ART CITIES:Austin-Anya Gallaccio
While Anya Gallaccio graduated from Goldsmiths College in London in the late ‘80s, during the short but fertile period that birthed Young British Artist cohorts Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Sarah Lucas, among others, her work departed shortly thereafter from her colleagues into radical materiality. Early in her career she participated in two seminal London group exhibitions, “Freeze” in 1988 and the “East Country Yard Show” in 1990.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Contemporary Austin Archive
With nods to historical movements from the ‘60s and ‘70s, including Arte Povera, Land art, Conceptual art, and Minimalism, Gallaccio’s work is unique in its conceptual temporality and its site-specific intent, whereby the artist sources a region for its unique geographical characteristics and reflects these qualities within a particular work. “to see if time was there” (2017) is a new, site-specific commission for The Contemporary Austin’s Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park, it takes its title from a 19th Century poem by Emily Dickinson. This work combines Gallaccio’s ongoing interest in the enormous sequoias trees in Calaveras County, California, whose destruction for timber at the end of the 19th Century led to contemporary fascination with the large stumps as oddities and natural wonders, with her research into Texas’s rich geologic legacy and variety of stone. Taking a 1:1 scan of the base of a massive sequoia tree in Wales, that is among the largest examples of its kind in the U.K., Gallaccio worked with a local fabricator in central Texas to source and cut an array of stones to form this outsize tree stump. The artist intends the sculpture, sited in the remote wooded area of the lower grounds at Laguna Gloria and recalling petrified wood in its textures, to be an “Excavated relic or fantastical object,” one that is “More sci-fi than scientific”. Gallaccio invites viewers to stand, sit, play, or lie on the tree stump’s colorful inlaid surface, a lived aspect that reinforces the work’s commentary on the complex interaction between geologic time and human interventions in nature. Gallaccio’s work is concerned with constant change and the effects of time. Using a wide range of materials such as cut flowers, fruit, chocolate, ice, burning candles and salt, there is an inevitable impermanence about her work. Her approach most commonly involves setting up an installation which then evolves through the process of decay and disintegration. For one of her most dramatic works, “Intensities and Surfaces” (1996) staged at Wapping Pump Station, London, she built a 32 ton stack of ice which melted over a period of three months. More recently she has begun to use more traditional materials for her sculpture and has cast a whole apple tree in bronze. Although the short life of much of her work has meant that her installations now live on in memory and through photographic records, over the last decade and a half she has created a major body of work which has given her an important and unique place in British art. Works can be repeated, as has been the case with her pieces using cut flowers and for which she is perhaps best known. “Red on Green” incorporating 10,000 red roses is such a work. Originally made for her first solo exhibition in a public gallery, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1992, it was recreated ten years later for the exhibition “Blast to Freeze: British Art in the 20th Century” mounted by Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2002-03. More recently, “Red on Green” was recreated for the British Council exhibition Turning Points: 20th Century British Sculpture in 2004, the first major exhibition of contemporary art for ten years at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, Iran.
Info: Organizer: Heather Pesanti, The Contemporary Austin, Edward Marcus Sculpture Park, Laguna Gloria, 3809 West 35th Street, Austin, Duration: 2/4- , Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 9:00-17:00, Sun 10:00-17:00, www.thecontemporaryaustin.org
