Rebecca Warren | The Now Voyager, Belvedere 21, Vienna, July, 15 – October 16, 2022
© Rebecca Warren, courtesy Maureen Paley, Galerie Max Hetzler, and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
British artist Rebecca Warren makes sculptures, assemblages, and constructions in a wide variety of materials including clay, bronze, steel, and neon. Her distinctive and complex oeuvre, blending tradition with the quotidian, seriousness with frivolity, mastery with mismatch, has embodied her attitudes to art and its history.
Rebecca Warren’s solo exhibition The Now Voyager at Belvedere 21, consists of nine new, large hand-painted bronze sculptures on variously coloured plinths, and a number of new neon collages shown on walls designed by the artist. Many of these sculptures (which in their variety Warren likens to the cast of aliens in the bar scene in Star Wars) are broadly figurative, and some are additionally top-heavy, leaning, working against gravity, straining against their own bulk and weight. The collages, made of neon, household paint, wool and other elements are presences of a different order: they suggest a strange system of communications manifested as glyphs, oddly familiar peripheral glimpses and distant, nocturnal vistas.
Adapted from Walt Whitman’s poem The Untold Want, the exhibition title emphasises the nuance of voyaging in nowness, in live, immediate mental and artistic presence.
Curated by Axel Köhne.
Assistant Curator: Andrea Kopranovic