highlike

oliver herring

Gloria
Oliver Herring’s stunning sculptural portrait Gloria (2004) was a hit at the recent international art fair Art Basel Miami Beach. Created from thousands of fragmented digital chromogenic prints, this lifelike and expressive construction exists at the intersection of photography and sculpture and between realism and abstraction.

JAN VERCRUYSSE

Les Paroles

According to Jan Vercruysse, art no longer has a place in this world. As a result, he seeks, through his work, a new place for art and new conditions in which to work. His earliest photographic works recreated historical subjects, such as self-portraits, still lifes and mythological scenes. Gradually, he evolved a sculptural vocabulary of narrow rooms, empty frames and bases without objects. The sacred spaces created by Vercruysse in these works are known as Chambres or Tombeaux and represent the artist’s last-ditched attempts to create art that refers only to itself. His later works, such as plaster pianos, blue Murano glass musical instruments and bronze and ceramic turtles, achieve a perfect equilibrium between conceptual conviction and aesthetic concerns, and also reflect a real pleasure of making.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster

spinning heads

Noble and Webster produce silhouetted self-portraits through carefully constructed mounds of rubbish and debris illuminated at one precise angle, transforming the abstract pieces into figurative composites. Each sculptural installation represents this duality of art and also references the duality of man. Things appear to be far more complex than what first meets the eye. Whether you first notice the figurative shadow or the abstract wood piles, there is always the other to view second as its other half.