Sarah Lucas, Julian Simmons
13 Jun - 31 Jul 2014
Julian Simmons, Sarah Lucas
Excusado Revisitado (Portrait Of Sarah)
c-print
124 x 84 cm / 49 x 33"
Excusado Revisitado (Portrait Of Sarah)
c-print
124 x 84 cm / 49 x 33"
Julian Simmons
Realidad P. 110-111
Inkjet print, carbon black pigment on paper
231 x 328 cm / 91 x 129"
Realidad P. 110-111
Inkjet print, carbon black pigment on paper
231 x 328 cm / 91 x 129"
SARAH LUCAS, JULIAN SIMMONS
TITTIPUSSIDAD
13 June - 31 July 2014
Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to announce the publication of TITTIPUSSIDAD, a new book documenting Sarah Lucas’s odyssey to Mexico in the spring of 2012 and published by Sadie Coles HQ. The book has been conceived, designed and edited by Julian Simmons. Encyclopaedic in size and scope, TITTIPUSSIDAD traces Lucas’s time in Mexico from a trip to a brick factory in the Valley of Oaxaca (to source bricks to make plinths), to the creation of the sculptures, to their final exhibition at the Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli. This exhibition marked a significant development in Lucas’s art, as her NUD sculptures – stuffed tights twisted into abstract contortions – developed into playful and perverse anthropomorphic characters.
Combining the genres of exhibition catalogue, diary, photographic essay and epic poem, TITTIPUSSIDAD unfolds a vivid and nostalgic account of the trip to Mexico. Interweaving colour and black-and-white photographs, Simmons has produced an unparalleled study into the way in which Lucas’s life informs and shapes her art. Each chapter focuses on a separate work in a sequence of close-up black-and-white shots in dramatic chiaroscuro, interspersed with images from Mexican streets, bars and houses. The images explore the different figures – huddling or sprawling, with breast- like appendages and bulbous limbs – with an almost pornographic intensity, scrutinising their surface textures and their variously firm and flaccid structures.
The book features a series of conversations with Lucas’s friends - interwoven to create a revealing and intimate dialogue with the artist about the making of the series. The tone and typography of the words shift, taking us from poetic musings to explanations of the works and their titles. From the prologue, which offers an account of the Dadaesque wordplay of Lucas’s titles, to the ecclesiastical-style images of the installation at the Museo Diego Rivera, TITTIPUSSIDAD provides an emotive account of a pivotal moment in the artist’s life and career.
REALIDAD | 69 minutes
Easter 2012, continuous threats of serious aftershocks.
We fly into Mexico-City the day after a massive magnitude-8 earthquake hit Mexico - originating on a fault-line in Oaxaca, our next destination. In fact before we left England we were thinking “shit should we go!!”
The film REALIDAD was taken alongside my photographic documentation of a series of sculptures and cigarette-drawings made by Sarah Lucas, for an exhibition to be installed among the pre-hispanic artefacts of Anahuacalli - the Museo Diego Rivera in Mexico City.
We arrived in Oaxaca a month before the show was to open. We needed to find a place to live and work, gather the raw materials, and make the works – whatever they might be, there was no plan.
In the day I was assisting in making the sculptures, test plinths, and mainly photographing the sculptures as they were completed. This photographic evidence in 2013 became the book TITTIPUSSIDAD.
Oaxaca is where Sarah’s NUD sculptures suddenly became truly anthropomorphic. The first of these, REALIDAD, also became the name for this film.
The meditation for these sculptures, were the objects we had seen in Anahuacalli, the active transformative ingredient, was Mezcal. At the start of this film, Tit-Teddy is credited as having a starring role – which he does, at the end of the film the largest credit goes to Mezcal. This distilled agave spirit, fuelled many of the works; Mezcal is almost hallucinogenic, certainly psychotropic to an extent, the mysterious cactus intent is transferred by it - Mexicans speak of Mezcal as a person.
Each day our house in which we worked - sometimes naked due to intense heat, would slowly accrue a bunch of friends. In the evenings we would walk with feet black from volcanic dust, down into Oaxaca crazy with fireworks, to a restaurant, a party, or the local Mezcal bar. With the day’s photography done, these were the gritty, low-light, noisy environments in which I captured most of this film.
This is a record of ‘the other side’, of in a way, one of Sarah’s great assets - to speak freely with moments of genius, and so to likewise encourage the spirit of others in her company.
I intentionally took only a few photographs of Sarah making the sculptures - I didn’t want my observation to affect her thought process, or so for the sculptures to look different than they might have otherwise. The same is true of shooting this film, there are only a few instances here of Sarah sculpting. In any-case most of the stimulating evidence of creation is in the formation of ideas through conversations, rather than the silence of thoughts in the head when making.
There is a film within a film here. Not knowing what to expect as we entered a ‘brick factory’ in the Oaxaca valley, there emerged something anthropological in its importance. Men crafting mud into the building blocks of whole houses - floor tiles, wall bricks, ceiling slabs, roof tiles, and more, the scene looked 100’s if not 1000’s of years old. The footage is valuable not only in its instructional impression, but also as a record of a way of practice that possibly will not last another generation, or even half a generation.
A few days before our departure the nearby volcanoPopocatepetl started chuffing heavily, villages were evacuated, the airport was on high alert, this place from start to finish had been one hell of a weird hub of energy.
REALIDAD along with TITTIPUSSIDAD is a rare combination of film and book that describes an intense period of Sarah Lucas, at work, and at life!
Julian Simmons | Suffolk UK | 5 June 2014
TITTIPUSSIDAD
13 June - 31 July 2014
Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to announce the publication of TITTIPUSSIDAD, a new book documenting Sarah Lucas’s odyssey to Mexico in the spring of 2012 and published by Sadie Coles HQ. The book has been conceived, designed and edited by Julian Simmons. Encyclopaedic in size and scope, TITTIPUSSIDAD traces Lucas’s time in Mexico from a trip to a brick factory in the Valley of Oaxaca (to source bricks to make plinths), to the creation of the sculptures, to their final exhibition at the Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli. This exhibition marked a significant development in Lucas’s art, as her NUD sculptures – stuffed tights twisted into abstract contortions – developed into playful and perverse anthropomorphic characters.
Combining the genres of exhibition catalogue, diary, photographic essay and epic poem, TITTIPUSSIDAD unfolds a vivid and nostalgic account of the trip to Mexico. Interweaving colour and black-and-white photographs, Simmons has produced an unparalleled study into the way in which Lucas’s life informs and shapes her art. Each chapter focuses on a separate work in a sequence of close-up black-and-white shots in dramatic chiaroscuro, interspersed with images from Mexican streets, bars and houses. The images explore the different figures – huddling or sprawling, with breast- like appendages and bulbous limbs – with an almost pornographic intensity, scrutinising their surface textures and their variously firm and flaccid structures.
The book features a series of conversations with Lucas’s friends - interwoven to create a revealing and intimate dialogue with the artist about the making of the series. The tone and typography of the words shift, taking us from poetic musings to explanations of the works and their titles. From the prologue, which offers an account of the Dadaesque wordplay of Lucas’s titles, to the ecclesiastical-style images of the installation at the Museo Diego Rivera, TITTIPUSSIDAD provides an emotive account of a pivotal moment in the artist’s life and career.
REALIDAD | 69 minutes
Easter 2012, continuous threats of serious aftershocks.
We fly into Mexico-City the day after a massive magnitude-8 earthquake hit Mexico - originating on a fault-line in Oaxaca, our next destination. In fact before we left England we were thinking “shit should we go!!”
The film REALIDAD was taken alongside my photographic documentation of a series of sculptures and cigarette-drawings made by Sarah Lucas, for an exhibition to be installed among the pre-hispanic artefacts of Anahuacalli - the Museo Diego Rivera in Mexico City.
We arrived in Oaxaca a month before the show was to open. We needed to find a place to live and work, gather the raw materials, and make the works – whatever they might be, there was no plan.
In the day I was assisting in making the sculptures, test plinths, and mainly photographing the sculptures as they were completed. This photographic evidence in 2013 became the book TITTIPUSSIDAD.
Oaxaca is where Sarah’s NUD sculptures suddenly became truly anthropomorphic. The first of these, REALIDAD, also became the name for this film.
The meditation for these sculptures, were the objects we had seen in Anahuacalli, the active transformative ingredient, was Mezcal. At the start of this film, Tit-Teddy is credited as having a starring role – which he does, at the end of the film the largest credit goes to Mezcal. This distilled agave spirit, fuelled many of the works; Mezcal is almost hallucinogenic, certainly psychotropic to an extent, the mysterious cactus intent is transferred by it - Mexicans speak of Mezcal as a person.
Each day our house in which we worked - sometimes naked due to intense heat, would slowly accrue a bunch of friends. In the evenings we would walk with feet black from volcanic dust, down into Oaxaca crazy with fireworks, to a restaurant, a party, or the local Mezcal bar. With the day’s photography done, these were the gritty, low-light, noisy environments in which I captured most of this film.
This is a record of ‘the other side’, of in a way, one of Sarah’s great assets - to speak freely with moments of genius, and so to likewise encourage the spirit of others in her company.
I intentionally took only a few photographs of Sarah making the sculptures - I didn’t want my observation to affect her thought process, or so for the sculptures to look different than they might have otherwise. The same is true of shooting this film, there are only a few instances here of Sarah sculpting. In any-case most of the stimulating evidence of creation is in the formation of ideas through conversations, rather than the silence of thoughts in the head when making.
There is a film within a film here. Not knowing what to expect as we entered a ‘brick factory’ in the Oaxaca valley, there emerged something anthropological in its importance. Men crafting mud into the building blocks of whole houses - floor tiles, wall bricks, ceiling slabs, roof tiles, and more, the scene looked 100’s if not 1000’s of years old. The footage is valuable not only in its instructional impression, but also as a record of a way of practice that possibly will not last another generation, or even half a generation.
A few days before our departure the nearby volcanoPopocatepetl started chuffing heavily, villages were evacuated, the airport was on high alert, this place from start to finish had been one hell of a weird hub of energy.
REALIDAD along with TITTIPUSSIDAD is a rare combination of film and book that describes an intense period of Sarah Lucas, at work, and at life!
Julian Simmons | Suffolk UK | 5 June 2014