Skarstedt is pleased to announce Sculpture, a group exhibition featuring iconic works by George Condo, Willem de Kooning, Eric Fischl, Alberto Giacometti, KAWS, Martin Kippenberger, Joan Miró, Juan Muñoz, Rosemarie Trockel and Rebecca Warren. Tracing the modes of portraying the figure, Sculpture brings together visions of human and animal form, revealing the tension between mental and corporeal dimensions, extraversion and reflection, body and soul. Engaged in an internal contemplation or looking out towards the viewer in open interaction, the works explore the ways in which a sculpture can create and transform the space around it, choreographing the spectator’s movement and summoning opposing senses of belonging or alienation, affection or alarm.
Gazing upward, the figure of Eli Lotar by Alberto Giacometti seems to inhabit a separate, impermeable realm. Smaller than life-size, the work presents the sitter at a distance, perhaps as he appeared to the artist in the studio. Reflecting Giacometti’s continued preoccupation with situating the figure in space, Buste d’homme assis (Lotar III) reveals the artist’s unwavering search for veracity of visual experience, the process of re-discovering the sitter in every moment, independent of prior knowledge of the subject.
Drawing towards the viewer from the edge of the plinth, Large Torso (1974) by Willem de Kooning portrays a human form in the process of becoming. Registering the electrifying complex of traces of the movement of de Kooning’s hands and wrists, the work presents the intricate tactile surface reminiscent of Giacometti’s late sculptures. Raising the arms, the figure seems to emphasise the significance of gesture and touch, projecting the sense of movement palpable in its core and surface. As painter and art critic Andrew Forge writes, “The gestures, the rolling, pinching, gouging, flinging actions that one is continually reading as one moves around each piece are not agitations of the surface of the piece but rather the crests of violent actions that go to its very centre.” (A. Forge, “de Kooning’s Sculpture”, Willem de Kooning: Sculpture, New York, 1996, p. 37)
Poised and elegant, the tall figure in Toto (2012) delineates the bulging curves of female body characteristic of Rebecca Warren’s artistic language. Operating in a nuanced dialogue with sculptures by Giacometti and de Kooning, Warren merges their existential gravity with the animated presence of a contemporary female figure. Cast in bronze and hand-painted in tones of pastel blue, green and pink the sculpture flaunts its dynamic surface quality. Intermittently suggesting facial features, sensuous curves, or items of clothing, the work presents dynamic visions of a body from every new angle. As Bice Curriger described sculptures from this period: “Walking around these slender, compact sculptures, our perception is particularly challenged by their metamorphoses of form. A constantly mutating narrative, with pictures succeeding one another as if in a kaleidoscope.” (B. Curiger, Rebecca Warren: Evert Aspect of Bitch Magic, Fuel, London, 2012, p.17).
Positioned high on the wall, Juan Muñoz’s protagonists in Three Laughing at One (2000) appear united in their amusement with the spectacle unfolding beneath. Looking up towards the sculpture, one feels present in the scene, led to a bodily as well as visual experience of the work. Transforming the gallery space into a kind of arena, the work engages the viewer as a participant, simultaneously inviting and rejecting contact. As the artist noted, “Some of the best figurative sculptures seem to be aware of the impossibility of looking alive and aware of the boundaries they can occupy. The most successful ones are the ones that state those limits, the space between being just a sculpture and the man walking down the street. Not for a split second can you confuse one with the other.” (Juan Muñoz quoted in Juan Muñoz, exh. cat., Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2001-02, p. 42)
