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Terry AdkinsAbbas AkhavanAlighiero BoettiAbraham CruzvillegasTacita DeanJimmie DurhamJean-Luc MoulèneBetye SaarSer SerpasArthur SimmsMichael E. SmithCecilia Vicuña -
In 1971, Alighiero Boetti began to use the phrase ‘Mettere al mondo il mondo’. One translation is ‘giving birth to the world’, but another more prosaic translation is ‘putting the world back into the world’ which implies a way of making art that Boetti followed. Instead of inventing images, constructing forms, or having things fabricated, Boetti took the stuff of the world, rearranged it, and put it back into the world as art. He used stamps, maps, the names and lengths of rivers, the colours of biro pens.
Boetti’s idea of putting the world back into the world is one approach among the many that artists take when transforming used objects, and this exhibition explores the different reasons they do this. -
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In the early 1970s, Cecilia Vicuña left her home in Chile to flee the military dictatorship. She started to make tiny constructions from things she found, calling them ‘Precarios’. For her, such sculptures expressed the fragility of political exile. She makes ‘Precarios’ still, but increasingly they reflect the precariousness of the natural world.
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Also in the early 1970s, Betye Saar began to collect objects from flea markets and build small shrines, drawing from many different cultures’ ideas of spirituality.
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For others in her wake, like Arthur Simms and Terry Adkins, the used object is not just a physical thing. It is charged, and magical, and carries a sense of the lost presence of its former owner.
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Arthur SimmsKing, in Praise of the Father, 2020artist's hair, feathers, rope, wire, wax, wood, red earth, screws, glue100.3 x 152.4 x 114.3 cm.
39 1/2 x 60 x 45 in. -
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Jean-Luc Moulène and Michael E. Smith take a more targeted approach to sourcing their materials, buying up objects that have been collected by other people, rather than assembling whatever is easily to hand. Like Cruzvillegas and Serpas, they combine things in unexpected and poetic ways, and give new life to previously unremarkable objects deemed fit only for landfill.
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Abbas Akhavanstudy for a garden, 2014/2022cupressus variety, cotton string132 x 36 x 30 cm.
52 x 14 x 12 in. -
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Abbas AkhavanIT, 2022-ongoingcast brass, found stick5 x 29 x 3.5 cm.
2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. -
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Tacita Dean reworks her collection of found postcards of Vesuvius.
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Mettere al mondo il mondo: curated by Mark Godfrey
Past viewing_room
