Overview:

The exhibition in Venice marked a highlight of the Statements series. Three new works by Steven Gontarski, Thomas Rentmeister and Marc Quinn were shown.

Quinn's work, 'The Overwhelming World of Desire (Phragmipedium Sedenii)' is a work without any of the brashness or bombast often associated with large-scale sculptural installations. It has an hallucinatory quality to it: vivid and seductively colourful from the front and back but almost evaporating into thin air as the viewer moves around it, a simple steel line in space.

For years, virtualisation and digitalisation have had an ever-increasing impact on our everyday life. In opposition to that there is a growing desire for something comprehensible, tangible. Through careful observation of that which is mundane and apparently of secondary importance, making the course of existence, we have – thanks to the various artistic standpoints – obtained illuminating answers to these questions.

In the finale of the Statements series, ‘Statements 7’, Quinn’s orchid, 12 metres high, takes pride of place of the terrace of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Observation of the orchid in context showed an additional hidden architectural quality. The impressive height of 12 metres was supported by a 16-cm-thin corpus. The result was that the sculpture seemed to disappear if viewed sideways from a distance. And so, time and time again, the “sudden appearance” of the “anti-sculpture” was a particularly special moment.

Curated by Mike Meiré.