Alison Wilding: Testing the Objects of Affection

20 September 2024 to 26 October 2024 Alison Jacques

Alison Wilding, Cuckoo, 2015 © Alison Wilding
Alison Wilding, Cuckoo, 2015 © Alison Wilding

Alison Wilding presents her first exhibition at Alison Jacques, London.

The sculptures give off a sense of time and space crumpled, a collapse that pushes us into the present, directly. Ancient and modern materials collide, drawing out streams of consciousness…. Rosie Cooper - on the occasion of ‘Alison Wilding: Right Here and Out There’ at De La Warr Pavilion, 2018

Alison Wilding (b. 1948 Blackburn, UK) presents her first exhibition at Alison Jacques, a widely anticipated overview of the artist’s highly influential 50-year career. Spanning work from 1975 to the present day, the show allows an unprecedented insight into one of Britain’s major sculptors.

Emerging from the male dominated group ‘New British Sculpture’ in the 1980s, a reaction to Minimalism and Conceptual art marked a return to the incorporation of traditional materials and methods. As one of the few female artists within this group, Wilding’s work has often been under the radar in comparison to her male counterparts, despite solo exhibitions at MoMA, New York (1987), the Serpentine Gallery, London (1985), a retrospective at Tate Liverpool (1991) as well as Duveen Galleries Tate Britain (2013).

Wilding’s work is often discussed in terms of materials and shadow, concealment and revelation; the artist refers to her work as ‘mostly abstract sculptures’. Outside of abstraction, her practice is very much related to human desires and bodily encounters.  This exhibition gives us an insight into the scale at which Wilding works. Small arrangements of sculptures are presented on worktables from the artist’s East London studio. Works of an intimate scale, including a tiny, desiccated frog found in the basement of the artist’s home are shown in conversation with large free-standing and floor-based sculptures.

Wilding has constantly experimented with the boundaries of sculpture, side-stepping any traditional value orders, using the found and the made, the expensive and cheap with equal importance. A vital part of her practice is a continual interest in drawing. For Wilding, her works on paper possess a freedom that is impossible to replicate in sculpture, a practice without gravity in which ‘the right way up’ is always open for interpretation. These works on paper, presented alongside the artist’s intricate notebooks - in which works are numbered, thoughts are discussed, and ideas are sketched out - provide a fascinating and at times unexpected insight into her studio practice.

Alison Jacques, 22 Cork Street, London, W1S 3NG.

Times: Tuesday – Friday 10.30am – 6pm, Saturday 11am – 6pm.

Further Information:  Exhibitions – Alison Jacques