Legend

Viviana Abelson, 2019
  • Read along

    The jacket-like sculpture – metal-seamed and hung with chains, whose collar and shoulders are surmounted by a bulging armour of tyre treads – is not draped over a coat hanger but over a starkly angular steel support. One is put in mind of punk and rocker culture, of brutality and thugs.

    And yet there is a peculiar poetry to this sculpture. One could read it as a memory of, a longing and demand for a life of freedom, independence and self-determination, a romanticised ‘being-left-to-one’s-own-devices’ in a harsh environment. Perhaps there is a faint whiff of adventurism about it, of South American gaucho culture. That would invest the jacket, which seems so brutalist at first glance, with something protective, something that helps people survive in the great but inhospitable outdoors. Something homely.

    Exciting art always means and effects an exploration and an engagement with possibilities.

    Erhard Metz
  • Location
    Room 4 on the ground floor
Viviana Abelson, Legend, 2019
Viviana Abelson, Legend, 2019