In his first solo show with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Richard Stone presents a new body of work which both consolidates and advances his practice. The exhibition is characterised by a partial move away from Stone’s ‘reversal of making’ where haunting figures of found sculptures dipped in wax and paintings with their surfaces scraped away dominate. Here Stone enacts the same confrontation of the romanticism of a lost past with the contemporary through a new series of works in bronze and marble. The result is that ‘gleam’ deconstructs and reconstructs art history through a network of material and conceptual references. Stone engages with both the figure and the landscape, creating an immersive, critical dialogue between humanity and nature in the liminal space between historical reference and a resolutely contemporary effort to move forwards. While heroic in tone and monumental in scale, Stone’s new works interrogate humanity’s timeless preoccupation with placing itself coherently within a narrative that forever just eludes definite articulation. This phase of Stone’s work has been aided by an Arts Council England award for a significant phase of research and development and a Scholarship at Fonderia Mariana, Italy awarded by the Royal British Society of Sculptors and the Brian Mercer Charitable Trust.
Richard Stone: gleam
12th September – 12th October 2014
Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, 533 Old York Road, London SW18 1TG
Private View: 11th September 2014, 6.30-9pm
kristinhjellegjerde.com | richardstoneprojects.com
