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Richard Deacon: Deep State

London, 20 November 2019 – 29 February 2020

Richard Deacon: Deep State

“As a sculptor, I have always wondered what exactly is depth? It is shifting and ineffable. Perhaps all I can know is surface, the rest a fiction, a deep state that slips away from view.”

Richard Deacon presents his eleventh exhibition with Lisson Gallery, showing works incorporating steel, ceramics, clay, bent wood and ink on paper that evoke different senses – from memory and touch, to sight and movement. This new collection of sculptures, reliefs and drawings also inhabit different planes – from verticality to horizontality – all while shifting between two and three dimensions and passing from porosity to solidity, suggesting their fluid possibilities as either sites for bodily experience or spaces for contemplation and, as the title suggests, for deep dives into each object.

Among his major recent sculptures are the undulating, twisted forms of I Remember #5 (2018), Swell and Under the Weather #5 (both 2019). The complex arrangements of stainless steel housings and spiraling wooden beams in I Remember #5 are presented horizontally, suggesting the viewer walk along its length while following the trajectory of its delicately sinuous wooden lines. With every steamed wooden dowel ending at a different point in a tessellating grid of metal plates, there is an invitation to recall where each begins its journey and follow them to their conclusion. The upright form in pale bentwood, Under the Weather #5 (2019), represents the apotheosis of Deacon’s two-decade-long mastery of the various techniques involved in wood steaming, manipulation and construction, with only the most unobtrusive nodes of joinery completing the object’s soaring, shelter-like structure and revealing the techniques of its manufacture.

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Works on view

Installation views

Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork
Richard Deacon: Deep State artwork

More information

Location

67 Lisson Street
London

Opening Times:
Tuesday – Saturday: 11:00am – 6:00pm

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