BERLIN.- KW Institute for Contemporary Art continues its examination of the political potential of communication by shifting the focus on notions of (cultural) representation, appropriation, and translation through the lens of the work of artist Lucy Skaer as part of the fall season.
For her exhibition at KW, British artist Lucy Skaer (born 1975 in Cambridge, GB) is presenting an ambitious new body of work embedded in a selection of existing works from the last ten years. The exhibition presents the most substantial survey of Skaer’s work to date in Germany. Skaer draws on pre-existing imagery, narrative and forms shaped by biography, usage and industry standards shaped by mass production and global trade to make intuitive amalgamations of sculpture, film and print. Form, meaning, and value are traced in her work through various states of formal and allegorical existence.
For her new commission for KW, Lucy Skaer continues her scrutiny of the conventional classification of objects and production methods in critical exchange with art historical motives and references. Skaer aims to unite these leitmotifs that have long accompanied her work into one large-scale sculptural tableau. Here, she draws from her own oeuvre, reworking her existing sculptures to become representations of animals in a medieval hunting scenery referencing the famous Livre de la Chasse, a medieval transcript with miniature illuminations on Renaissance hunting techniques from 1331–91. Doing so, Skaer explores the mutable meaning of these works and playfully critiques their language of desire, their status as definitive works of art and their potential for self-reproduction. In line with her prevailing attitude she rejects the understanding of materials or works as finite things, recognizing every manifestation as only one latent version amongst many others. Skaer’s sculptures function in that way more like idiosyncratic processes, which insert themselves into an already existing chain of material conversions and transformations, consuming one manifestation to give birth to another.
As part of the opening weekend, KW will screen Why Are you Angry (2017), the most recent film of the artists-duo Nashashibi/Skaer, embedded in a selection of their jointly made 16mm film works.
Lucy Skaer (born 1975 in Cambrigde, GB) is an artist based in Glasgow and London. Her sculptures, films, paintings and drawings often take found photographic sources as their starting point. Rooted in reality, yet subjected to a process of elaborate transformation, her images hover in the space between recognition and ambiguity, figuration, and abstraction. Skaer exhibited at the first Scottish presentation at the Biennale di Venezia in 2003, where she also presented in 2007. She was nominated for both the 2003 Beck’s Futures prize and the 2009 Turner Prize. In addition to the Nashashibi/Skaer collaboration, Skaer is a founding member of Henry VIII’s Wives artist collective.
