Geographies of Dust and Air

About

Mary Mary is delighted to announce a group exhibition, Geographies of Dust and Air focusing on sculptural works which offer a slightness, an abstraction or a re-working of material, and yet have a depth of surface and texture where forms seem pared down. To varying degrees the works here defy their innate materiality or facilitate the qualities of such to re- focus our expectations of them, offering up multi-faceted sculptural forms.

Many works deal with light, shadow, transparency and fragility, offering a transience in our experience of them. We are confronted by sculpture which emphasises light and space as much as ‘solid’ sculptural forms. Our experience of them becomes filmic and cinematic, slight, vast and transformative. Changing as we look, we find in these works multiple influences and themes, amongst them; cinema, textiles, painting (the majority of works here are also wall based) sculpture, light and dark, interior and exterior.

Leonor Antunes practice deals with questions of space, measurement and compositional structure, resulting in objects of extreme intricacy. Often dividing and demarcating space, playing with transparency, translucency, intimacy and architecture. Presented here is the work, folded back against the pillars (2008) consisting of flat stripes of leather and cord, which take the proportions of the folding windows that exist on the Villa E 1027 designed by Eileen Gray in Roquebrune on the French Riviera. As if each piece corresponded to one window, the two parts of the piece are identical, but with different threads inserted into each. The leather strips have cuts, so that the flat, opaque surface becomes transparent, like a screen or a window that can be looked through.

Sara Barker’s (whose 2016 work lends its title to this exhibition) work alludes to drawing in three dimensions and rest somewhere between painting and sculpture. Looking to the work of Matisse and Bonnard, Barker sees paint as acting sculpturally, with colour able to direct form, creating volume and depth. In her most recent works, Barker’s constructions have become more compact, complex and layered, with multiple materials interlocking and over-lapping to create a web of lines and surfaces. There are anthropological associations in her work, the idea that the works ‘grow’ out of themselves as if branches of a tree, where each section aids the development of the next.

Within Germaine Kruip’s practice there is a strong focus on ephemerality and where it condenses into a physical or visual moment. Kruip’s works attempt to reach abstraction through geometry, via fleeting, brief, uncontrollable phenomena such as light and the passage of time; her works, seemingly other-worldly. Presented here are two works, including a wall-mounted mirror piece, made in India. The mirrors are polished by hand with a ritualistic quality to their production. Previously only circular mirrors have been produced, but here Kruip has arranged for squares and now a triangle to be made, further exploring the language of abstraction and its connection with ritual.

Recently citing ‘I felt a need to make my sculptures even more fragile, more transparent, almost floating’ Manuela Leinhoß presents three works here, each in varying degrees a nod to her interest in the dissolution of form. Each is produced through a process which renders sculptural forms fragile and ambigious. Her work does not ‘explain’ itself, as if never fully realised, secretive, rather they are ‘almost objects.’ Ironically in the exhibition, these are the only works installed as ‘conventional’ sculptural objects on the floor. Rendered in translucent plastic, plaster, clay, papier-mâché, wire and glass, Leinhoß seeks to produce fleeting objects that offer differing degrees of opening and perviousness.

Bojan Šarčević’s practise exists outside classification, with his works at once being referential but autonomous, fragile and ornamental, architectural yet open, abstract and narrational. Moving freely between various media – sculpture, film, photography, Šarčević both employs, denies and manipulates his materials’ qualities, offering signifiers to multiple references and research. There is a strongly architectural character and physicality to his work which emphasize the play of symmetry, the relations of scale, material and transparency, and the harmony of materials and forms.

The gallery wishes to thank all the artists for their contributions and their galleries; Air de Paris, The Approach, Galerie Micky Schubert, Raebervonstenglin, Modern Art & Stuart Shave.