Simon Starling: Concrete Light

Limerick City Gallery of Art is delighted to host a major solo exhibition by Turner Prize winner Simon Starling. This survey exhibition, which is Starling's first major exhibition in Ireland, will present previously existing works exhibited with a newly commissioned site-specific work, Concrete Light. The work references the stone wall tradition particular to the West of Ireland and involves a dry stone wall being constructed in the gallery space, in which specially replicated stones allow the wall to mirror itself.

Readymade for Kunsthalle Bern, 1997, forms a centre piece of the exhibition, in which two aluminium objects, a 'Marin Sausalito' bicycle and a Charles Eames 'Aluminium Group' chair, were reconstructed using the metal from the other. The result is two handcrafted, degraded, mutations of their former manufactured selves, scarred from their form transfer and separated by a sheet of glass which holds a text explanation of the work. The work inverts the notion of the ready made in a simple but labour-intensive act of transmutation. Readymade for Kunsthalle Bern, holds for Starling particular association to Ireland, in the form of reference to Flann O'Brien's novel 'The Third Policeman'.

Starling's innovative research process involves absorbing the histories, environment and social nuances of a locale. He breaks down specific histories which he re-uses and reconstructs, through his evolving transformation of objects. Starling's work playfully explores the intimate relationships between craft, material and technique. His investigations reveal a fascination with process. Starling's reflections on modern manufacturing and traditional crafts show countless nuanced contradictions in the production of a single object. His work explores part utopian vision and part critical. Starling is fascinated by the processes involved in transforming one object or substance into another. He makes objects, installations and pilgrimage-like journeys which draw out an array of ideas about nature, technology and economics. Starling describes his work as 'the physical manifestation of a thought process', revealing hidden histories and relationships.

Born in 1967 in Epsom, England, Simon Starling graduated from the Glasgow School of Art. He won the Turner Prize in 2005 and was short-listed for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2004. He lives in Copenhagen and is Professor of Fine Arts at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt. Starling has exhibited widely including the Bienal de Sao Paulo and the Busan Biennale in 2004. Recent exhibitions include Cuttings at The Power Plant, Toronto and Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations at Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest.

Simon Starling
Concrete Light