LONDON.- From 3 July to 18 August 2019, Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space presents the first solo exhibition in the UK by Hicham Berrada.

Hicham Berrada: Dreamscapes brings together a new, large-scale video installation with a number of the artist’s existing sculptural works, including a series of illuminated tanks that house delicate and ephemeral chemical landscapes.

Immersing visitors in a spellbinding world of shape and colour, Berrada treats temperature, light and time as sculptural materials, and harnesses natural and scientific processes to create artworks that change and evolve over the course of the exhibition.

Much of Berrada’s work is concerned with morphogenesis – the biological process that causes an organism to take or change its form. This is the case for the artist’s new video installation Augures mathématiques (Mathematical Omens) (2019), created using algorithms that mimic the way that elements of the natural world – leaves, sand dunes, shells – take shape. Resembling a shadowy underwater world populated by coral-like forms, Berrada’s video installation presents visitors with kaleidoscopic visions at once familiar and strange.

Hicham Berrada: Dreamscapes also includes four works from the artist’s ongoing series Présage, tranche (Portent, cross-section) (2007–ongoing) – delicate, technicolour sculptures, encased within glass tanks, that shift and change over the course of the exhibition, in a poetic cycle of genesis and decay. A second series of sculptures, Matrices minérales (Mineral Matrices) (2017), sees the artist submerge fragments of bronze in tanks of electrified water, in order to accelerate and make visible the process of erosion. With these sculptures, Berrada reveals and celebrates natural processes that are not usually visible to the human eye, or take place beyond our lifespans.

Speaking of this work, the artist comments ‘I’m fascinated by the immutable, intangible aspect of certain natural elements and forms’, and of his practice more broadly, ‘I proceed like a scientist, alternating experimentation and intuition’.

Hicham Berrada (b. 1986 in Casablanca, Morocco) lives and works in Paris and Lens, France. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Louvre-Lens (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); Pinault Collection–Punta della Dogana, Venice (2019); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt-am-Main (2018); Maubuisson Abbey, Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône (2017); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016); ICAS–Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore (2015); Villa Medici (2013-2014); MoMA PS1, New York (2011), among others. The artist is currently in residency at Pinault Collection in Lens.

Hicham Berrada: Dreamscapes is curated by independent curator Eimear Martin.