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ArchiveExhibition

The Life of Forms

7 Feb-6 May 2024

Hayward Gallery
London SE1 8XX

Overview

Spanning over 50 years of contemporary art, this exhibition highlights ways in which artists draw on familiar experiences of movement, flux and organic growth.

Inspired by sources ranging from a dancer’s gesture to the breaking of a wave, from a flow of molten metal to the interlacing of a spider’s web, the artworks in this exhibition conjure fluid and shifting realms of experience.

Undulating, drooping, erupting, cascading and promiscuously proliferating, these sculptures invite a tactile gaze, and trigger physical responses. In an era when our encounters are increasingly digitised and disembodied, these artworks call to mind the pleasures of gesture and movement, the poetics of gravity and the experience of sensation itself.

Palpably dynamic, they proclaim that nothing in the world stays the same, that everything is moving, seething, changing and transforming.

The exhibition features work by 21 international artists: Ruth Asawa, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Lynda Benglis, Michel Blazy, Paloma Bosquê, Olaf Brzeski, Choi Jeong Hwa, Tara Donovan, DRIFT, Eva Fàbregas, Holly Hendry, EJ Hill, Marguerite Humeau, Jean-Luc Moulène, Senga Nengudi, Ernesto Neto, Martin Puryear, Matthew Ronay, Teresa Solar Abboud, and Franz West.
 

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