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Richard Wentworth

London, 8 September – 8 October 2005

Richard Wentworth

We are pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures and photographs by Richard Wentworth previewing at 52-54 Bell Street. This is his sixth solo show at the gallery with his last show in 1999.

Richard Wentworth has developed a 35-year career out of being an alchemist of the everyday, a connoisseur of the commonplace, an anthropologist who repeatedly sees the world around him and everything in it, for the first time. Yet he is also a ‘nosy-parker’ with an insatiable fascination to create provocative object poetry that “exposes the quirky peculiarities of our culture,” states Nicholas Logsdail. His work and exuberant personality are intertwined and interdependent as he continues to question the traditional definition of sculpture. By manipulating found objects, his effortless and light-handed approach subverts their original function and challenges our understanding of conventional systems of classification. This can be seen both in its formal understanding and our own internal system of logging objects and their meanings. Consider the work, Mirror, Mirror 2003, how might we think of different language dictionaries sitting alongside each other and the multi-lingual conversations that begin within this new argumentative proximity, a new world amp that overpowers you as if on the brink of collapse. [See above illustration]

Wentworth’s work is far from illustrative, as it thrives on the multi-layering of meanings, word plays and associations. These sculptural-equations play with the juxtaposition of obscure objects to form a new kind of algebra. Tantamount, 2005, includes a bale of straw that was specially commissioned at an irregular 6ft diameter to represent the harvest of an acre of land, which in turn was conceived as it represented a day’s work - ploughing a field. Here however such historicism is held captive within the constraints of modernity – a tensile crash barrier. “I adore etymologies,” cites Wentworth, “the fact that words have all had a life and a history, they’re all second-hand, but when we speak we conjoin them in totally new ways.”

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Works on view

More information

Location

52 Bell Street
London

Opening Times:
Monday – Friday: 10:00am – 6:00pm
Saturday: 11:00am – 5:00pm

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