Agenda

LONDRES : EXPOSITION MEEKYOUNG SHIN "WEATHER" A BARAKAT GALLERY

Du 3 octobre au 22 novembre 2019,

Meekyoung SHIN

"Weather"

Barakat Gallery is pleased to announce Meekyoung Shin: Weather, the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery. On this occasion, Shin will present her first ceramic works alongside a selection of antiquities from the extensive Barakat collection.
 
Working between Seoul and London, Meekyoung Shin (b. 1967) continually attempts to visualise time and its passage through her sculptural practice. Her work creates points of contact between the past and present, exploring the boundaries between nature and art, East and West. Trained in Korea in the classical tradition of European sculpture, Shin subsequently moved to London where she became drawn to the many objects removed from their place of origin and placed in vitrines and on plinths in museums and art institutions to act as representatives of distant cultures.

Known for her soap replicas of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, which she exhibited at the British Museum (2007), and for her soap sculpture replicas of ancient Chinese pottery, the pieces Shin has recreated in soap are exquisite enough to pass for the originals, yet the nature of her material expresses the potential of art to transform and decay over time.
 
Weather will exhibit some of these soap sculptures alongside Shin’s latest ceramic work, as well as  antiquities from the Barakat collection, reflecting the artist’s perspective on the ephemeral nature of art in different ways. Through her working method, she shows the process of decay that all life and art will eventually undergo. The title evokes the double meanings of ‘weathering’ and ‘weather’, suggesting both the processes through which objects become worn through daily life, and the weather, as a force of nature that changes objects over time.

In her Megalith series of ceramics (shown above), the artist creates rock-like forms out of fragments that exploded during sintering, a process through which clay becomes rock-hard in the kiln and then explodes into fragments, like those that might have been generated during the birth of the cosmos. Her Megaliths record and halt moments of such fragmentation. For the artist, these works stop time in its tracks and visualise petrified time at the moment of explosion – a midpoint between what has disappeared and what exists, nature and art. The works look like meteorites, gold ore, bronze, and moss-covered rocks by turns. They also resemble cross sections of the white rocks of the Seven Sisters cliffs in the United Kingdom. They recall and reinterpret the natural objects that the artist has encountered in her life.
 
Weather also reflects a fresh approach to Barakat, this fifth-generation, 130-year-old family business, famed for its collection of ancient art from East and West. This year, the London headquarters of Barakat will relaunch with an aim of welcoming new and existing audiences through a programme of exhibitions, inviting viewers to look at antiquities through the eyes of modern and contemporary artists, exploring different themes in its vast collection.

The gallery’s evolving programme poses questions such as, what is it about ancient art that still captivates the modern imagination? How can contemporary art help us to see the classical legacy with new eyes? With a new, young team, Barakat seeks, across traditional divides of ‘classics’ and ‘art history’, to offer a richer way of seeing art: the new grows out of the old, the old is renewed by the visions of today.

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