Introduction
Esther Schipper is pleased to present Angela Bulloch’s Animal Vegetable Mineral, the artist’s 13th exhibition with the gallery. On view are all new works, further developing the artist’s iconic series and her sculptures assembled from modular geometric elements, as well as a monumental wall painting and a projected digital animation.
Click here to enter the Online Viewing Room
The title, Animal Vegetable Mineral, refers to the three general categories comprising the totality of what exists in the world. As such the exhibition experience is equally all-encompassing: visitors enter a darkened space in which light and sound are programmed to shape the way the works are encountered. As illumination shifts from one work to the other and the video plays in an alternating rhythm, a specially arranged ambient audio-scape of synthetic noises surrounds us.
Installed in loose groupings in the exhibition space, the new sculptures are constructed from one to six modular elements based on pentagonal shapes. The surface of the vertically assembled geometric modules— dodecahedrons, meaning each is made of 12 pentagonal flat faces—creates an optical illusion of pushing and pulling planes. In bright colors and distinct materials, the works range in height from 50 cm to 300 cm. Each material—the sculptures are made from Corian, MDF, or stainless steel—has distinct properties that give the colors and surfaces of the works specific characteristics, modulating light and color.
A group of three Pixel Boxes, cuboid units programmed to emit light, includes modular pentagonal sculptural elements placed on top. Each work shines in one color: Canary in yellow, Caramba in blue and Cardinal in red. Ursa Major Minor and Aquila Winter Quartile, two works from Bulloch’s Night Sky series, wrap around the gallery’s existing floor-to-ceiling pillars. The dark blue felt panels with numerous programmed LED lights, placed according to the pattern of a galaxy or constellation, effectively make the pillars disappear. The sight of the spangled sky is reassuringly familiar, yet also holds a mystery as these particular constellations do not appear as they would from an Earth-based perspective.
A digital animation entitled Audio Visual Mineral is projected onto the wall. It mirrors the physical exhibition in the gallery as its virtual double, replete with a visiting cat avatar. A large-scale wall painting in the exhibition, formed from a pattern of pentagonal shapes stretching along an entire wall and across a corner, also appears doubled in the digital animation.
By emphasizing the changing conditions in the exhibition space, Angela Bulloch draws attention to the indebtedness of our perception to specific environments, cultural landscapes and image worlds. As light and sound shift, and architectural markers seem to disappear, her sculptures foreground our inclination for recognizing the familiar and classifying the alien. Animal Vegetable Mineral seeks to introduce an awareness of the multitude of realities that can exist at the same time, bringing into question our sense of the stability of any single state of being: real, virtual, or otherwise.
Angela Bulloch’s Animal Vegetable Mineral is kindly supported by the Stiftung Kunstfonds, NEUSTART KULTUR program.
