Musée d'Art Contemporain

SIMON STARLING
Metamorphology
5 February – 10 May 2015

Summary
Metamorphology presents some fifteen pieces – sculptures, photographs, installations and films – that draw on the idea of metamorphosis and a conception of the transformative power of art. Behind each of these works is a narrative that exposes sometimes serendipitous links between seemingly disparate people and places, times and events. Starling pursues a fundamentally research-based practice that often centres around key figures in early twentieth-century art history.

At the centre of Simon Starling’s practice is an interest in the materials and tools of his trade (limestone, marble, platinum, silver, steel and wood), as well as the economies of production, reproduction and circulation of resources, energies, images and matter. The title of the exhibition, which brings together works in film and photography, sculpture and installation, draws on the idea of metamorphosis and a conception of the transformative potential of art.

Behind each of Starling’s works is a narrative that exposes sometimes serendipitous links between seemingly disparate people and places, times and events. Pursuing a fundamentally research-based practice that often centres around key figures in early twentieth-century art history—Henry Moore, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp—the artist uncovers littleknown moments that assume resonance as each piece takes form, as though the works were attempting to transmit an ever thickening plot. The works themselves are triggers for investigation, pieces in a puzzle, or function as traces of sometimes rather complicated narrative trajectories.
Titles and wall cards are essential in order to grasp the full resonance of each piece. The exhibition includes large-scale sculptures such as Bird in Space, 2004, 2004, a two-ton slab of Romanian steel that intertwines the story of a court battle around the status of a 1923 sculpture by Brancusi and the imposing of a significant tax hike on foreign steel by George W. Bush in 2004; The Long Ton, 2009, which is composed of two blocks of marble, one Italian, the other Chinese, suspended from the ceiling of the gallery; and Flaga 1972–2000, 2002, a red-andwhite Fiat 126 hung on the wall. Starling’s foray into film, which has allowed him to integrate his unique kind of storytelling, is manifested in the installation Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima), 2010-2011, which conflates such disparate characters as Henry Moore, James Bond, Sir Anthony Blunt and Colonel Sanders, alongside a Japanese Noh mask maker.

Photography is an integral part of Starling’s practice, and his suite of thirty-six gelatin silver prints entitled Pictures for an Exhibition exemplifies two levels of investigation: one based in research and the other photographic. Prompted by two photographs of an exhibition of sculptures by Brancusi at the Arts Club of Chicago in 1927, Starling set out to track the provenance of each work and photograph it on location in the homes of private collectors, museum vaults and exhibition spaces.

Simon Starling was born in 1967 in Epsom, United Kingdom, and lives and works in Copenhagen. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art, and it was in that city that he gained international recognition. He has exhibited extensively in Europe, Asia and Australia, often producing site-responsive works. He was the winner of the 2005 Turner Prize and a nominee for the 2004 Hugo Boss Prize.

Lesley Johnstone, Curator