REAL WORLD

REAL WORLD considers what sculpture might be at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the work of six international artists. Our contemporary perception of the world is no longer bounded by the immediate landscape through we move but by a vast network of information that connects personal experience with the shifting borders of geography, history and culture. The very notion of what is «real« - the space we find ourselves sharing with other people and things - has become inextricably linked with the multiple realities of a globalised hyperspace. The art of Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema and Hiroshi Sugito engages with this terrain of proximity and interconnectedness. Their work suggests new artistic attitudes in which indeterminacy, resistance and the convergence of multiple spheres of experience are the new creative conditions for understanding space and the way we inhabit it.

Working in distinctive ways, the artists share an interest in the assembled, modelled or manipulated object which they mix with recycled visual references ranging from remembered scenes to found imagery of sculpture, architecture and design from defined moments in history. In their hands, actual space, historic space and remembered space are collapsed into fluid figures hybrid structures and fractured forms that seem caught in states of continual transformation.

The exhibition presents, for the first time in the UK, new and recent work by the artists including Paul Sietsema«s Empire (2002) - a captivating journey through time, objects and their environment; a new series of monumental paintings by Hiroshi Sugito, and a sculptural installation by Katie Grinnan in which psychedelic figures and magic elixirs melt into starry skies and a sprawling New Age constructivist tower. REAL WORLD is curated by Suzanne Cotter, Senior Curator, Modern Art Oxford.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the Goethe-Institut London, and The Japan Foundation. With thanks to the Embassy of the United States of America, London and ANA (All Nippon Airways Co Ltd).

This fully illustrated book features reproductions of work by the artists, and new essays by writer and critic Michael Archer and curator Suzanne Cotter. Pressetext

REAL WORLD - THE DISSOLVING SPACE OF EXPERIENCE
Kurator: Suzanne Cotter

mit Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema, Hiroshi Sugito