- Exhibition
- Artist
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Presentation
Houseago’s works in plaster stand out among the ancient marbles of the portico and the airy spaces of the Bird House. The figures are simultaneously vigorous and powerful, awkward and vulnerable, with parts finished in detail and others crudely roughed in, three-dimensionality alternating with two-dimensionality, fullness with hollowness.
They are bodies created with elements assembled in an unlikely way, supported by skeletons in iron rods, and seem to find a new vitality. The forms are not random but drawn from an artistic memory of centuries, hinting at solutions and works of art from a near or ancient past, while avoiding any direct reference or any classification.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the two monumental figures located in the Bird House, Striding Figure and Standing Figure: the first is a colossus with powerful shoulders, captured in the movement of a broad slow pace; the second is a body reclining on its knees, with one arm bent over the head in a pose taken from famous classical prototypes..
The figures, made with plaster, hemp, iron, elementary materials modeled, coated, sawn or roughly hewn, show the bodies in a transfiguration that retains a stripped-down iconic look.
Houseago reworks artistic references and codes in a personal and deeply original expressive language. The forms translate into dramatic power, in an unconventional figurative synthesis that invades the exhibition space with brutal effectiveness.
The exhibition was curated by Anna Coliva in collaboration with the Gagosian Gallery in Rome.
Artist
Thomas Houseago was born in 1972 in Leeds, England. He studied at the Central Saint Martins College of Art, London, and De Ateliers, Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include: “The Artist’s Museum,” MOCA, Los Angeles (2010); “What Went Down,” Modern Art Oxford (2010, traveled to: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Centre Internationald’Art et du Paysage de l’Ile de Vassivière, Beaumont-du-Lac (through 2011)); “The Beat of the Show,” Inverlieth House, Edinburgh (2011); “The World Belongs to You,” Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2011); “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Thomas Houseago: Hermaphrodite,” Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich (2012). His work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. A major solo exhibition, “As I Went Out One Morning,” opens in May 2013 at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. In January 2013, the Dijon art center Le Consortium installed a selection of Houseago’s sculptures around the streets of Aix-en-Provence, France.
Houseago lives and works in Los Angeles.
Housed in the former Villa Borghese Pinciana outside the city of Rome, the Galleria Borghese holds a substantial part of the Borghese collection of paintings, sculpture and antiquities, begun from the seventeenth century by the Cardinal and patron of the arts Scipione Borghese.
Setup
Thomas Hauseago. Striding Figure/Standing Figure
Installation View
Thomas Hauseago. Striding Figure/Standing Figure
Installation View
Thomas Hauseago. Striding Figure/Standing Figure
Installation View
Thomas Hauseago. Striding Figure/Standing Figure
Installation View
Thomas Hauseago. Striding Figure/Standing Figure
Installation View
Thomas Hauseago. Striding Figure/Standing Figure
Installation View
Thomas Hauseago. Striding Figure/Standing Figure
Installation View
Thomas Hauseago. Striding Figure/Standing Figure
Installation View