source: lehmannmaupin

Anya Gallaccio (b. 1963, Scotland) attended Kingston Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College at the University of London. Gallaccio creates site-specific installations, often using organic materials as her medium. Past projects have included arranging a ton of oranges on a floor, placing a thirty-two ton block of ice in a boiler room, and painting a wall with chocolate. The nature of these materials results in natural processes of transformation and decay, often with unpredictable results.

Gallaccio has exhibited extensively on an international level, including solo exhibitions at the Tate London (2003); Sculpture Center, New York (2006); Camden Art Centre, London (2008); and Eastshire Museum, Scotland (2010), among others. In 2003, Gallaccio was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize. Gallaccio’s work is featured in numerous public and private collections, including the Tate Gallery, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and South Gallery, London. The artist lives and works in San Diego, California.
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source: artnet

The Druids, a class of priests who lived in the Iron Age, communicated via an alphabet that consisted entirely of drawings of tree branches, with each letter or sound accorded an arboreal species and drawn to graphically resemble it. For instance, the “B” sound was “beith,” which means “birch tree” in modern English, and the letter comprised a drawing of a birch branch, while “ea” was an aspen tree, and the letter was a representation of aspen. The Druids also marked time by trees, naming each calendar month of the 13-month lunar cycle after a common tree like Birch, Rowan, Ash or Willow.
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source: lwoodacre

‘For that open space within (2008), Gallaccio has filled the smaller gallery at Camden with a section of a horse chestnut tree, recently removed from a London park after it died. The tree is huge, filling the high-ceilinged space, its branches pushing against the windows and walls as though they were about to burst out of the building at any moment. In spite of its mighty presence, however, the tree is obviously lifeless: its limbs are hacked and re-pinned, held in place by crisscrossing struts and ropes. These accoutrements give an impression of Frankenstein’s monster, brutally rebuilt and harnessed, despite the fact that all its sections have sprung from the same organic form. This method of reconstruction has created a curious mixture of both the real tree and a representation of it’
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source: goyovigil50

Después viene o no a cuento el marco para la reflexión y la emoción, para el diálogo y la colaboración con la obra y su creador, que en este caso es la escocesa GALLACCIO, la cual toma como motivo un sentido ecológico y poético sobre lo que nace y es destruido, consumido, utilizado, a pesar de que la tela de araña nos tiene atados bajo condena. La música ya no suena. La conjugación de todas estas elucubraciones entre visionarias y plásticas tiene el sabor y disfrute de lo posmoderno, del reflejo de una sensibilidad convaleciente del propio perfume de su éter esparcido.
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source: artavizuala21

Anya Gallaccio s-a născut în Scoţia, în anul 1963 şi a studiat la Goldsmiths ‘College, Universitatea din Londra (1985-1988) şi Politehnica Kingston (1984-1985).
Ea lucrează cu materii organice, cum ar fi de exemplu fructe, legume şi flori, materiale supuse unor schimbări pe timpul cât sunt expuse. Cele mai multe dintre aceste materiale de lucru pur şi simplu se degradează, demonstrând efemeritatea artei, creaţia ei fiind greu de achiziţionat în aceste condiţii de către public sau de colecţii private. Ea a fost nominalizată în anul 2003 pentru Premiul Turner, intrând în atenţia publicului la sfârşitul anilor 1980, alături de un grup de tineri artişti care expuneau la Londra în expoziţia Freeze, expoziţie curatoriată de Damien Hirst, în urma căreia a luat fiinţă grupul Tinerilor Artişti Britanici. Din acel moment ea a avut o serie de prezentări expoziţionale personale atât în Marea Britanie, cât şi în străinătate. Timpul, pe de o parte, iar de cealaltă parte calitatea imprevizibilă a instalaţiilor sale, sunt două concepte ce se referă la istoria performanţei şi, în acelaşi timp, la tradiţia pentru sculptură. Această fascinaţie care cuprinde un ciclu de transformare şi degenerare, proprietăţi inerente a materialelor organice, se află în centrul preocupărilor lui Anya Gallaccio.

„Priviţi cu atenţie la o crăpătură în perete şi ar putea fi şi Grand Canyon”, spunea Robert Smithson.

Călătoria Anyei Gallaccio a început în Valea Morţii din SUA, formând pe parcusul întregii acţiuni un clişeu definit ca o eliberare de pasiuni şi, purificator de emoții, o excursie care ajunge ajunge în cele din urmă la Londra.
Formale şi nisipul se combină cu fragmente din sticlă pentru a compune imaginea, asemenea unei proiecţii care depinde de lumina soarelui şi este apoi proiectată pe podea sau pereţii galeriei, instalaţia depinzând de diferitele momente ale zilei. Fereastra devine un aparat, folosit în cazul de faţă pentru proiecţia unui peisaj imaginar, care este rezultatul unei experienţe personale în deşert, o experienţă „filtrată” prin lentila unui design arhitectural. Pornind de la această logică, Gallaccio produce o intervenţie sub forma unui „asamblaj” care se angajează atât în moştenirea Land-Art, cât şi a artei abstracte de la începutul secolului al XX-lea.
Nisipul suferă şi el o transformare sau, mai degrabă, o schimbare cromatică. Culorile artei străvechi, care configurau primele imagini create de mâna omului, cum ar fi de exemplu galben-ocru, roşu de fier, siena sau gri, se combină în construcţia unor compoziţii geometrice, constructiviste şi un hiper-play saturat de vizualitatea senzuală, devenind un semn distinctiv al creaţiei artistei Anya Gallaccio. Lumina şi sticla de la etajul galeriei invită imaginaţia privitorului să călătorească prin intermediul particulelor microscopice de nisip, amplificând relaţia metaforică dintre lumină şi artele vizuale.
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source: tateorguk

Anya Gallaccio was born in Paisley in 1963. She studied at Kingston Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College, University of London. Gallaccio is one of the leading British sculptors of her generation, yet the ephemeral nature of her chosen materials, such as flowers, fruit, ice and grass, means that few of her works remain permanent. Most of them simply decay, rather than being acquired by private or public collections. The unpredictable time-based qualities of her installations relate to the history of performance as much as the tradition of sculpture. This fascination with cycles of transformation and degeneration, properties inherent in the organic materials she uses, lies at the heart of Gallaccio’s practice.
Many of Gallaccio’s early works were set in large derelict spaces. In 1996, she constructed a thirty-four tonne cube of ice in an old Pumping Station in Wapping, East London. This vast block of ice slowly melted over time, a process accelerated by the ball of rock salt buried in its core. She has also responded to historical sites. In Glaschu 1999 she took a pattern from a carpet design found in the archive of a local factory and recreated it in foliage on the floor of the neo-classical interior of Lanarkshire House in Glasgow.
The conceptual framework of her art is often developed from the specific site and its historic resonance. Yet the physical presence of the work is always a primary concern. The viewer’s senses are stimulated at every turn. This might be the pleasurable scent of flowers or chocolate – which at a later date might become the disturbing stench of decay. Or it might be the bold use of unexpected forms to create a stunning view, for example through the introduction of seven felled oak trees to the grand Duveen galleries at Tate Britain, or the simple presentation of a wall of gerbera daisies pinned behind a single sheet of glass, as seen in a new work, preserve ‘beauty’ 1991-2003, for the Turner Prize exhibition.
Her exhibitions at Tate Britain and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, showed the innovative ways in which Gallaccio continues to explore the language of sculpture. Recently she has started to work with the traditional sculptural medium of bronze, whose properties seem to be the opposite of the unconventional materials she usually employs. Yet the casts of living objects, such as in because I could not stop 2002 which juxtaposes a bronze apple tree with real apples , represent Gallaccio’s ongoing fascination with time, whether presented in its arrested state, or by making visible the inevitable process of natural decay and eventual disappearance.