Turning the world upside down

 
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.

Exhibition round-up

At Tate Britain today I saw Fiona Banner's Duveen Commission where she has placed recently decommissioned fighter planes in the incongruous setting of the Duveen Galleries. The suspended Sea Harrier transforms machine into captive bird, the markings tattooing its surface evoking its namesake the Harrier Hawk. A Jaguar lies belly up on the floor, its posture suggestive of a submissive animal. Stripped and polished, its surface functions as a shifting mirror, exposing the audience to its own reactions. Harrier and Jaguar remain ambiguous objects implying both captured beast and fallen trophy.

Rachel Whiteread's collages and drawings provide a fascinating and intimate insight into the creative process behind her work. While her sculptures are often large-scale and involve a team of fabricators, these paper works provide a more personal, mobile counterpoint. Nevertheless, they also share many of the themes familiar from her public commissions: texture and surface; void and presence; and the subtle observation of human traces in everyday life.

To enter Mike Nelson's The Coral Reef is to enter a parallel world. Rooms, doors, passageways, all bear traces of habitation and decay. Different, often conflicting, ideologies or belief systems are presented through these traces. The implied occupants of Nelson's world appear to be detached from the political and economic centre, left to exist at the margins of globalised, capitalist society. The work's title alludes to this collection of complex, fragile belief systems that form an obscured layer - a coral reef - beneath the 'ocean surface' of prevailing orthodoxies. Nelson's absent protagonists occupy positions of resistance in the face of dominant ideologies. However, Nelson perhaps conveys a sense of inevitable futility about such resistance. In his words, he wants the spectator to feel 'lost in a world of lost people'.

Using vintage Coca-cola and Pepsi advertising signs as his canvas, Pakpoom Silaphan creates portraits of influential people using collage and illustration with marker pen and emulsion. High-profile figures including John Lennon, Che Guevera and The Queen populate the signs at the Scream Gallery, making a clear connection between icons and the advertising industry. Silaphan takes Warhol's elevation of everyday brands to high art, and combines it with his adoration of famous figures. The power of advertising and corporate branding is demonstrated by the infiltration of Coca-Cola, Pepsi etc. to countries outside Western culture. "Celebrity is really just a word. The people who not only find fame, but also learn the power of influence, and in doing so, make a huge impact on our culture - these are the icons to me." Pakpoom Silaphan, July 2010

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Robert Plant - Angel Dance.