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thomas houseago

moun room

thomas houseago  moun room

source: officielleartfair

Né en 1972 à Leeds en Angleterre, Thomas Houseago vit et travaille à Los Angeles. Il crée des sculptures monumentales, souvent figuratives qui ont une capacité remarquable de transmettre de manière simultanée des états de puissance et de vulnérabilité. L’utilisation de matériaux associés à la sculpture classique et moderne (comme le bois sculpté, l’argile, le plâtre et le bronze), ainsi que des matériaux moins traditionnels tels que des tiges d’acier, de béton et de toile de jute, lui permettent de créer des sculptures qui révèlent avec force tout le processus de fabrication. Alors que l’œuvre de Houseago peut être considérée comme le prolongement d’une tradition sculpturale historique, les combinaisons particulières de matériaux, l’inclusion de références tirées de la culture populaire et l’interaction inhabituelle entre deux éléments tridimensionnels, remettent en cause la hiérarchie inhérente à des formes visuelles ainsi que les matériaux et les valeurs qui leur sont associés.
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source: gagosian

Thomas Houseago is vanguard in his approach to sculpture’s original subject, the human body. Utilizing mediums associated with classical and modernist sculpture—such as carved wood, clay, plaster, and bronze—as well as less traditional materials like rebar and hemp, Houseago builds monumental figures rife with the traces of their making. Body parts rendered from flat portions of wood adjoin with others sculpted in the round to create interplay between two and three dimensional elements. His bulky-shouldered figures replace the grace of their serpentine contrapposto stance with awkward contortions of piecemeal appendages. Crouched and stilted on thick limbs, these reductive interpretations convey a striking sense of weight and anatomical structure. By tapping into the nuanced legibility of the human form, Houseago’s figures oscillate between states of power and of vulnerability.

Thomas Houseago was born in 1972 in Leeds, England. He studied at the Central Saint Martins College of Art, London and De Ateliers, Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include the “The Artist’s Museum,” MOCA, Los Angeles (2010); “What Went Down,” Modern Art Oxford (2010, traveled to Ashmolean Museum, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, and Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Ile de Vassivière, through 2011); “The Beat of the Show,” Inverlieth House, Edinburgh (2011); “The World Belongs to You,” Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2011); “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Thomas Houseago: Hermaphrodite,” Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich (2012); “Thomas Houseago: Striding Figure/Standing Figure,” Galleria Borghese, Rome (2013); and “As I Went Out One Morning,” Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York (2013). His work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.
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source: designboom

british artist thomas houseago sets visitors to hauser & wirth gallery in new york within an immersive environment, inviting them to meander among the complex screens of layered and pierced materials. ‘moun room’ comprises three chambers contained within one another, spanning approximately 37 feet by 45 feet wide, and 12 feet above the viewer. playing with notions of negative and positive, geometric apertures are cut from the panel walls and constructed in bas-relief, mimicking the lunar phase of the moon. circular voids of varying sizes — some large enough to walk through and others like portholes — engage the viewer in exploration and play. the enclosures and small passageways extended both internally and outside the structure’s physical walls, beckoning meditation and introspection in response to the architecture, summarized by houseago as ‘a visual maze with a spiritual dimension’.

walls are built from individual panels made of tuf-cal plaster and are linked together through the use of iron re-bar. the architectural ribbing reveals that the structure’s internal framework is akin to the ribs of the human body — yet reversed — so that what is normally protected is externally exposed. similarly, the soft, smooth skin of his structure’s pearlescent walls can only be experienced from inside the structure.