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Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford, OX1 1BP,
10 Jan 2011
Thomas Houseago: What Went Down
Artist : Thomas Houseago
Title : Installation View
Date(s) : 2010
Credit : Photography by Edmund Blok
Thomas Houseago Press Release
Thomas Houseago has come to public prominence in recent years with his monumental, figurative sculptures that are charged with a remarkable energy and vitality. Houseago works primarily with media that demonstrates a sensibility towards classical sculptural materials and processes; primitive, totemic sculptures are hewn from giant timbers, Hessian is slathered in plaster and crudely wrapped around steel armatures, and largescale, free-standing works are ambitiously cast in bronze. Houseago’s sculptures possess a daring urgency, a tactility and brute physicality that expose the process of their own making. The visible ‘touch’ and ‘imprint’ of the artist are nakedly evident: a fist of plaster is gauged out to create an eye socket, a deft chiselling of redwood to suggest a shoulder
blade.
Houseago’s work is unapologetic and relentless in its evocation of classical and modernist sculptural works. His somewhat crude and direct working belies a sophistication that is rich in a layering of cultural, mythological and art historical references. In a time of fast-paced
technological change, Houseago’s art takes on the psychological role of an awkward, unresolved reminder of the past – cumbersome and insistent in its emotional presence.
Alongside his presentation at Modern Art Oxford, Houseago will present a number of sculptures in the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. These pieces will be placed in the newly redeveloped Cast Gallery, the Human Image gallery and elsewhere around the Museum, providing visitors with surprising and dramatic discoveries, and highlighting the relationships and tensions between the past and the present found in
Houseago's work.
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