Paul Hobson, Director of the Contemporary Art Society, recommends his favourite exhibition of the week.
26 May – 23 June 2012
23/25 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8DF
Open Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm, or by appointment
Occasionally you see some really distinctive and arresting work and for me, David Altmejd’s new sculptures at Modern Art are just that! Continuing the Canadian artist’s interest in spirited bodies abstracted from architecture, ornament and naturalistic figuration, there are three large sculptures in the gallery, all of which take the format of room-sized boxed and vitrine-like clear Perspex structures in which fantastical, almost spectral, dragon-like creatures are suspended in complex arrangements of symbolic objects and suggestive forms. Legible as representations of mental and biological systems, energy-flows and spirits, these creatures of myth and fantasy appear to both revealed and fixed in architectural prisms and dioramas. Bobbins of coloured cotton threading out from centralised structures suggest cognitive procedures; fine silver chains allude to nervous systems, whereas more visceral processes are rendered through coconut shells, crystals and resin-like substances that flow and pool into schematic channels. This is a stunning show by one of the most interesting artists working internationally today.
Image: David Altmejd, Le ventre, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art.
Let us know what you think at membership@contemporaryartsociety.org