Every year, doggerfisher mounts a group show. Rather than lay out the gallery's wares, gallerist Susannah Beaumont gathers together represented artists, artists who have shown in the space before and international artists whose work has never been seen in Scotland. This time, there is a theme, too, with the six artists sharing a concern for "the divide and the shared territory between sculpture and wall-based work".
As themes go, it seems fair to say that this is a loose one, bordering on the nebulous, but, whether it's really an excuse to get a bunch of sympathetic artists in a room together or not, it works, giving the visitor a hook on which to hang their thoughts about the work on show.
Some seem to have taken the tension between work that goes on the floor and work that goes on the wall rather literally. Sally Osborn's twin installations are both titled Thinking For U, and both feature black-wax discs, and, yes, one is on the floor, under a puddle of water, a second is up on the wall and a third bridges the gap, propped up between the two.
But there is more to Osborn's work than that. She drapes found furniture - a low stool and a high-backed chair - with lengths of fabric, striped and printed with text, effortlessly evoking, if not a narrative, then a heady atmosphere, hinting at rituals, half-suburban, half-glamorous.
Tension and to-and-froing is everywhere, and not just in terms of the difference between the sculptor's floor and painter's wall. Neil Clements's Tipton is ostensibly a painting - in fact, it is a painting, in the sense of being canvas covered with paint - but the canvas is stretched over a jagged, off-kilter geometrically formed frame, and the oil is applied in an even coating, making the work a sculptural form, more than anything else. That it is hung on the wall fits the underlying theme of the show, but Clements is exploring different territory, too, placing his work in between two media.
Jonathon Owen is up to similar tricks. His untitled piece is made from a rubber car mat, and hung up on the wall, but the real tension here is between the reconfiguration of a lowly, quotidian object into something almost comically precious, the dull rubber cut with extravagant care into a lacy filigree, a pattern that clashes with the existing triangular shapes incised in the surface to provide grip for a driver's feet.
Clements's untitled installation, a thin metal structure that cordons off an area to the rear of the gallery, deals in tension of a different sort: at intervals, the metal form is lit by a sudden burst of red neon light. The sudden, unpredictable click and flash of the bulb is distinctly unnerving, a distracting warning that something - God knows what - is up.
Claire Barclay's work dominates the main gallery space, and, as ever, her multi-part installation is complex, oddly disquieting and powerful. Barclay's work always carries hints of a situation or event, invariably mysterious, rarely pleasant. This discomforting air is enhanced by the use of attractive, tactile materials - she tends toward the organic, for want of a better word, often using animal hides, printed fabric, porcelain, untreated wood and delicately machined metals, objects with an unknown purpose. A brass frame leans against the wall, bearing a skimpy curtain of red and white, like an unusable deck chair. Connected to the frame by looping brass wires, there are three wooden objects, shaped to resemble skittles, or, more menacingly, stout clubs. A second assembly sees another frame, free-standing this time, bearing a wedge-shaped platform on which rests a trio of circular brass forms, like a pocket watch or compass stripped of its workings. What Barclay is hinting at is anyone's guess - tastefully tooled up mods and rockers sprang to my mind, of all things, thanks to that deck chair and those clubs - but the relationship she sets up between the discrete parts of her installations is so precise, so taut, that meaning doesn't seem to matter.
If it weren't for Barclay's strong presence, Albrecht Schafer would absolutely steal the show. Indeed, his untitled sculpture has the look of an element stripped out from one of Barclay's installations. Twin wooden laths stretch from floor to ceiling, curved at the midpoint, just touching each other and apparently under great tension. It is as if these two thin lengths of timber are holding up the gallery roof, and as if a well-aimed kick to the base of Schafer's structure could bring the building tumbling down.
His other pieces here are more delicate. Noguchi Split is a transformation of the Japanese-American sculptor and designer's ubiquitous paper-globe lampshade, cut along its bamboo lines and allowed to fall into thin interlocking spirals of wood and paper. As with the untitled laths, Schafer uses a simple gesture to powerful effect, economically exploring the nature of the material or object to hand.
More complex are the pieces he has installed in doggerfisher's office space, Propeller No 1 - Propellor No 17, a reprise of a 1989 work. The propellers, tiny and made of paper, like origami sycamore seed helicopters, are set on matchstick-thin slivers of wood protruding from the wall, light enough to move in the air circulating around the room. Some hardly budge at all, others turn at a sluggish pace and one, placed directly above a radiator, spins on its axis like crazy. They're delightful, mesmerising machines, and, again, Schafer makes a lot out of very little.
The same goes for Sara Barker, who presents a pair of curving forms, like off-cuts from a Brutalist building. They are simple, beautiful things, but at first glance both look monolithic, heavy, menacing - if you found these sculptures sitting next to you at the bar, you'd be sure not to spill their pints - but on closer examination, their stumpy heft is partly an illusion. They are not solid lumps of building material, but made of cardboard slathered in concrete.
Other works do not fit in quite so neatly - Owen's carefully burned and woven book pages, Clements's forgettable oil landscapes on steel - but what might at first appear to be a rather thin curatorial conceit turns out to prompt unexpected, even unlikely connections between a broad group of artists, and offers unforeseen means of understanding their work.
- Group is at doggerfisher until April 26.
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