Jim Lambie
29 Apr - 24 May 2016
JIM LAMBIE
La Scala
29 April – May 2016
Gerhardsen Gerner is pleased to announce the Scottish artist Jim Lambie’s second solo show with Gerhardsen Gerner in the Berlin gallery on the occasion of the GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN 2016. For this event the musicians Parra for Cuva and the duo Trash Lagoon, both based in Berlin, will release a new LP. The record is also an art work by Jim Lambie, who designed the cover.
Sourcing his material directly from the modern world, Jim Lambie references popular culture, often drawing his subject matter from music and iconic figures. He makes use of everyday objects and materials – both as reference points and as original objects, transforming them into new sculptural forms, re-energizing them and giving them with an alternative function. With each element constructed from found objects he creates sculptures that are steeped in the spirit of the UK punk explosion with garish tones, bold display, and references to both bands and songs from an array of movements.
Lambie explores the potential of everyday materials and objects sourced from charity shops, like old suitcases, mirrors and popular books, as well as industrially manufactured materials like gaffer tape and potato bags. This use of ordinary objects reflects the DIY nature of the post-punk scene, where zealous participants created a subculture out of materials that were perceived as broken, obsolete, or undesirable. In his sculptures and installations, he embraces each object’s right to meaning while also prioritizing the act of looking. His works acknowledge that the viewer comes with an understanding, a pre-existing history with the component materials that adds to their experience of it as an artwork. According to Lambie, the things we recognize—paint, potato bags, color— “set up a reverberation between them and our possibly unconscious previous visual experience with them. These works don’t want to create a new world into which we can escape, they want to bounce the world back to us, encouraging us to look at it again.”
Jim Lambie's approach to art making is informed by a few fundamental ideas. A rock musician before he became a visual artist, he uses color in a way that is deeply rooted in color theory and specifically relates to the concept of synesthesia, an analogous experience between music and the color spectrum in which the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Colors are harmonies and pattern and repetition form rhythms.
Different from his rather esoteric predecessors, Lambie?s choice of color composition is determined by a sense of directness and everyday availability. The modern world seems his source and palette. Which sheds light onto Lambie?s other basic feature, his Glaswegian origin. Lambie is deeply immersed in the history of a place characterized by the tension between industrialization and liberation movements such as William Morris? utopianism and socialism and the Arts and Crafts movement at large. The Glasgow School of Art, designed by Scottish architect and fellow Arts and Crafts member Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and also Lambie?s place of study, is an incarnation of such utopian ideas. Echoing Mackintosh, Lambie?s concern is to build around the needs of people: people seen, not as masses, but as individuals who needed not a machine for living in but a work of art. Lambie shows how we can maintain a sense of self in an over-commodified world of sameness.
Jim Lambie (b.1964, Glasgow) is most well known for his mixed-media sculptures and dazzling floor installations using industrial materials, found objects, and other cultural detritus. He represented Scotland’s inaugural pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale and was nominated for the 2005 Turner Prize.
Recent solo exhibitions include Zero Concerto, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Sun Rise, Sun Ra, Sun Set, Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo; Answer Machine, Sadie Coles HQ, London; and The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.
Recent group shows include Eyes on the Prize, The Travelling Gallery, Various cities (Turner Prize); Summer Exhibition 2015, The Royal Academy of Arts London; A Secret Affair: Selections from the Fuhrman Family, FLAG Art Foundation, New York; 20 Years of Collecting: Between Discovery and Invention, Zabludowicz Collection, London; Color Fields, Bakalar & Paine Galleries, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston; Schlaflos – Das Bett in Geschichte und Gegenwartskunst, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, 21er Haus, Vienna; Private Utopia: Contemporary Works from the British Council Collection, Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, Okayama.
Lambie’s work is represented in institutional and private collections worldwide, including The Pace Foundation, San Antonio; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Miami; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh; and TATE, London.
La Scala
29 April – May 2016
Gerhardsen Gerner is pleased to announce the Scottish artist Jim Lambie’s second solo show with Gerhardsen Gerner in the Berlin gallery on the occasion of the GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN 2016. For this event the musicians Parra for Cuva and the duo Trash Lagoon, both based in Berlin, will release a new LP. The record is also an art work by Jim Lambie, who designed the cover.
Sourcing his material directly from the modern world, Jim Lambie references popular culture, often drawing his subject matter from music and iconic figures. He makes use of everyday objects and materials – both as reference points and as original objects, transforming them into new sculptural forms, re-energizing them and giving them with an alternative function. With each element constructed from found objects he creates sculptures that are steeped in the spirit of the UK punk explosion with garish tones, bold display, and references to both bands and songs from an array of movements.
Lambie explores the potential of everyday materials and objects sourced from charity shops, like old suitcases, mirrors and popular books, as well as industrially manufactured materials like gaffer tape and potato bags. This use of ordinary objects reflects the DIY nature of the post-punk scene, where zealous participants created a subculture out of materials that were perceived as broken, obsolete, or undesirable. In his sculptures and installations, he embraces each object’s right to meaning while also prioritizing the act of looking. His works acknowledge that the viewer comes with an understanding, a pre-existing history with the component materials that adds to their experience of it as an artwork. According to Lambie, the things we recognize—paint, potato bags, color— “set up a reverberation between them and our possibly unconscious previous visual experience with them. These works don’t want to create a new world into which we can escape, they want to bounce the world back to us, encouraging us to look at it again.”
Jim Lambie's approach to art making is informed by a few fundamental ideas. A rock musician before he became a visual artist, he uses color in a way that is deeply rooted in color theory and specifically relates to the concept of synesthesia, an analogous experience between music and the color spectrum in which the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Colors are harmonies and pattern and repetition form rhythms.
Different from his rather esoteric predecessors, Lambie?s choice of color composition is determined by a sense of directness and everyday availability. The modern world seems his source and palette. Which sheds light onto Lambie?s other basic feature, his Glaswegian origin. Lambie is deeply immersed in the history of a place characterized by the tension between industrialization and liberation movements such as William Morris? utopianism and socialism and the Arts and Crafts movement at large. The Glasgow School of Art, designed by Scottish architect and fellow Arts and Crafts member Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and also Lambie?s place of study, is an incarnation of such utopian ideas. Echoing Mackintosh, Lambie?s concern is to build around the needs of people: people seen, not as masses, but as individuals who needed not a machine for living in but a work of art. Lambie shows how we can maintain a sense of self in an over-commodified world of sameness.
Jim Lambie (b.1964, Glasgow) is most well known for his mixed-media sculptures and dazzling floor installations using industrial materials, found objects, and other cultural detritus. He represented Scotland’s inaugural pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale and was nominated for the 2005 Turner Prize.
Recent solo exhibitions include Zero Concerto, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Sun Rise, Sun Ra, Sun Set, Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo; Answer Machine, Sadie Coles HQ, London; and The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.
Recent group shows include Eyes on the Prize, The Travelling Gallery, Various cities (Turner Prize); Summer Exhibition 2015, The Royal Academy of Arts London; A Secret Affair: Selections from the Fuhrman Family, FLAG Art Foundation, New York; 20 Years of Collecting: Between Discovery and Invention, Zabludowicz Collection, London; Color Fields, Bakalar & Paine Galleries, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston; Schlaflos – Das Bett in Geschichte und Gegenwartskunst, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, 21er Haus, Vienna; Private Utopia: Contemporary Works from the British Council Collection, Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, Okayama.
Lambie’s work is represented in institutional and private collections worldwide, including The Pace Foundation, San Antonio; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Miami; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh; and TATE, London.