BLOCK
12.02.2015 – 28.05.2015 Pi Artworks London I UK
An artist with the training of an architect, Mehmet Ali Uysal instinctively likes to toy with his audiences’ preconception of the gallery space as well as how they move around it. To do this he creates large-scale installations that are integrated into the architecture of the gallery within which they are situated. Subsequently, the walls’ layers of cement and plaster no longer function as fixed and intractable protecting structures, but rather they become soft and malleable strips. Acting as the artist’s medium, these once-solid forms begin to mimic the skin of a dissected body that is flexible enough to be literally pinched, scored, parted, ripped, folded or torn off. In previous work, anonymous bodies try to break free from underneath the elasticated walls (Untitled, 2010) or clothes pegs of varying sizes pinch the surface (Untitled, 2013). In the Peel series (2012), sections of plaster are separated from the bare bricks underneath, contorting into spiral forms or becoming like a book’s pages about to be turned.
Today, the process of creating, exhibiting and perceiving contemporary art is deeply intertwined with the austere, white-walled gallery space that continuously erases traces of its own history in order to appear impervious. Uysal both plays on and inverts this tradition by interfering directly with the structure of the white cube and deconstructing both its formal characteristics and inherited traditions. The juxtaposition of gallery and work is dissolved and the relationship of one to the other is rendered fluid.
The work created for BLOCK retains the artist’s recognizably mischievous approach, but takes the form of discrete, sculptural objects. Instead of grand gestures integrated into the space, the viewer is confronted by contorted and deformed concrete pillars, stone blocks and square wall sections that are strewn across the floor as well as pinned to the wall for appraisal like caught animals. Mehmet Ali’s subject matter, the contemporary art gallery, has been cut up and transformed into a series of specimens disengaged from their original context.
Bir yanıt yazın