Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Stacks and Ledgers, Lucy Skaer’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in New York since 2018.
Stacks and Ledgers features new sculptures, drawings, and photographs that expand on Skaer’s interest in expressing abstraction through material as a challenge to representation rather than as a thing at rest or resolved. Among these works are three-dimensional interpretations of two-dimensional objects, and vice versa, as well as physical manifestations of accrued time, of the present moving into the past.
Open glass boxes representing the cells of a ledger—a heavy tome of recorded transactions that often remains tied to a space—explore the relationship between annotation and materiality, a means of conveying the intangible idea of value and currency through physical presence. While the cells imply a set of rules and logic, their emptiness seems to pose a question.
Taking a cue from British surrealist Paul Nash’s painting Equivalents for the Megaliths (1935), in which geometric shapes in a field replace standing stones, Skaer presents her own series of equivalents, accruing time as shapes in graphite and switching grass for textured bronze. These works reference haystacks as fodder gathered for winter—embodiments of stored light from spring and summer. Much like the cells of a ledger, they form an internal logic of counting, accumulation, worries, and wishes in the commodified pastoral landscape.
A constant subject of Lucy Skaer’s work is the transformation of the possible interpretations one can derive from material and form. In Stacks and Ledgers, Skaer explores the shifting nature of exchange, as one figure becomes another, be that a number, a body, or a thought. Within this presentation she has produced works in bronze, enamel, platinum, glass, gold, and porcelain. The history and meaning behind these materials are both implied and obscured. Skaer’s works sit between object and representation, and ask: can the abstraction of late capitalism wield its power in another way?
An artist’s book featuring new images of Skaer’s previously exhibited sculptures alongside the artist’s own photography, with essays by K Patrick and Ingrid Schaffner, was recently published by Book Works, London. Limited advanced copies will be available for purchase at the gallery. Peter Freeman, Inc. will host a conversation between Lucy Skaer, K Patrick, and independent curator Anthony Elms on Saturday, 1 November, 3–5pm.
Lucy Skaer (born 1975, Cambridge, United Kingdom) lives on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. A Turner Prize nominee in 2009, Skaer also had a solo show at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland in 2009 and has exhibited extensively since. Recent solo and group exhibitions have been mounted at Frac Pays de la Loire, Carquefou (2022); S.M.A.K., Ghent (2019–2020); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017–2018); and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2017). She was a Chinati Artist in Residence in 2021 and participated in Carnegie International, 57th Edition at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2018); documenta 14 at EMΣT – National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Greece (2017); and 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2008). Her work is in numerous museum collections including the Arts Council Collection, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; and Tate, London.