The Zabludowicz Collection has revealed details of four new solo exhibitions of sculpture that it will be presenting this summer. Artists Adriano Costa, Sam Falls, Samara Scott and Michael E. Smith will comprise the line-up, combining new works with pieces from the Collection. The exhibitions will take place simultaneously at the Collection’s North London home. Each artist engages in a distinctive way with the question of how to make sculpture today, while a number of threads can be seen to link their approaches. A central concern is an evocation of the human body and its fragile, messy nature. There is also a sensitivity to the properties of materials and how they encapsulate the passing of time. Open-ended narratives are suggested through surprising and subtle gestures.
Adriano Costa translates the detritus of our culture into a multitude of mysterious compositions. In the installation From My Body Comes, Through Your Body Goes (2009–2012) brightly coloured towels, bronze cast plaques, found umbrellas, gold coated rubber and collaged tourist T-shirts are deftly combined to suggest unspecified symbolic meanings. Presented in the Collection’s Middle Gallery, Costa’s installation will react to the residual domestic traces, such as fireplace and furniture, with new elements produced in situ.
Sam Falls applies his multidisciplinary background to a practice exploring the time-based possibilities of photography, sculpture, painting and video. The centre-pieces of his exhibition in London are large-scale sculptures in copper, marble and powder coated aluminium which, while they may appear colourful, crisp and monumental, contain the potential for ageing. Alongside will be presented five video works from the Final Forever series. For each work the artist appropriates one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s famously lingering shots and couples it with a section of a song by the Velvet Underground. In the month prior to his exhibition, Sam Falls will be participating in Zabludowicz Collection’s 2014 residency programme on the Finnish island of Sarvisalo. Here he will continue his series of works in which large expanses of hand-dyed fabric are exposed to the natural elements, creatin g images that are both abstract and indexical, representative of a specific environment and duration.
Samara Scott lifts textures and sensations directly from the daily flow of images that surround us, addressing head-on our complex and conflicted contemporary experience of the body. For this exhibition Scott is producing a major new installation, utilising large sheets of glass to make ‘tapestries’ that form semi-transparent horizontal surfaces throughout the space, and a large wall mural of magazine images and toothpaste.
Michael E. Smith’s work is enigmatic, thought-provoking and often confounding. His exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection will populate the tiered mezzanine of the former chapel, as well as small side rooms and back corridors. Frequently working with found objects of an abject nature, such as crushed plastic containers, tarred bird feathers, deconstructed computer casing and resin-encrusted clothes, Smith places these fragments in empty expanses, dark recesses or high corners of gallery spaces. By damaging, embellishing or sometimes simply presenting such objects, Smith encourages a confrontation with both their past and present.