Angela Bulloch
11 October to 18 December
NEWS RELEASE
AUGUST 2005
ANGELA BULLOCH
11 OCTOBER – 18 DECEMBER 2005
You are invited to the Press View: Tuesday 11 October, 1-4pm
This autumn Modern Art Oxford presents a new exhibition of the work of British artist Angela Bulloch. This will be the first comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work in the UK since her Turner Prize nomination in 1997.
Since graduating from Goldsmith’s College as part of the Freeze generation in the late 1980s, Angela Bulloch has emerged as one of Britain’s most innovative artists. The exhibition at Modern Art Oxford surveys a number of Bulloch’s significant works from the past ten years drawing on the themes of translation, encoding and systems of perception.
Bulloch is interested in systems that structure social behaviour. Her functional sculptures, light and sound works play with the ways in which we construct and interpret different types of information, be it related to art, literature, cinema, music, or issues of ownership and authorship. Her multi-disciplinary installations marry conceptual rigour with sensuousness and humour. Walking through a room triggers canned laughter; a video screening is activated by a person sitting on a cushioned bench opposite; a wall-mounted sequence of coloured spheres switches on each time a person passes a particular point.
Since the early 2000s Bulloch has been creating increasingly ambitious sculptural installations made from ‘pixel boxes’. Developed by Bulloch with engineers as a prototype in the late 1990s, the pixel box is made up of luminous tubes and an electronic control unit housed within an industrially produced wooden or metal casing. Elemental units within an ever-expanding body of work, the pixel boxes form the basis of a variety of structures, from towers and floors to monumental screens which translate scenes from cinema, television or entirely abstract sequences as mesmerising colour compositions that change before the viewer.
In recent years Bulloch has realised a number of important architectural commissions. Invited to create a work for the Tate Britain pier designed by Marks Barfied Architects, on the Thames at Millbank, she created a perforated light work embedded into the pier’s structure, which pulses and changes colours with the rise and fall of the tide.
Installed across Modern Art Oxford’s Upper Gallery spaces, the exhibition explores the artist’s use of cinematic narrative and its breakdown, often into kaleidoscopic environments of colour and sound. Among the works presented are Solaris, 1993, first shown at the Aperto section of the 1993 Venice Biennale, and Z-Point, 2001, one of Bulloch’s first pixel-box towers, in which the explosion scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point is referenced in a dynamic wall of changing colour sequences set to a sound track by composer David Grubbs. Also included are the Rules Series: ‘lists of rules that pertain to particular places, practices or principles’, which will be presented in their entirety. Bulloch also presents a new light-sculpture installation, RGB Spheres, in which she takes further her interest in the conditions of visual perception with reference to Bridget Riley’s iconic black and white painting White Disks from 1964.
Born in Ontario, Canada in 1965, of British parents, Angela Bulloch graduated in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1988. Since that time, she has exhibited in numerous exhibitions in Europe and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Vehicles, Le Consortium, Dijon (1998); Angela Bulloch. Z-Point, Kunsthaus Glarus (2002), Matrix 206: macromatrix for your pleasure at Berkeley Art Museum, University of California (2003). Her work was recently on show in the group exhibition Extreme Abstraction at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. In 1997, Bulloch was short-listed for the Turner Prize. She has been nominated for the 2005 Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. The artist lives and works in Berlin.
The exhibition is curated by Suzanne Cotter, Senior Curator at Modern Art Oxford and organised in association with Secession, Vienna and De Pont Foundation, Tilburg. A joint publication documenting the exhibitions is being published in January 2006. It will include reproductions of the installation at Modern Art Oxford. Published as a bilingual edition in English and German, it will also include a number of new texts on Bulloch’s work to date.
The exhibition at Modern Art Oxford is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation and the Canadian High Commission, London.