May 23, 2018, 3 pm
Many thanks to the art dealer Javier Perés introducing our participants to the program and history of PERES PROJECTS and guiding us through the exhibition “THE MULCH” by Rebecca Ackroyd.
Exhibition Dates: April 27 – June 15, 2018
Location: PERES PROJECTS
Opening Hours: Monday – Friday, 11 AM – 6 PM
Address: Karl-Marx-Alle 82, 10243 Berlin
“When I go to talk to Rebecca Ackroyd in her studio she tells me she doesn’t want me to map out her thinking, nor for the work she’s making this year to be decoded, explained, interpreted within an inch of its life. Recent political events, she says – the prospect of Brexit, its attendant flurry of reactionary posturing and violence, the rise of right-wing politics in the UK, Germany (wherever, it sometimes seems, we care to look) – made it hard to make art for a while, to know what art would be for.
Like my friend’s productive mistake, Ackroyd’s mind too veers towards the warm. She describes how the sculptures of reclining figures in the Berlin show will be ‘basking’ – like lizards in the sun. In the past she sculpted figures that were half-human, half stove pipe, deep charred hearths in place of bellies. Those works, I think, were part of an exploration of some idea of home (per the popular Great War song, Keep the Home Fires Burning, the hearth being a long-established folk synonym for the dwelling, as well as a political rhetoric of the nation). But in 2018, I think her creations inhabit the street. She casts from door shutters now (Carriers, she calls the series): the sort of exclusionary, protective, oddly rhythmic structures that punctuate every walk, however short, in the area of London where she works and I live. In Peres Projects, Ackroyd tells me, she wants to build a long wall up to the ceiling, making the space into a runway, or a road.” (Excerpt from the press release by courtesy of PERES PROJECTS & Matthew McLean)
More information on the PERES PROJECTS Website.
