Can stone flow? Can metal ooze? Can hardness be rendered soft? I mean, generally, no. But artists are alchemists at heart, always trying to enact some kind of magical transformation, so they’re not going to let something like solidity stand in their way.
This show looks at 60 years of artists hellbent on the impossible: creating sculptures that ooze and bulge and throb and breathe. It’s all bodily and undulating, implying movement and growth and change and guts.
Artist duo Drift’s silk lampshades rise and fall from the ceiling as you walk in, pulsating like jellyfish. Teresa Solar Abboud’s airbrushed constructions look like the limbs of some impossible being that’s got itself stuck in a rockface. Marguerite Humeau’s futuristic society of socialist insects is familiar but uncomfortably post-apocalyptic. It's like walking into an alien aquarium, filled with creatures your brain can’t quite process.
But things are human too. Holly Hendry’s twisting knots of metal ducting look like freshly plucked guts, Eve Fabregas’s overwhelming, giant intestines are throbbing and literally visceral. All these sculptures look fleshy, porous, squishy.
All these sculptures look fleshy, porous, squishy
Other works deal more directly with immateriality, like Ruth Asawa’s hanging structures which seem to have somehow made soundwaves permanent, or Michel Blazy's tower of scaffolding which burps out huge sheets of foam.
The concept of the show is a bit too fluid for its own good though. It’s hard to see what Phyllida Barlow’s rigid slabs or how EJ Hill's neon rollercoaster relate to the theme. It can’t just be about curviness, otherwise you’d be able to include pretty much everyone but Donald Judd, you know? Elsewhere, Jean-Luc Moulene’s knotty glass sculptures are pretty heinous, and most of the works in fabric rub against the main thrust of the exhibition.
The ideas here aren’t new. Ever since Bernini made stone look like silk in the seventeenth century, sculptors have strived desperately to make hard look soft, turn line into curve, bring the immaterial to life. This feels like quite an old fashioned exhibition. It’s not dense with post-conceptual ideation, there are no narrative threads to unpick. It’s just about ooze, about seeping and twisting and morphing, about form and structure.
And that’s a pretty good thing. Because when it works – like with Lynda Benglis’s two sculptures, which are so blobby and rippled it’s impossible to believe they could ever have been anything other than the liquidy forms they are now – the illusion of transformation is so real it makes your brain feel floppy.