Benefit Preview: Wednesday, 2 November, 6-8 pm
Run of Show: Thursday and Friday 12-8pm, Saturday 12-7pm, Sunday 12-6pm
Lucy Skaer’s ADAA presentation will feature new works created from elements of her family home in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The house has been the genesis for many works and series by Skaer for six years. During the last two decades, the artist’s father gradually lost his memory, and the house slowly changed in meaning and in use.
For The Art Show, Skaer uses the house where she grew up and her father lived until his death in 2021 in a series of sculptures made from parts of the home, photographs taken in the home, and related ceramics. The sculptures consume and preserve parts of the house in a process that reclaims material and rewrites meaning in equal measure: a table is now an eccentric box, a window pane a metaphoric rock, and so on. These transformations and substitutions preserve material elements of the home’s interior even as they wander from their original use, history, space, and location.
My father began to collect and arrange specific objects in a serial way... over time they turned to great collections and heaps. In some ways, the house and the way that my father altered it resemble tactics that I use in my own practise. As my father’s memory detached from the objects that surrounded him, the house became more and more of an abstraction. And this is the way that I re-entered it.
A constant subject of Lucy Skaer’s work is the transmutation of art works, both in terms of their shape and of the possible interpretations one can derive from material and form. Often taking as a starting point images and concepts that originate in a localized source – such as a history, place, or name – the artist creates works that sit between object and representation, loosening the ability of language to settle a single definite meaning. Skaer’s works physically fix how changes of context initiate changes of state that put words continually a step behind looking and feeling as a form of knowledge.
Lucy Skaer (born 1975, Cambridge, United Kingdom, lives in Glasgow) is a Turner Prize nominated contemporary artist who works with sculpture, film, print and drawing. Skaer graduated from the Glasgow School of Art and, in addition to her own practice, has also worked collaboratively since 2005 with Rosalind Nashashibi as Nashashibi/Skaer.
Lucy Skaer’s work is represented in permanent collections of many international museums including the Arts Council Collection, London (UK); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (FR); Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris (FR); FRAC, Marseille (FR); FRAC Bretagne, Rennes (FR); Kunsthaus Zurich (CH); Museum of Modern Art, New York (US); Tate, London (UK); and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (US).
Recent solo and group exhibitions include Forest on Fire, Bloomberg Mithreaum, London, 2020; Future Sun, SMAK GHENT, 2019; Carnegie International 57, Pittsburgh, 2018; The Green Man, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, and Available Fonts, Kunst-Werke, Berlin, 2018; and Una Casa Más Pequena, Museum Tamayo, Mexico City 2017. Skaer was selected as a Chinati Artist in Residence in 2021.
A Meet the Artist event will be held on Sunday, 6 November from 12 to 3pm.
For reproduction requests, interviews with the artist, and general inquiries, please contact the gallery:
+1 212 966 5154 or anna@peterfreemaninc.com.