21st September – 2nd November, (Opening reception 20th September 6-8pm), Sid Motion Gallery, 24a Penarth Centre, Hatcham Road, London

In collaboration with Tom Cole, the Sid Motion gallery is delighted to announce DUST TO DUST, a three person exhibition featuring Magdalena Abakanowicz, Phoebe Cummings and Robert Mapplethorpe that considers the relationship between the organic world and the condition of the human body.

The exhibition is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute in London

Opening Reception: 20 September 2024, 6-8pm

About the exhibition

Exploring decay and renewal, each artist uses motifs and forms evocative of the fragility and vulnerability of nature, positioning cycles of life within the temporality of the natural world.

The exhibition will centre on Robert Mapplethorpe’s flower photographs; an installation by Phoebe Cummings made from raw clay; and Magdalena Abakanowicz’s signature sisal works. All three artists engage directly with the seemingly decorative tradition of flowers to ask much deeper and profound questions of our place in the world, and the fragility, tenderness and transience of life.

The human body is also implicit in the work of each artist. This blend of the organic and corporeal is clear in woven fibre works by Magdalena Abakanowicz (b.1930-2017). Probably best known for her Abakans – vast enveloping, womblike, seemingly timeless structures or figures that hang from the ceiling – Abakanowicz creates shroud-like forms that evoke a metamorphosis of some form of ambiguous organism; a brooding refuge to take shelter in or emerge from, imposing yet benevolent.

Phoebe Cummings (b.1981) makes time-based ceramic installations from unfired clay. Highlighting the fragility of the material while delving into themes of impermanence and decay, her work generally takes the form of botanical elements and is mostly site specific. The time-based nature of the work also has a performative quality: works are dissolved after the exhibition, or sometimes over the course of it, depending on the inherent fragility of the structure. Referencing the fragile relics of past and future histories, Cummings’ works frequently return themselves to dust.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s (b.1946-1989) flower photographs capture the fleeting and ephemeral. Increasingly made towards the end of his life, there is a beauty, temporality and fragility to these works that blurs the boundaries between the botanical and corporeal. The bodily parallels (flowers as organs) are evident and erotic, but the wilting forms also communicate a deep poignancy, reminiscent of the memento mori trope and the Baroque symbolism of Dutch still life painting in the seventeenth century.

By highlighting conceptual and historical overlaps, the exhibition brings these three disparate, but materially rich, practices together to encourage new contexts and threads of meaning to emerge.

The exhibition is the first in a series of four collaborations between Sid Motion Gallery and Tom Cole. This series of exhibitions will foreground material-based practices, exploring the liminal spaces between craft and art where traditional distinctions between the two begin to dissolve, allowing for exploration and experimentation that challenges preconceived notions.

Find out more about the exhibition here, FREE to visit: DUST TO DUST – Sid Motion Gallery

About Magdalena Abakanowicz

Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) was born in Falenty, Poland. She emerged as a young artist in a country devastated by the Second World War, bestowing her with a unique perspective that has unfurled through a distinct sculptural vocabulary including an innovative approach to materials and figurative forms. Robert Hughes in Time Magazine referred to Abakanowicz’s “dark vision of primal myth” and Barbara Rose, in her monograph, Magdalena Abakanowicz (Abrams, 1994), to the artist as “a shaman who receives and transmits messages in a visual language that is more universal than words.” Abakanowicz has had over 150 solo exhibitions in Europe, North and South America, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. She has exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Jardins du Palais Royal in Paris, and the Muzeum Narodowe in Poznań. Most recently, she is the subject of a major retrospective at London’s Tate Modern called Every Tangle of Thread and Rope (through 2023). Previous museum solo exhibitions include the Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and Institut Valencià de Arte Modern (IVAM), Valencia, both in 2008, and the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, in 2009. Several works were exhibited in the Energy and Process wing at the Tate Modern for the duration of 2010, and her survey The Human Adventure was exhibited at the Akbank Art Center, Istanbul, in 2013.

Read more about Magdalena Abakoanowicz:

Magdalena Abakanowicz – Biography | Artysta | Culture.pl