Anish Kapoor's stainless steel sculptures in Kensington Gardens bring the sky down to earth and turn the world upside down. Constructed from highly reflective stainless steel, the giant curved mirror surfaces create illusory distortions of the surroundings and are visible across large distances, creating new vistas in this famous and much-loved setting.
The sculptures are sited to contrast and reflect the changing colours, foliage and weather in Kensington Gardens. Despite their monumental scale, the works appear as pure reflection of their surroundings: the sky, trees, water, wildlife and changing seasons. The distortions in the works’ mirror-like surfaces call into question the viewers’ relationship to both the work itself and the surrounding environment.
Mauro Perucchetti’s work at the Halcyon Gallery unites pop aesthetics with social comment. Perucchetti presents a critique of our society by holding up a mirror to our material desires through his use of materials, including coloured polyurethane resin, gold leaf, Swarovski crystals, and marble, which reflect our obsession with shiny, shallow surfaces. His bejewelled sculptures confidently satirise the work of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst while challenging consumerism and greed.
Perucchetti's Jelly Baby Family sculpture will soon be installed at Marble Arch as part of the City of Sculpture Festival. This sculpture is part of a body of work inspired by the dilemma between cloning and religious or medical ethics. Perucchetti uses the jelly baby as an impersonation of cloned beings; the ambiguity of their sinister sweetness.
Close by the Halcyon is the Scream Gallery which also currently has a pop art influenced exhibition by Thai artist Pakpoom Silaphan. Silaphan paints Western celebrity icons such as John Lennon, Che Guevara, Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali in white emulsion on old Coca-Cola, Pepsi or Fanta advertising signs found in Bangkok. As a Buddhist who had a Catholic education, he is interested in the power of advertising and popular culture seeing fashion as today’s opium of the masses and, like religion, as constantly shifting and re-inventing itself.
He says of his work: "The influence of living in a different culture inspires much of my work. I think multicultural societies are as complex as an unfit jigsaw, but offer many opportunities creatively. I like to work with themes from everyday life and popular culture, both for my subject matter and my media as well - newspaper cuttings feature in much of my work in 2D and 3D. I choose subjects by using my basic understanding of similarities between cultural issues and situations in everyday life, which I cannot define as right or wrong but as a conclusion. In terms of the selection of my work, I like to pick and combine subjects that have an inherent ambiguity and which have triviality and feeling in equal measure."
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Thea Gilmore - Saviours And All.
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