When Forms Come Alive: a surreal, bonkers show like this is the Hayward Gallery’s happy place
What an invigorating, joyful show the Hayward Gallery’s new exhibition proves to be. Its subject is sculpture from the past 60 years – and there’s barely any bronze in sight. Rather, the curator, and director of the gallery, Ralph Rugoff, traces a “lineage” of what he calls “restless sculpture”: abstract forms that engage with “movement, flux and organic growth”, and rebuke “rigid geometries”. Blobby menhirs and a dolmen – seemingly slapdash, yet mischievous and irresistible – by two of the show’s 21 artists, Franz West and Phyllida Barlow, exemplify this genealogy, and provide a pleasing counterpoint to the hard-edged Brutalist edifice in which they’re set.
If Rugoff’s thesis sounds vague – works here range from Ruth Asawa’s ethereal hanging sculptures, like ghosts of a lava lamp’s innards woven from metal wire, to a recent model of a rollercoaster with pink neon tubing for a track, by LA-based EJ Hill – that’s because it is. Yet, there is invention aplenty (bath foam, beeswax, amber resin, and wasp venom are among the long list of surprising and exciting materials) – and, if you’re after it, abundant skill.
In Pumping (2019), Eva Fabregas hooks up 12 speakers pulsating with bass-heavy electronic music to gigantic bulging pastel-coloured worms, like a palpitating pile of monstrous entrails made from elastic fabric. Are we in a gallery – or a nightclub’s bowels? Elsewhere, Holly Hendry’s serpentine steel ducting, arranged on a window ledge like an annotation on the City view beyond, has a similar (albeit simultaneously industrial) intestinal quality.
If you wished, you could snap your way through this exhibition in 15 minutes, post the results on social media, and be done with it: a wall of foam by Michel Blazy, cascading imperceptibly from whirring apparatus attached to scaffolding, like a machine for producing clouds, provides one of many spectacular moments. And several works have a slick, Instagramable quality. Shylight (2006-14), a kinetic sculpture of tutu-like lampshades that endlessly curtsey as they yo-yo from the ceiling, could be a centrepiece for a flash hotel’s foyer.
Moreover, the sleekness of several sculptures feels at odds with the “corporeality” supposedly under investigation – although, it could be argued, this may simply reflect our own airbrushed, beautiful-body-obsessed culture.
Still, I recommend taking your time, to relish the subtleties, as well as charged energy, of these “alive” forms, such as the grain and texture of Matthew Ronay’s beautifully crafted painted wooden sculptures, which resemble sex toys fashioned from coral. Olaf Brzeski imbues cast-iron slabs with the quality of half-melted chocolate. Swelling, incandescently colourful shapes erupt from the roughhewn clay bases of Teresa Solar Abboud’s sculptures like crabmeat spilling from a claw.
I also loved the intricacy, and strangeness, of Marguerite Humeau’s fascinating sculptures inspired by bracket fungi and termite mounds, which smell gloriously of honey, and, accompanied by an eerie saxophone soundtrack, evoke a throbbing, insect-like otherness, with little relation to human consciousness.
The Hayward has form when it comes to staging exhibitions with a surreal, even bonkers quality – as anyone who remembers 2008’s Psycho Buildings (with its outdoor boating lake on one of the gallery’s roof terraces) can tell you. Putting on a show like this is the gallery’s happy place.
From Feb 7; information: southbankcentre.co.uk
