Continuing their ongoing series of significant solo exhibitions by leading international artists, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) presents a major exhibition by Irish-born, London-based artist Eva Rothschild, currently on display to 25 November 2018.
Curated by Max Delany and Annika Kristensen, and presented in association with the City Gallery Wellington and the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the first Australian survey of Rothschild’s work, this timely exhibition comes ahead of her forthcoming representation of Ireland at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and brings together new sculptural commissions and recent work spanning the last decade of the artists diverse yet distinct practice.
Shaped by a myriad of influences from minimal art of the 1960s and 70s to classical architecture, occult spiritualism and pop-culture, Eva Rothschild has developed an international reputation for sculptural works that are both striking and spare, as sharp geometric forms morph into flamboyant, enigmatic compositions. Stripped of excess, Rothschild’s abstract arrangements draw the mind into spaces where power, ritual, the architectural and the existential intersect.
Alongside the artist’s interest in the materiality of sculpture – encompassing ideas of form, space, materiality and scale – is an attentiveness to the physical presence of the body and its role both in the act of making and experiencing an artwork.
Rothschild’s arresting and at times eccentric forms, assembled from a variety of materials including concrete, leather, jesmonite, fabric and plastic, encourage a physical and aesthetic response from the viewer, as they navigate their own corporeality in proximity to the work, the composition of the exhibition, and the architecture of the gallery.
Several works consider the social potential of sculpture as open-form spaces and informal social settings in which to convene and converse; while others serve as spatial interruptions or thresholds, reorienting the passage and behaviour of the viewer. As a mise-en-scene or backdrop for performance, Rothschild’s installations also invite the idea of the chance encounter, as spaces to reflect, relax within or, more actively, play.
For one-night only at ACCA on Monday 1 October, Melbourne choreographer Jo Lloyd presents CUTOUT. With costumes designed by Eva Rothschild in collaboration with Andrew Treloar, the new choreographic work features ten dancers in dialogue with Rothschild’s installation, CUTOUT – which explores ideas of urbanism, augmented landscapes, borrowed scenery, shared fictions and the endeavour of pilgrimage.
Eva Rothschild has exhibited widely since the early 2000s, following postgraduate studies at Goldsmith’s College, London and an earlier degree at the University of Ulster, Belfast. Recent solo exhibitions include Iceberg Hits, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, 2018; A Material Enlightenment, 303 Gallery, New Work, 2017; Alternative to Power, The New Art Gallery Walsall, 2016; A Gated Community, Sonneveld House, Rotterdam, 2016; and Sightings, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas 2012.
Rothschild was awarded the 2012 Children’s Art Commission at London’s Whitechapel Gallery and the 2009 Duveen Commission by Tate Britain. In 2011 she was commissioned to produce a new public work, Empire, for New York’s Public Art Fund.
Eva Rothschild: Kosmos
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank
Exhibition continues to 25 November 2018
Free admission
For more information, visit: www.acca.melbourne for details.
Image: Eva Rothschild, Border 2018, painted concrete, wood, foam, polystyrene. Courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London