LONDON.- Large Glass presents ‘Universal Fragments: Conversations with Trevor Shearer’, a group show inspired by the work of Trevor Shearer. Six contemporary artists; Tonico Lemos Auad, Miroslaw Balka, Massimo Bartolini, Jean-Philippe Dordolo, Jean-Luc Moulène and Alison Turnbull each have selected some of their own work they feel resonates with that of the late British artist.
Trevor Shearer (1958 – 2013) was a British artist whose approach was known to his colleagues and students at Byam Shaw School of Art and Central Saint Martins where he taught, but whose work has rarely been shown. Shearer engaged with some of the most profound problems regarding art’s relationship to transience, to perceptual experience, and to the imagination’s capacity for reinvention. Yet this engagement was carried out using modest, fragile materials and apparently unremarkable everyday objects: graph paper is used to cast the inside of a bathroom sink, layered drawings recreate the sea’s mass and movement; resin casts form strange new hybrid plants; a film of a drop of water skips, dances and vanishes on a kitchen hotplate. Shearer wrote that his work is “Often impulsively conceived and …[involves] opposing or divergent references: the intimate and the distant, the natural and the synthetic… the idea that nothing is fixed in how we perceive or interpret.”
Shearer was an artist who found the idea of exhibiting his work exceptionally difficult, and rarely did so. He died at the beginning of 2013, leaving behind the largely unseen results of a practice that extended across a wide range of media, and which finds its centre of gravity in a remarkably subtle yet unprecious way of thinking and working. Shearer’s intense reticence was equaled by – perhaps even directly proportionate to – the disarming intelligence of his decisions, and the care and precision with which his work was made. Enigmatic while resisting any of the grand connotations that this word might evoke, his work combines a mute precision with an other-‐worldliness always grounded in the stuff of the everyday.
In some notes written in 1998, Shearer stated, “these pieces are fictions that I hope connect with the idea of a mutable and slightly vertiginous reality.” Much is at stake in the question of how far unspectacular forms and materials can be persuaded to bear the significance of a world, and indeed in how far the logic and wonder of that world is communicable.
The display at Large Glass concentrates on Shearer’s sculptural objects, especially those using casting methods. The work is already in a dialogue with significant moments in art history: with the probity and strangeness of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-‐mades and body casts, the offbeat Surrealism of Marcel Broodthaers’ rebus-‐like early works, and with Eva Hesse’s resonant conjunction of opposed formal and material qualities, for example. This exhibition will show how Shearer’s art, virtually unseen until now, shares a formal and conceptual space with those of his contemporaries.
