BERLIN.- For Cornelia Parker, violence and destruction are central to sculptural practice. In her sculptures and installations, deconstruction meets reinvention. Everyday objects are exposed to forces that alter their form and generate new meanings. Her art often plays with time and history – a practice of translation, transformation, and allusion. A striking example is her large- scale sculpture on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) (2016), which references both the Bates Motel from Hitchcock’s film classic Psycho and the red wooden farmhouse of rural North America. Parker creates visual metaphors for the political, intellectual, and cultural state of our world – often with an apocalyptic undertone. Her works open onto the unconscious, to violence and trauma, but also to collective beliefs and desires.

This approach is powerfully demonstrated in works such as her early piece Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), where Parker suspended the fragments of a garden shed blown up by the British Army around a single light bulb, creating the effect of a three-dimensional explosion diagram. Already here, a method central to her practice emerges: collaboration with people outside the art world. Another well-known example is Magna Carta (An Embroidery) (2015), a 13-metre-long stitched version of the Wikipedia article on Magna Carta, the landmark 1215 charter of English constitutional law. Created through a collective process, the work involved contributors such as whistleblower Edward Snowden, journalist Julian Assange, sculptor Antony Gormley, musician Brian Eno, and writer and feminist Germaine Greer, together with inmates from 13 English prisons, members of the UK’s Embroiderers’ Guild, and students from a Roman Catholic girls’ school in London.

For the monumental Kesselhaus, Cornelia Parker has conceived a site-specific, immersive installation – a vast imagined event of immediate physical presence that carries a sense of foreboding. Stolen Thunder (A Storm Gathering) was developed with composer Graeme Miller and draws on extensive research into weather phenomena, as well as the media and cultural history of how they are recorded and archived. Parker animates the space with an encompassing sound and light installation. Once again, she works with a central light source which, during phases of darkness, casts visitors’ shadows onto the walls – a nod to German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s and specifically the German Expressionist movement known as Der Sturm. In this way, Parker links back to the period in which the Kindl brewery was built and to the Expressionist elements of its architecture.

“The idea of the storm as a powerful metaphor has been used liberally throughout the history of literature and cinema, reflecting political instability, the unpredictable power of nature, and the darker depths of man’s own psyche. With the ever-increasing threat of climate-related disasters as the planet heats up and fears of conflict as the political axis seismically shifts, this work seems to me to be ‘an idea whose time has come’,” Cornelia Parker states.

Cornelia Parker (* 1956 in Cheshire, lives in London) was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997. In 2010 she was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (followed by Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2022). She was the first conceptual artist, and also the first female artist, to be named the official Election Artist for the UK’s 2017 general election; the resulting works are now part of the Parliamentary Art Collection. In 2023 she was commissioned by the UK Government Art Collection to create works marking the coronation of King Charles III.

Solo exhibitions (selection): City Gallery of Wellington (in preparation); Tate Britain, London (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2019); The Palace of Westminster, London (2018); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016); The Whitworth, Manchester (2015); Terrace Wires Commission, St Pancras International Station, London (2015); British Library, London (2015, touring: The Whitworth, Manchester; Bodleian Library, Oxford); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2014); MoMA, New York (2010); Reina Sofía, Madrid (2009); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2008, touring: Ballroom Marfa; Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo; Fundación Pro Buenos Aires; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks, Istanbul; Kunsthaus Zurich; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2007, touring: Museo de Arte de Lima).