Pipeline

Current Exhibition

Still There Are Seeds To Be Gathered: Larissa Lockshin & Giorgio Van Meerwijk, 2- 25 March 2023

Giorgio Van Meerwijk and Larissa Lockshin are two artists united by their approach to materials. Their duo exhibition, Still There Are Seeds To Be Gathered embraces the raw physicality of their work whilst also considering the transformation and reinterpretation of their materials.

Van Meerwijk presents sculpture that evokes actions of gathering and transforming. Further exploring the idea of the receptacle, he is interested in how these narratives that Ursual le Guin is describing in her essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ (1986), shape a way of seeing and interacting with our surroundings. Van Meerwijk explores this through his use of materials, mixing artificial and natural materials in some works and embracing the original materiality in others. His sculptures feel at once nostalgic and natural whilst also being architectural and process-based. They seek to contradict in their shape and texture, conjuring a feeling of the unknown.

Van Meerwijk’s sculpture bounces off Lockshin’s enigmatic paintings, where abstraction of color using charcoal and matt pigment are mapped onto satin. Her paintings draw on landscapes from the 19th and early 20th century and consider paintings as objects over image content. Repossessing a gender associated material typically used for dressmaking, Lockshin paints on unprimed satin to allow for breaks of light to adorn the shiny fabric’s surface. Her paintings subtly move off their surfaces, creating tension and engaging the viewer from multiple viewpoints. Hand-carved frames snake and surround the picture plane, speaking in dialogue with Van Meerwijk’s own woodwork.

Both Van Meerwijk and Lockshin allow the character of their materials to keep their original nature as well as absorb new shapes and interpretation. Their work individually engages with the viewer. Van Meerwijk’s undefined sculptural shapes require you to be in front of them to understand the image they create, or the realisation of the presence of the mosaic. Lockshin’s shimmering landscapes similarly force their viewer around multiple vantage points to understand them entirely. Painting, drawing and sculpture collide as these two artists engage with their unique materials within a container of a multitude of sacred things.

In the Pipeline

Irene Montemurro

Grace is the only exception, 2023

Paper, gouache, acrylic, ink, pencil, rubber, satin and organza, ribbon

Varied dimensions

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.

– Simone Weil

Ahead of her exhibition at Pipeline, Irene Montemurro presents one of her notebooks as an introduction to the feverish landscape of her imagination. Filled with a collage-like array of found images, drawings and words, Grace is the only exception (2023) reveals the multitude of ideas, experiments and free associations that lie behind Montemurro’s poetic and evocative process.

Begun in June 2021 in Italy, Montemurro’s notebook provides an uninterrupted account of her most authentic thoughts mixed together with some explored fictional ones – those she never believed would be seen by anyone else. This notebook can be seen as an autobiographical yet fantastic gathering of objects: an expanded diary of sorts that speaks to the influence of avant-garde comic books, film, poetry and punk music lyrics, as well as personal memories, riffing on the religious imagery and text of Montemurro’s Catholic upbringing.

The title is a quote from the French philosopher Simone Weil, taken from the compilation of her notebooks Gravity and Grace (1952). Montemurro decontextualizes and reappropriates Weil’s notion of “Grace” and describes the notebook as “the space where the world building (Grace) can freely take place.” If the sketchbook is home, Montemurro views “Grace as the creation of a safe and controlled environment to dwell in and dramatize feeling, pain and (painterly?) pleasure.”

A pair of gloves hangs next to the notebook, symbolically asking visitors to try them on and turn the diary’s pages. Through this ritual act of dressing-up, we are granted entry into Montemurro’s intimate world and invited to play. Fashion historian and curator Valerie Steele writes that certain materials have “a powerful erotic appeal by virtue of their tactile, olfactory, and visual characteristics as well as their symbolic associations.” For Steele, “the costume is thus part of an elaborate erotic drama.” Within this context, Montemurro describes femininity as a form of play, or an aesthetic of its own that is constructed, distorted and exaggerated – all in the quest for Grace. In words of gender theorist Judith Butler: “The distinction between expression and performativeness is crucial.”

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