Conrad Shawcross: After the Explosion, Before the Collapse

About

Victoria Miro is delighted to announce an exhibition of new works by Conrad Shawcross. After the Explosion, Before the Collapse marks a significant development of the artist’s Paradigm sculptures and features two new mechanical works in addition to a unique new sequence of photographic prints created by firing a laser through a series of faults in glass fragments. United by an aesthetic akin to that of scientific models, the abstract works continue to deal with notions of time, entropy and disappearance.

Conrad Shawcross’s Paradigms are an ongoing exploration of the tetrahedron, geometrically a four-sided non-tessellating form and conceptually the symbol of an indivisible unit of matter. As a building block, the tetrahedron behaves as an irrational number, creating sequences that in theory, extend into infinity without repetition. Major examples include Paradigm, 2016, a permanent installation commissioned by the Francis Crick Institute in King’s Cross, which is one of the tallest public sculptures in central London. The title of the works refers to the notion of the paradigm shift – a leap of imagination that jolts scientific enquiry forwards and collapses pre-existing notions of what is true – identified by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996).