The Lubomirov Angus-Hughes Centre for Contemporary Curation is proud to announce a solo show by Mark Woods curated by Vanya Balogh following his participation at the 56th Venice Biennale and the Gerwerbemuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland. The centre is located in 26 Lower Clapton Road, Hackney, London, and will open on the 18th of February until the 12th of March 2017.
A Sundry Female Object, 2003-2004, silver, lace, leather, 230 x 110 mm. Photograph by Paul Tucker.
Mark Woods produces highly elaborated artefacts that blurs the boundaries between top end jewellery, fine arts and items from a cabinet of curiosities ending in luxurious objects of desire. As unnerving as evocative, the viewer is confronted with exquisite beauty, sophisticated craftsmanship and the awakening of unexpected emotions. That is the power of Woods’ works: an invitation to step out from our comfort zone and a requestioning of the human desires.
As the art critic, Mónica Sánchez-Argilés, says: “Woods’ sculptures seem to echo to perfection the fraudulent simulation phenomena of a society increasingly obsessed with glamour and pornography”.
Vanya Balogh, the curator and also an artist, says: “A Return To The Old Certainties is that rare thing; an exhibition that brings us a renewed encounter between psychoanalysis and fine art. At once disciplined and productively wayward, Mark Woods work dialectic directs us toward compelling voyeuristic world that awakens and invites us intimately to his fine making skills, love, curiosity, perversion, aggression, impurity and much more, ultimately all devised and compellingly so for an artist himself to unbecome accomplice in that ritual of repetitive abandonment.”
Woods commented on a few points below:
What is the reaction you expect to awake from the viewer with your creations?
Curiosity, perhaps surprise, certainly to question….I can never predict what reactions people have to these works, however, it does make me happy that people want to come & see it though…people often surprise, showing a glimpse of the darker corners of psyche…
Do you see your works blurring the boundaries between a highly sophisticated Craftmanship and Fine Arts? How?
Product produced by crafting, made to look synthetic, manufactured, seduction & desire, provocation of seduction & desire, harnessed to the cause of the market, consumption, commodity fetishism… commerce… selling us something…
For more information, please visit their website on www.lubomirov-angus-hughes.com
