Found Forms: A Summer Show

1 Jul - 13 Aug 2022 Golden Square

The Frith Street Gallery Summer Show Found Forms brings together work by gallery artists who start with a found object or material, transforming these objects or mediums into new and distinct forms. The exhibition will include Cornelia Parker's Poison and Antidote Drawings, Tacita Dean's Significant Form (Group Four), a group of Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press's Full-Stop Seascapes, a suite of ink drawings by Anna Barriball, a new set of prints by Raqs Media Collective, as well as two 'mannequin' sculptures by Daniel Silver. Found Forms highlights the sustained importance of the objet trouvé for contemporary artists.
Fiona Banner Aka The Vanity Press, Full Stop Seascapes, 2022
The materiality of language is central to the work of Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press. Her Full-Stop Seascapes start with a found painting of a romantic marine landscape, usually with a noble ship punctuating the horizon. She then paints over the boat or boats, replacing them with boulder-like full stops, or full stops that look like vast, geometrical formations, depending on the type of font (whose names become the titles of the works). The conventions of landscape are as constrained as language itself, and with her Seascapes Banner disarms a range of cultural clichés.

For Found Forms, Banner has hung a group of three paintings that greet the viewer as they enter the gallery, each one suspended on a rod, shifting into the gallery space in a cascade of diminishing dimensions. The largest of the three paintings, Newsense, Newsense (2022), appears to show mysterious portals on the horizon, while in Pop, Pop, Pop (ellipsis) (2022), three cuboids are tossed in the waves like lost elements of a sentence adrift in a storm, and in the smallest work, Gudea, Cousine (2022), two monoliths bob in a calm sea under a gloomy sky. The familiar and nostalgic look of the found paintings is disrupted by the black chunks of language that interpolate with humour the overall mood of romantic melancholy.
Anna Barriball, Windows with Water and Ink, 2013
To make the set of drawings that comprise Windows with Water and Ink (2013), Anna Barriball covered a pane of textured glass in black ink and pressed paper into its surface. When the ink had dried the paper was first bathed in water, then in a solution of ink and water. Each piece was then dipped into a solution with different concentrations of ink and water, creating a scale of grey across the pieces of paper. The process, reminiscent of that used to develop photographs with chemicals, leaves behind a strange, photographic trace of the original patterned glass. Barriball transforms a commonplace thing – an old, patterned window – into a measured horizon of subtly beautiful abstractions in a process reminiscent of the serial artworks of Sherrie Levine.
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Poison and Antidote Drawings, 2010
Cornelia Parker devised her Poison and Antidote Drawings (2010) while on residency in Texas, procuring venom from a rattlesnake farm and antidote from a doctor, mixing black ink with the venom, while the white ink is blended with its antidote. The resulting drawings take the form of Rorschach inkblots, a form designed to reveal the subconscious of patients undergoing analysis. With the Poison and Antidote Drawings, Parker confronts one of her greatest fears – snakes – while also repurposing their venom to create drawings that are at once haunting and beautiful, deadly and lifesaving, inviting the viewer to confront their own subconscious in symmetrical, monochrome patterns.
Tacita Dean, Significant Form (Group Four), 2021
Tacita Dean's Significant Form (Group Four) (2021) is a group of fifteen images, drawn from Dean's postcard collection, hung on the wall in a constellation format. This selection emerged from Significant Form, which consists of a total of 130 images, each re-photographed and hand-printed at various scales. This work was exhibited at Hepworth Wakefield in 2021. The fifteen images in Significant Form (Group Four) feature stone and landscape formations, snow-encrusted trees, the atmospheric interior of a cave, tree trunks on a beach, and even European and Indian sculptures; in each case, the postcards depict a distinct time and place, yet also a kind of readymade sculpture. The array of forms invites the viewer to move their gaze across the wall, alighting on the different settings and sites, revelling in the unusual forms.
Raqs Media Collective, Bestiary, 2021
For their Bestiary series of prints (2021), Raqs Media Collective drew upon historical and popular illustrations of animals to create an array of beasts that range from the mythological to the extinct. The animals are immediately recognisable, yet they are also stylised, filtered through the cultural conventions of a particular place or time. Each animal is accompanied by an ambiguous form that is the image of a human tear, documented through a microscope so that the salt crystals are visible, and embossed with gold foil. By appropriating animal imagery from different cultures, accompanied by a tear laced with precious metal, Bestiary explores what it means to be human in companionship with other forms of life, and our tendency to attribute value or sentiment to animals or use them as characters in moral lessons.
Daniel Silver, Liv and Marcel, 2018
Daniel Silver conceived of Liv and Marcel (2018) while thinking about the similarities between modern mannequins and Classical nudes. Liv and Marcel is based on two historical mannequins that Silver discovered in the Adel Rootstein catalogue. The artist asked the company to remake the figures for his sculpture, but instead of a flesh tone the figures were made in bright, primary red. Atop the mannequins, Silver placed heads sculpted in onyx, a stone he prizes for its pale translucency, which imbues the heads with a depth of emotion and a sense of inwardness.
Daniel Silver, Ira Dancer, 2018
At the heart of Ira Dancer (2018) is the torso of a nineteenth-century mannequin, which was given to Silver by a friend in the fashion industry. The sculpted onyx head that tops the torso has a soft luminosity, as if to invite the viewer to peer into the inner life of the figure. The result is a hybrid sculpture: the stone conveys a feeling of something permanent, or out of time, which contrasts with the everyday denim that covers the torso. Ira Dancer greets the viewer with a powerful silence, asking questions about how sculpture might reflect - or absorb - a viewer's thoughts and emotions. Inspired by looking at dancers, Silver's sculptures are equally characterised by a fascination with the forms of movement and stasis, ephemerality and permanence, everydayness and the uncanny.

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Found Forms: A Summer Show

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