Andreas Siegfried and Lee Cavaliere are pleased to present a group exhibition of collective works around the theme of Weight and Measure.
The work of artist Richard Serra is the result of a lifetime spent exploring the insistence of gravity, the anticipation of crushing weight and the remoteness of geological time. This exhibition draws its title from a work on paper by this artist: an etching, which encompasses very simply notions of human experiential space, lightness and time. The diverse works in this exhibition each reflect in their own way Serra’s concerns, and communicate their own route into understanding weight and measure in art.
Fredrik Vaerslev’s work exists as a measure of time: imagined and real. The piece presented here is an expression of the fantastic through the mundane; the work is left to weather, forming seemingly everyday marks on familiar surfaces. These could be caused by ordinary daily wear and tear; yet as we realize the works are a construction, an artifice, the materials and process are revealed.
Pedro Cabrita Reis describes his work as painting, and the materials he paints with are space and light. In Una Grata su Arancio a steel grid deceptively floats from a painted surface, thrown into the space by a vibrancy of colour. The colour is applied directly to the wall, becoming part of its surroundings. The piece embodies a physical expression of modernist principles; of lightness, of lack.
Similarly, Jose Dávila’s work is a brief and erudite description of balance, gravity and weight. Using industrial materials the artist explores the notions of architecture and sculpture, drawing out parallels between form and space. The steel sculpture stands like a sketch in space, held together only by its own weight.
Other pieces take a measure of time and human effort. Martin Creed’s works often consider duration and infinity. Assigned random numbers, the pieces bear no relation to each other and yet we see in them an urgency, a need to engage with process and draw out ideas. Jeff Wall’s photograph is a study of a sapling as it is gently supported in its fragility. It is an image of nurture and of surrender; we can feel the pull of gravity and imagine the passage of time.
Alongside this, Richard Long’s work considers the limitations of human time, leveling us against the world and its sheer scale. The impossibility of that relationship is drawn here in primordial mud. We are compared physically to nature’s vastness.
As with many of the works in this show, we are invited to consider how we measure ourselves against the wider world, and to consider our own physical presence. Materials are paramount within the works on display; each considers its own objectness, its own presence. They betray a broader relationship with the physical world, or its absence; with space, with gravity, with weight and lightness.