Phyllida Barlow ~ 21 october - 20 november 2005
studio 1.1 london e2		text | images
about  present show  past shows  press  gallery details  contact		untitled: demo It is a great pleasure to welcome Phyllida Barlow back to studio1.1 to show a new site-specific work. At the time of her first exhibiting with us in 2003, a review of the show by Sarah Kent referred to her ‘slacker sculpture’. This is a clue to the lightness and contemporaneity of her work but gives no inkling of its seriousness. There is a sprezzatura or effortless grace in the apparent casualness of elements bound and tied; an excitement in the way she lashes these constructions to the floor or each other as though anticipating a twister. Her penetrating intelligence shifts and proposes a raft of ideas and allusions, quotations and fragments washed up from somewhere in the real world. An effortless theatricality, an actorless mise en scene where the setting itself drives the drama forward. Forms are questioned, half shaped into images, elements recur; there are stages, platforms, barriers, piers and jetties. The viewer’s imagination teeters like little Em’ly on the edge of the sea in ‘David Copperfield’. And the red of cloth or tape, soaked in paint suggesting blood while resolutely remaining paint (if nonetheless congealed). A balancing act seems to characterize Barlow’s practice. How can a thing be itself while simultaneously suggesting something else? Ideas take shape, are built and dismantled, a determined flux of being as pure form shifts back into image. A cogent and manifest intelligence, rare in contemporary art. A monograph of her work is published by Black Dog. Studio 1.1 will also be showing Phyllida Barlow at our space in the: Zoo Art Fair 20th - 24th October 2005 Studio 1.1