Victoria Miro is delighted to present an exhibition in Venice by Conrad Shawcross. Coinciding with the opening of La Biennale di Venezia: The 17th International Architecture Exhibition, The Measures of Change features a number of the artist’s celebrated Fracture sculptures, the debut of a new series of Perimeter Studies sculptures, and prints from a new body of work, Studies for The Patterns of Absence.
Conrad Shawcross creates sculptures and installations that, imbued with an appearance of scientific rationality, explore subjects that lie on the borders of geometry and philosophy, physics and metaphysics. He has gained a global reputation for extending the possibilities of art in the public realm and in dialogue with architecture.
Conceived of especially for the Venice gallery, this exhibition features the most recent examples of the artist’s Fracture sculptures – ethereal, complex geometric forms that seem almost to disappear as they rise up and expand – a new sequence of Perimeter Studies that explore the geometric properties of the five platonic solids, and a new series of prints inspired by the gallery’s waterside location, which highlight the connections between geometry and natural phenomena in the artist’s work.
This exhibition features a number of the artist’s Fracture sculptures in a variety of scales and materials including weathering and stainless steel, and patinated bronze. Borne out of his Paradigms, which are an ongoing exploration of the tetrahedron – a four-sided non-tessellating form and being the simplest of the platonic solids is conceptually the symbol of an indivisible unit of matter – Shawcross’ Fractures are ethereal forms that seem almost to disappear as they rise up and expand. Imbued with references to the manmade and natural worlds, each Fracture contains a central helical stem, a twisting spine that supports a series of branches which in turn support hundreds of triangular leaf-like fragments that dissipate in precise formation.
Explored across various materials, scales and registers of display, the Perimeter Studies have been an integral aspect of Shawcross’ practice over the past decade. This new sequence of ten works, five structural and five solid, explores the geometry and the geometric properties of the platonic solids – the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the cube, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron. The artist explains, ‘The radiant properties of these five solids are very much defined by the fact that they equally divide up the surface of a sphere. What I’ve done here is pushed and pulled and stretched these surfaces to form these crystalline geometric explorations. They’ve been rendered here in weathered steel to form this very scientific shelf in which the geometries can be compared and contrasted, and defined against each other, like musical notes within a score. They gain their gravitas and their meaning through their juxtaposition with each other.’
A number of new prints, each a Study for the Patterns of Absence, have been inspired by the gallery’s canalside location in Venice. Using algorithms to create interference patterns, which are printed in dynamic sequences that move through a chromatic scale of blues, greens and complementary colours, the artist has arrived at a series of works whose optical effects are reminiscent of the shifting reflected light of the sea.
