PRESENTATION: Phyllida Barlow-Glimse
For more than 50 years, Phyllida Barlow has taken inspiration from her surroundings to create imposing installations that can be at once menacing and playful. She creates anti-monumental sculptures from inexpensive, low-grade materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, polystyrene, scrim and cement. These constructions are often painted in industrial or vibrant colors, the seams of their construction left at times visible, revealing the means of their making.
By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive
Phyllida Barlow has continuously challenged the conventions of sculpture. Infusing humble materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, and cement with a boundless energy, she persuades the viewer to experience form on its own terms rather than to reflexively project meaning onto it. “Glimpse”, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in her celebrated five-decade career, is an ambitious presentation of new large-scale works assembled on site and in response to the Hauser & Wirth Gallery’s physical adaptation of the historic Globe Mills, a collection of late 19th and early 20th century buildings. Here Barlow responds to, manipulate, and punctuate the distinctive architectural features of the complex with her sculptures, yielding an intimate and confrontational encounter between form, environment, and viewer. Parallel to her studio practice, Barlow worked as a teacher for more than forty years before retiring in 2009 from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, where she was made Emerita Professor of Fine Art. Upon arriving at Hauser & Wirth’s South Gallery, viewers are confronted by Barlow’s new works, sculptures of such scale and fecundity that they radically transform the environment of the former neoclassical bank building of the Globe Mills complex. On any other day, this grand room, complete with a mezzanine and 21-foot-high vaulted ceilings, may draw viewers’ eyes upward to gaze at the immensity of the space. But through sheer force of imagination and innovation, Barlow encourages viewers to do the opposite: to glimpse, from above on the mezzanine or below on the ground floor, the intricacies and energy of gargantuan sculptural works that deny a prescribed narrative in favor of pure sensory experience. Like a theater director, she dictates viewers’ movement through space, pushing them around forms and into tight passages, drawing them into encounters with other works and unexpected vantage points. At the center of South Gallery, Barlow positions a sculptural structure reminiscent of a stage – a proscenium for the other surrounding sculptures. Though comprised of cement, this work will be delicate, prohibiting visitors from traversing its seemingly reliable surface. A nearby jumble of stilts will support two staircase-like forms, holding them in a state of entropy. Nearby, a cluster of poles and draped scrim may induce a sense of hazard, but will beckon visitors beneath its wooden posts and skirt of vibrantly painted fabric. The South Gallery’s mezzanine hosts a collection of smaller floor and wall-mounted works, more organic in their construction and suggestive of figuration. This grouping will include a new sculpture that harkens back to a visual trope of Barlow’s practice in the 1990s: a playful form, reminiscent of bunny ears, rests atop a gold base comprised of two cubes. This signature combination first appeared in Barlow’s 1994 work “Object for the television” which resides in the Tate’s permanent collection.
Photo: Phyllida Barlow, untitled: 100banners; 2015 (detail), 2015, Timber, plywood, tape, wadding, fabric, paint, sand, plastic, cement, plaster, Dimensions variable, Phyllida Barlow. frontier, Installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2021, © Phyllida Barlow, Courtesy the artist and Haus der Kunst, Photo: Maximilian Geuter
Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles CA, USA, Duration: 17/2-8/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com
