LONDON.- Haunch of Venison will present Jochem Hendricks, on view 25 August – 29 September. German artist Jochem Hendricks, known for his work addressing complex moral issues, will present a selection of new and recent works in his first exhibition with Haunch of Venison. Hendricks’ practice explores the social codes and boundaries that we live by, as well as questioning received ideas surrounding beauty and value. His projects often involve investigative processes more normally associated with scientific enquiry, questioning the boundaries of legality and using materials that raise complex moral and ethical issues.

The exhibition will present several recent projects. A series of works see organic matter - birds, a human leg and a human ear, which the artist acquired in the former Eastern Block - transmuted into diamonds, including Cold Birds (2002-5), Left Defender Right Leg (2002-5) and Oleg’s Ear (2004-6). The original processes were carried out in two former Soviet research establishments; the subjects were first converted into pure carbon which was then used to produce synthetic diamonds. For Hendricks an ‘official’ collaboration with the institutes was impossible, resulting in a series of complex and sometimes dangerous negotiations and transactions to realise the works.

For the ongoing work Grains of Sand (1999-2007), the artist paid assistants, often illegal immigrants in Germany, to count precise numbers of grains of sand, up to several million. The quantities of sand are presented in beautiful hand-made glass vessels, making it impossible to verify whether or not the numbers given are accurate or not. Such works raise questions about the value and meaning of labour, as well as notions of truth and imagination. Are there really 5,279,063 grains of sand in a given vessel, as the artist suggests, the result of hundreds of hours of work, or is this in fact an elaborate fiction?

Hendricks will also show a new installation, The Pack (2003-6). On the top floor of the gallery the visitor is confronted by a threatening pack of fighting dogs. Having procured a number of the dogs and had them ‘prepared’ under his direction, Hendricks presents us with a tableaux which offers a very direct confrontation; we are made to feel the object of the dogs’ malevolent attention and therefore question our attitude towards them.