Anthea Hamilton
20 Oct - 24 Nov 2007
ANTHEA HAMILTON
"Cut-outs"
The visitor has a sense of having walked into a television studio set. Walls, floors, everything is blue. A blue that is so clear and unnatural that it could later be replaced at will by any other background. In the context of the normal white, ‘neutral’ gallery space, the viewer has the opportunity to create his own context, his own setting.
For her solo exhibition at Galerie Fons Welters, the British artist Anthea Hamilton is creating a temporary environment of found and shaped objects. Paint cans, candles, shoes, bamboo, perspex and string are just some of the materials she combines to make her three-dimensional composition. Incorporated into the completely blue space, the objects interact with the environment and themselves become actors in the TV studio set.
The cross-section of a leg is the most recognisable element in Hamilton’s eclectic use of materials. It is modelled on her own leg, so that her identity is literally absorbed into the exhibition. In this way, the different versions of the artist, the ‘body doubles’, can act out her unfulfilled ideas and fantasies.
The legs keep recurring in different combinations, in settings ranging from the figurative to the mechanical. Reduced to a minimal template, the soft, round forms seduce and betray at the same time. An imagery is forged in which pop-art-like collages are subdued by a constructivist composition. Or is it, perhaps, the other way round?
The compositions of Anthea Hamilton can be seen as separate artworks, but at the same time they serve as part of the total installation. Together they make up a temporary universe, a certain mindset, in which the visitor is challenged flirtatiously to read the work and in which the blue holds out a promise of new opportunities and other worlds.
"Cut-outs"
The visitor has a sense of having walked into a television studio set. Walls, floors, everything is blue. A blue that is so clear and unnatural that it could later be replaced at will by any other background. In the context of the normal white, ‘neutral’ gallery space, the viewer has the opportunity to create his own context, his own setting.
For her solo exhibition at Galerie Fons Welters, the British artist Anthea Hamilton is creating a temporary environment of found and shaped objects. Paint cans, candles, shoes, bamboo, perspex and string are just some of the materials she combines to make her three-dimensional composition. Incorporated into the completely blue space, the objects interact with the environment and themselves become actors in the TV studio set.
The cross-section of a leg is the most recognisable element in Hamilton’s eclectic use of materials. It is modelled on her own leg, so that her identity is literally absorbed into the exhibition. In this way, the different versions of the artist, the ‘body doubles’, can act out her unfulfilled ideas and fantasies.
The legs keep recurring in different combinations, in settings ranging from the figurative to the mechanical. Reduced to a minimal template, the soft, round forms seduce and betray at the same time. An imagery is forged in which pop-art-like collages are subdued by a constructivist composition. Or is it, perhaps, the other way round?
The compositions of Anthea Hamilton can be seen as separate artworks, but at the same time they serve as part of the total installation. Together they make up a temporary universe, a certain mindset, in which the visitor is challenged flirtatiously to read the work and in which the blue holds out a promise of new opportunities and other worlds.