Exhibitions

Venue: Spectacle Gallery, Birmingham

Dates: 1st April–15th April 2007

Notes: With David Kefford, Ian Rawlinson, Sovay Berriman, Alistair Mackie, Joanne Dennis and Dan Mort

Obstacle at Spectacle Gallery presents dynamic, experimental and arresting examples of contemporary sculptural practice by seven artists from across the UK. With an emphasis on inventive uses of materials and ways of making, the work is characterised by its variety, formal innovation, and an interest in a range of aesthetic trajectories.

Using Spectacle’s central gallery space, the exhibition considers the common ground underpinning its thoroughly variegated parts. From sprawling installation to quietly assured intervention, the artworks here are all wrested in objecthood – things and stuff to be encountered and navigated, experienced physically, viscerally, intuitively… or somehow to be made sense of, persistently questioning the spaces between material fact and imaginative endeavour.

Elegant constructions of reclaimed industrial materials, confoundingly surreal set pieces, elegeic yet disturbing figuration, installations of twisted bio-morphic forms, de-regulated icons from popular and collective consciousness, imaginary landscapes, over-wrought complexity and deceptive simplicity – these converge in Obstacle to explore some prevalent concerns and methodologies of artists using three-dimensions in Britain now.

The participating artists are David Kefford, Ian Rawlinson, Sovay Berriman, Michael Stumpf, Alistair Mackie, Joanne Dennis and Dan Mort.