as it represented a day’s work - ploughing a field. Here however such
historicism is held captive within the constraints of modernity – a tensile crash
barrier. “I adore etymologies,” cites Wentworth, “the fact that words have all had a
life and a history, they’re all second-hand, but when we speak we conjoin them in
totally new ways.”
Read moreMode, Module, Modular, 2004 investigates human resourcefulness and co-
incidence as the pairing of a Charles Eames coat hook, a symbol of modernity
and a traditional French wooden wine crate coalesce. The joyous play of
coloured ball against cut hole seems to form the rationale of a child’s game, yet
both elements remain simply enigmatic. “He always wants the object to carry so
much meaning,” acknowledges Jon Thompson of Goldsmiths College, London “It
has to do the work of language. This goes way beyond the visual and the formal into
the realm of pœsis.
Word play and language remain integral ingredients in, If Only, 2004 - a phrase
of conditional optimism that can also be taken from the French word for bottle
rack, If, which can be derived from the history of the peg, an object that began
life as a young sapling branch of a Yew tree. This ingenious flippancy of
inappropriate materials and calculated ease acknowledges the fact that we all
make little sculptures everyday by piling the dishes for the washing up or holding
open the book with a boot.
Invited to create a work at Felbrigg Hall for ’Contemporary Art in Historic
Places’ a collaborative initiative conceived by Commissions East with English
Heritage and the National Trust, Wentworth responded with 14 Rooms
Upended, 2005. At Felbrigg, one of the finest 17th century houses in East Anglia,
numerous looking glasses and mirrors recall how light was once so precious that
people learned to play with it before it could escape. Celebrating an era
predating the arrival of electric lighting at Felbrig, Wentworth inserts mirrors –
part reflective, part transparent – into both the formal and utilitarian spaces of
the house, exploring the intricacies of it’s interiors and the ways that light plays
tricks on us. 14 Rooms Upended is installed at Felbrigg Hall, Norwich until
October 30th. www.commissionseast.org.uk
Richard Wentworth has had numerous solo exhibitions most recently “Richard
Wentworth” at Tate Liverpool 2005 and ‘Faux Amis - Richard Wentworth and
Eugene Atget’, The Photographer’s Gallery, London, 2001. His work has been
shown in numerous institutions worldwide including, Tate Modern, Serpentine
Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Hayward Gallery, all in London; the Israel Museum,
Jerusalem; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Castello di Rivoli,
Museo d’arte Contemporanea, Torino, Italy; Irish Museum of Modern Art,
Dublin; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Musée d’Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany.
Richard Wentworth also participated in ‘Absolute Generation’ an exhibition as
part of the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003 and the British Pavilion of the Sao Paulo
Biennale, Brazil, 2004. Forthcoming exhibitions include; a site-specific installation
for Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk, England, July 2005, (Hi)story, Kunstmuseum Thun,
Switzerland, Oct 2005; and “Permanent Instability” at the Istanbul Museum of
Modern Art, September 2005.
Richard became Master of the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford in 2004 and was
awarded the Mark Rothko Memorial (1974) and the Berlin DAAD Fellowship
(1993/94). He now lives between Oxford and London.
