Phillips de Pury & Company, Howick Place
London
3 March - 28 March 2009
Phillips de Pury & Company is pleased to announce a major exhibition of new work by internationally acclaimed artist, Ai Weiwei to be on view at the company’s London galleries at Howick Place.
The show is composed of four new sculpture series—Marble Chairs, Moon Chests, Bubbles, and selected Furniture works.
Ai Weiwei’s accomplishments in art, architecture, and urban planning are prolific.
The constant in the artist’s philosophy is his fascination with forms of nature and antiquity, and the continued investigation of such forms to question our concepts of value, authenticity, and aesthetics.
His earlier works configured Ming and Qing Dynasty antiques alongside utilitarian bicycles, raincoats, and shoes, toying with the perceived authority of Euclidean planes, culture, and utilitarian function.
More recently, Ai’s projects aim to capture something larger: history in the making.
Works such as his videos of Beijing’s ring roads, his hugely popular blog, and his Documenta XII masterpiece, Fairytale (2007), are monuments built upon the quotidian and ubiquitous.
The artist’s works are growing into increasingly large and complex aesthetic systems structured upon his own favorite motifs, but largely populated by the roar of the external world.
Ai Weiwei: Four Movements is an intricately structured symbolist poem. Its four parts comprise an allegorical whole; the major themes include constructed realities, the questioning of cultural authority, myth and science, and the transformative power of the artist.
The Moon Chests possess a mysterious quality of an earthly portal to an unknown abyss.
The series is executed according to a mathematical formula that permits for 81 unique permutations; each cabinet has four apertures that mimic the stages of a lunar eclipse.
The Chests are constructed from huali wood, an extremely dense and resilient wood that is often used in making Chinese furniture, and assembled with expert joinery methods utilizing no nails or screws.
In stark contrast to the immense finery of the works’ construction is the eclipses’ immaterial nature, raised to life by llght, shadow, and the shifting position of the viewer.
Faceless, yet familiar touchstones, the Marble Chairs series belie more contradictions.
While ethereal in appearance, each work weighs a hefty 55 kilograms and is carved from a single block of beautifully striated white marble -- rendering a misty, grey landscape within the confines of the classical forms of Ming and Qing Dynasty chairs.
In contrast to the traditional narrative quality of anthropomorphic marble statues, Ai leaves their story writ large in these three-dimensional totems.
In the tradition of Ai’s Oil Spills (2006) and Mei Le (2007), the Bubbles’ concept is inspired by largely overlooked forms of nature reconceived in exquisite materials.
100 Bubbles were shown on Watson Island as part of the Art Projects Exhibition at Art Basel Miami Beach 2008.
The Bubbles are created in Jingdezhen, the Chinese city with an illustrious 1800-year history of ceramic production which at one point was the source of all imperial porcelain for the Emperor Zhenzhong’s court (1004-1007).
They reflect the spectator’s changing environment implacably back at him, but also hint at space-age portals to other worlds.
The Furniture series presents new works by the artist in his ongoing exploration of Ming and Qing Dynasty furniture.
Since the late 1990s Ai’s ongoing experiments with his favorite medium portray classical chairs, tables, and other wooden artifacts in unreal configurations that defy gravity, matter, and three-dimensionality.
Immense beams pierce antique tables; floating stools collide like accidents of string theory; tables entwine and contort in space-challenging configurations.
The Table with Beam, Three-Legged Table, and Grapes featured in this exhibition rank among Ai’s most iconic pieces in the series.
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