Fantasy Island | 16.06 to 24.07.2020

Holtermann is pleased to present Fantasy Island - a small, in-focus group exhibition that offers insight into the rich and vibrant life of contemporary sculpture through the work of six exciting North American artists: Borden Capalino (b. 1980), Tony Matelli (b. 1971), Charlie Roberts (b. 1983), Sterling Ruby (b. 1972), Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin (both b. 1981). Together they demonstrate some of the issues that charge sculpture today, showing a variety of approaches to objects, images and materials.

Fantasy Island is a place with its own laws and customs, its own habitats and microclimates. From the street to the canopy, it is a place of imagination, materialisation and manipulation - and a zone for sculpture and sculptural thinking.

The works in the show can be read as sculptural tableaux: set pieces, still lives or object-environments, combining found, bought and made, and bringing together the unusual and quotidian, the unique and mass produced, pointing to the fantastical within the everyday, and the contingencies of material things.

Some read as plant sculptures or ‘hortisculptures’, offering up discordant and disorientating accounts of the natural world - anti-arcadias fabricated, manipulated and re-assembled - beginning their stories from the ground up, emerging from the soil, the pavement and the shop floor. The circular, island-like and wheeled composition of Fitch & Trecartin’s ‘Free Shot’ (2015) has a striking self-sufficiency and reads as both trophy and target - while Sterling Ruby’s ‘Basin Theology’ (2014) is another object-environment that might read as a crucible, a melting pot of former forms, ideas and, in turn, belief systems.

This self-seeding resilience is echoed in Tony Matelli’s ‘Weed 274’ (2012), a form of memento mori, a celebration of the overlooked and disregarded thriving against the odds, as well as in Borden Capalino’s ‘Island Sunset’ (2015) which is a comparable act of homage and attention-paying to plants unloved.

In spirit, the works on display in Fantasy Island all combine seriousness and playfulness, asking that we consider sculpture and its enigmas in dynamic relation to the real and imaginary worlds it has been created to inhabit. Together, they remind of the vibrancy of sculpture today and its special ability to communicate our material and emotional relationships to the changing worlds around us.

An insightful exhibition text by Dr Jon Wood, curator and writer on modern and contemporary sculpture formerly of the Henry Moore Institute, accompanies the show - click here to access it.

Courtesy Holtermann Fine Art, Photography Ollie Hammick