FREE RADICALS

The exhibition Free Radicals takes its title from and features the 1958 film of the same name by New Zealand artist Len Lye.

Free Radicals has been described by Lye’s biographer Roger Horrock's as "a dance of natural energies" and it is the intangible ‘natural energies’ of the works of the artists exhibited with Lye's film that is the premise for the exhibition. Lye’s abstract imagery, driven along by tribal drum music, always maintains a strong sense of physical intensity. Lines stretch, spin, wiggle, and sway and describe the intangible forces at play within the works of the exhibited artists, whether Mark Titchner’s belief systems or more specifically ‘orgones’, Kit Craig’s thought forms, Nick Laessing’s free energy, Eva Rothschild’s or Francis Upritchard’s modern voodoo, Simon Starlings conceptual story telling or perhaps in the case of Anna Barham’s light sculpture, the relationship is more formal; random flickers of light recalling the rhythms and variations of Lye’s particles in space. Lye’s film soundtrack, a field recording of the Bagirmi Tribe of West and Central Africa, lends itself as a soundtrack to the exhibition further defining the intention to quantify the “natural energies” or ‘Free Radicals’.

FREE RADICALS

Künstler: Anna Barham, Kit Craig, Nick Laessing, Len Lye, Eva Rothschild, Simon Starling, Mark Titchner, Francis Upritchard