Darbyshire Gander Pica Starling

Interesting exhibition at the Hayward Gallery of four recent sculptural acquisitions from the Arts Council Collection. Which is based at the South Bank Centre but has no permanent site however is widely lent out to exhibitions.
 
Amalia Pica work is a garden rake on a stand. She specialises in using found objects to make absurd works. Simon Starling’s work represented a project to cross the Dead Sea consisting of a canoe made from Magnesium from the Dead Sea and photographs of the crossing.
 
I had seen Ryan Gander’s work before which uses versions of Degas’s Little Dancer to talk about how we look at art. This one was a blue plinth from which she had escaped to fall asleep at the bottom of it.
 
My favourite though was Matthew Darbysihire’s “Capitcha No 21 Doryphorus”, a blue classical statue. He had bought a 3D scan of a Roman statue which was itself a copy of a Greek original, which he then rebuilt by hand using layers of hand cut polycarbonate. I felt it was saying something about copying in art being from an original, to a copy, to a digital version and back to a crafted piece.
 
Closed on 9 April 2018