Open until Saturday 8 September 2012
Matt Golden’s ‘House of Nguyen’ works up-scale a classic Vietnamese balancing dragonfly toy.
The veneered wooden insect spans to huge lengths and widths but still balance their noses onto the edges of plinths. With an amount of blase, Golden confirms and combines two well-trodden tropes: to make something bigger or smaller makes it art and to put something on a plinth makes it art.
LL: What’s the crux of the “dragonfly” work for you? Your works usually seem more romantic and open ended for the viewer…?
MG: The idea of taking something and putting it’s integrity, it’s ambition, it’s sense of worth or wonder under the microscope. Monumentalizing it, placing it on a pedestal. This grandiose approach is wrapped up in the gallery space they are to be seen in, it’s not about making them larger, but rather about making them ‘fit the space’.
They are not something to be viewed at a distance for what they represent, but rather engaged with on a physical level for what they are – a paradox of balancing harmony and creaking tension and strain.
I also see them (installed in this space) as painterly. Like walking through a Malevich painting, with a composition of overlapping horizontal lines – partially hidden, partially exposed.
Matt Golden (B. 1974, Salisbury, lives and works in London) gained his BA Fine Art from De Montfort, Leicester, and his MA Sculpture from Royal College of Art, London (2005). Recent and forthcoming solo and group exhibitions include ‘Matt Golden & Richard Paul’, The Russian Club Gallery, London, UK; Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, DE; ‘Young British Art II’, dienstgebaude, Zurich, CH (all 2012); and Art House Foundation, London (2011). Golden was awarded the Yoma Sasburg Award for Sculpture (2011). From 2008-2012 he established and directed The Russian Club Gallery
