ART CITIES:London-Mat Collishaw
An important member of the Young British Artists, Mat Collishaw creates work that confronts issues of moral ambiguity with formally stunning and alluring imagery. Coupling references to art history, literature and the Victorian era with modern imaging technology, the artist renders powerful images and objects that often re-contextualize the impact of traditionally disturbing and sinister subject matter. At once poetic and morbid, his sculptures, installations and photo-based works expose elements of beauty within the darkest fantasies, blurring the lines between seduction and repulsion, observation and exploitation, reality and artifice.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Blain|Southern Gallery Archive
Mat Collishaw in “The Centrifugal Soul”, his solo exhibition at Blain|Southern Gallery in London, presents new sculpture, installation and paintings. Drawing on various forms of illusion, the exhibition explores ideas of superficial truth and the erosive effect of our primal urges for visual supremacy. The core of the exhibition is “The Centrifugal Soul” (2016), a zoetrope-sculpture that plays into Geoffrey Miller’s theory that the human tendency for making art stems from the natural instincts of reproduction. “His theory is that we do a little dance, sing a song, tell a story – whatever it takes, just to indicate to the women that we have what it takes! We can build a fire, a shelter, but women were like, ‘what else have you got?” The work features dozens of tiny sculpted birds of paradise performing elaborate mating dances while flowers burst into bloom, offering a captivating demonstration of how aesthetic diversity has evolved through sexual selection and also reflects the artist’s ongoing examination of our insatiable appetite for visual stimulation. “Albion” is a new installation that takes as its subject the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, Nottingham, a centuries-old tree which since the Victorian era has been supported by an elaborate system of scaffolding. Collishaw’s near life-size rotating image of the oak is a ghost-like apparition generated by laser scanning. The image represents a living object which is trapped in perpetuity to present the illusion of life. A new body of work continues the examination of visual power play, 12 trompe l’oeil paintings of British garden birds tethered to perches reference the 17th Century fashion for commissioning portraits of prestige pets. The colorful graffiti-tagged walls against which the birds struggle to stand outprovide a contemporary example of aesthetic boasting as a form of sexual signalling.
Info: Blain|Southern Gallery, 4 Hanover Square, London, Duration: 7/4-27/5/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, www.blainsouthern.com
