Clay | Adrián Villar Rojas at Serpentine Sackler Gallery

Though all eyes are likely to be on Zaha Hadid’s redesign of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, the inaugural exhibition in the newly opened space by Adrián Villar Rojas, Today We Reboot The Planet (September 28 – November 10, 2013), is more than holding it’s own.

According to Jay Merrick, the Architecture Critic of The Independent, the gunpowder magazine, where Villar Rojas’s site-specific exhibition resides, was only minimally altered in Hadid’s renovation. “The magazine, an encyclopaedia of 18 different brick types, remains much as it was in the early 19th century.” The former ammunition store is a natural venue for Villar Rojas for several reasons. Firstly, he works with brick and unfired clay. He also maintains a studio in an operational, traditional brickworks factory in Rosario, Argentina. The immediacy and rawness of the production process of the factory, which drew Villar Rojas to make his workspace there, is very much alive in the exhibition.

Villar Rojas works with a team of builders, sculptors and engineers, many of whom collaborate with him on a continuing basis and form a sort of mobile, international workshop. Together, they test the limits of clay. In an article for The Guardian, “Adrián Villar Rojas: why I made Kurt Cobain out of clay” (September 18, 2013), Jonathan Jones described the sculpture on view as “relics from an invented antiquity or an imagined future.” He went on to write:

Clay is among the most ancient of art materials. Using a traditional potter’s wheel, Villar Rojas and his team make vases that look like vessels from ancient China. But those objects have survived thousands of years because, after being shaped, they were fired in an oven, making the clay hard. Villar Rojas takes it in a more tragic direction. Nothing he makes is fired, so all of it is doomed. The polluted London air is already corrupting it. “The way we are using clay is super-experimental – because the material is too fragile, because the pieces are difficult to transport, because they are cracking, they deteriorate in a totally disproportionate way,” he says. “I never smash the sculpture to get the cracks. It just happens.”
A kind of ironic pessimism – planning to fail – is a bit of a cliché in contemporary art. Villar Rojas, however, overcomes this through sheer exuberance. The energy and hard toil evident everywhere in the workshop have thrown up a staggering variety of finely realised artefacts.

The gunpowder magazine has a crypt-like feel that fits the fossilized world that Villar Rojas has created. Richard Dormant pointed out in The Telegraph (September 25, 2013):

Nothing that Villar Rojas does in his work is without meaning. The first of the two vaulted gunpowder rooms is filled with his clay sculptures, the accumulation of the past. The second space he leaves empty, apart from a stained-glass window. In other words, there is something sacred about the space in the building where new art will be made and shown in the future. He places his faith in the infinite possibilities of art.

The Guardian produced a must-see video (which is embedded below) that documents the array and volume of sculptures that comprise Today We Reboot The Planet and an interview with Villar Rojas about the show in his London workshop where the work was created.

Villar Rojas is best known for his recent projects at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany, for the Argentine Pavilion at the 54th Venice Art Biennale, the monumental installation in the Jardin Tuileries next to the Musée de Louvre in Paris (2011), and Expo 1, MoMA PS1, New York (2013). His work is included in major collections internationally.

Amy Albracht is a General Editor at CFile.

above images: Adrián Villar Rojas, Today We Reboot The Planet, Images courtesy of Serpentine Sackler Gallery © 2013 Jörg Baumann

above images: Adrián Villar Rojas, studio, London, 2013. Images courtesy Serpentine Sackler Gallery © Jamie Smith

The Guardian’s Adrián Villar Rojas at London’s new Serpentine Sackler gallery – video preview, 2013, presented by Jonathan Jones and produced by Carmeron Robertson

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Visit Adrián Villar Rojas at Marian Goodman Gallery

Visit Serpentine Sackler Gallery

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