New Model Army

About

Aloysisus' semi-figurative works often wear tattered old garments that gesture towards notions of feminine identity — the eternal bride, the old bird, the painted lady. We might quickly surmise that they are a riposte to the cock-sure monumentalism of sculptures hewn and erected by men: all those giant embodiments of machismo that populate our plazas and museums are rendered absurd, faltering, unbalanced. Their subversive intelligence chips away at a more recent layer of art history too: they stand in contrapuntal relationship to the virile residues of (mostly male) postminimal artists from the 1970s onwards. In the works before you, the scattering and binding of materials speaks not of testosterone-fuelled action (as it often did to an earlier generation), but of a compulsion to use extant objects as queues for new forms. It is action born of responsibility, desire and attentiveness.