Not Clay, but…| Lucy Skaer’s Repetitious Manipulations + Abstractions

SÉRIGNAN, France — Artist Lucy Skaer‘s latest installation La Chasse (meaning ‘The Hunt”) at the Regional Museum of Contemporary Art (MRAC) (March 25 – June 5, 2017) included her multiform installations where sculpture and drawing coalesce. As MRAC writes, her work is the result of a process in which she transforms objects and images, both recognizable and abstract, through manipulations, repetitions and ladder shifts.

The artist operates by sampling, replicas, distortions, quotations, according to encounters, research, and a fascination assumed for the history of art. Inspired by the fertile links that the real maintains with the sublime, Lucy Skaer strives to reveal the very essence of certain objects and materials to give a personal and suggestive interpretation of elements of the past.

Featured image: Lucy Skaer, ‘La Chasse’, 2017, view of the exhibition Mrac Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée, Sérignan, Photography: Aurélien Mole

Skaer works primarily in familiar materials like wood, glass and textile, however, she cunningly transforms the assumed spatial incumbent challenging the viewer’s cognitive perception of the objects.

Paris Art writes:

Nourished by the history of art, [Skaer] dismantle[s] the mechanisms by which we attribute meaning to familiar things.

The show is Skaer’s first in France, and includes works from the past five years as well as new productions, one of which, Eccentric boxes (2016), is the result of a co-production between the MRAC and the Rennes Biennial Incorporated!, MRAC writes.

‘Eccentric Boxes’ (2016) is an installation made in and from the family house of the artist, house that she transforms and moves gradually.

The mahogany boxes feature beautiful bright lapis blue inlays.

The exhibition also features work from Skaer’s Sticks & Stones series comprised of four pairs of mahogany boards, which historically have been exploited from Brazil at the end of the 19th century to build ships and manufacture inexpensive furniture in the United Kingdom.

From this mahogany board loaded with stories, the artist has made eight copies, declined in different materials such as marble, aluminum, bronze or paper mache. Each new sculpture being molded on the previous one, the initial shape of the object has thus gradually evolved, offering a series of strange horizontal sculptures laid on the ground

Read more about the installation here. Below, watch a video of the exhibition (Skaer’s work appears at 4:27).

About the artist: Lucy Skaer is an English artist (Scotland-born in 1975, lives and works in Glasgow) who acquired in a few years an international recognition on the artistic scene. In 2007 she was one of the six artists nominated to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale and in 2009 she was a finalist in the Turner Prize. After his solo exhibitions at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and the Chisenhale Gallery in London, the Kunsthalle Basel devoted him a monographic exhibition in 2009 and the Witte de With in Rotterdam in 2016. She is represented in France by Peter Freeman And in the United States by Murray Guy.

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