Monthly Archives: March 2018

RED SKY | Sarah Lucas Portraits

by

DAME ZERO - Sarah Lucas - RED SKY 11527

RED SKY portraits of Sarah Lucas; photography and printing by Julian Simmons.

Edition of 3.

ORDER ENQUIRIES & AVAILABILITY : kurimanzutto

 

A set of 6 + 1, framed prints on Hahnemühle 100% cotton rag, matte surface, 308gsm; archival matte ink; AR museum glass.
Image size: 59 x 44″, framed size: 60 x 45 x 2.4″.

RED SKY AH
RED SKY BHA
RED SKY CAH
RED SKY DAH
RED SKY FA
RED SKY GHA
+
RED SKY HA

 

‘RED SKY (2018), a self-portrait smoking series that easily scoffs off any criticism and more importantly seems to laugh in the face of death. Whilst firmly rooted in the irreverent humour of Britain, DAME ZERO is able to securely locate itself within (as if emerging from) the context of Mexico. Embracing the hedonistic and self-destructive impulses that can be found in both British and Mexican society, it teases a bridge between the two cultures, made by our shared experiences of sex, illness, violence and death.’

Elliott Burns, thisistomorrow

 

‘DAME ZERO, where a woman is intuited, perhaps a self-portrait of the artist, which holds a skull in her crotch – an unquestionable death speech: life is a vice that is consumed. The resource is repeated, again, but in another medium; in this case, a series of self-portraits of the artist, which crown the exhibition, entitled RED SKY, in which Lucas poses in front of the camera, smoking compulsively: the lens portrays the movement of the artist, in denial of a precise recording; the shutter poetises the cigarette smoke that surrounds her, that makes her anonymous, a being that can not be stopped, defined, or dissected by analysis.’

Translated from the article ‘Un viaje al Mictlán con Sarah Lucas / A trip to the underworld with Sarah Lucas’, Javier Villaseñor V. CÓDIGO

SEE MORE  ➤➤

REALIDAD | screening at kurimanzutto

by

SHOWING IN MEXICO

17 MARCH – 7 APRIL 2018

KURIMANZUTTO, RAFAEL REBOLLAR 94, SAN MIGUEL CHAPULTEPEC 11850, MÉXICO D.F.

REALIDAD | SARAH LUCAS Y AMIGOS EN MÉXICO a film by Julian Simmons

A month in Mexico with British artist Sarah Lucas

72 minutes

‘The documentary REALIDAD accompanies the exhibition DAME ZERO at kurimanzutto. The film shows the original journey made by the artist to Oaxaca in 2012, in the company of friends, for the making of her first exhibition in Mexico, NUDS in Anahuacalli.

REALIDAD is not an art documentary; in fact, there is not much ‘making of art’ implicit in the filming, since the documentary does not seek to interfere with the creative impetus of the artist. It is an intimate portrait, somewhat social, where the various ‘actors’ move between drunken states caused by the consumption of mezcal. The documentary is basically that : Sarah Lucas in mezcálicos trances.

Which leads me to the first question I asked myself : what do international artists see in Mexico that brings them back? – and I think it is this ritualisation, this capacity, that daily life has – to impregnate itself with a total spiritual essence — an influence also found in the pre-Hispanic cultures that gave form to the first Mexican ideologies and a consequence of baroque thought that eventually curdled into a national ideal that was responsible for making the Mexican world a dictionary of symbols – ready to be read.

The documentary, in conjunction with Lucas’s exhibition at kurimanzutto, made me think of the journey across Mexico of the British Malcolm Lowry in the first quarter of the last century — also driven by a self-destructive momentum, where he channeled transcendental experiences with the (excessive) consumption of mezcal; experiences that were aphorised and published in his novel ‘Under the Volcano’ of 1947.

There is, in the reading of Lucas (and of Lowry) about Mexico something of a voyage to an unfathomable depth, something of a transit to an unearthly world, a space of symbols and representations, where death occupies a primordial place in the reading of reality.

Imagine a journey to Mictlán [the Aztec underworld], mediated, seen from afar, an ordinary glimpse of what transcends our physical experience of the world, evidenced by our self-destructive impetus, our constant – and foolish – need to self-destruct’  …this is DAME ZERO and REALIDAD.

Translated from the article ‘A trip to the underworld with Sarah Lucas; DAME ZERO at kurimanzutto’
by Javier Villaseñor V. in CÓDIGO