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Claire Barclay has used two rooms in the palazzo, responding to the distinct nature of the spaces and finding common ground with her own formal preoccupations. Exploring the role of craft in society, Barclay’s objects bear the clear imprint of an individual maker, resisting commodification and suggesting a potentially spiritual role for the hand-made object in the contemporary world. The hand-worked oak hangs awkwardly, evoking thoughts of a sinister, abstract theatricality. The broad screen-printed fabric that forms a backdrop to these objects echoes the woven silk patterns of the palazzo room but goes further, presenting us with an intense, Gothic fractal landscape suffused with a dark eroticism.
In another room Barclay adopts a more minimal approach. The space is altered through the judicious placing of several objects that again reflect the artist’s interest in materials, their tactile properties and their ability to summon an almost involuntary psychological response from a viewer. Glass encased in leather, metal cylinders sheathed in crocheted wool hint at fragilities and strengths beyond the objects themselves.
Claire Barclay is represented by doggerfisher, Edinburgh.
Jim Lambie shows in the two most ornate rooms in the Palazzo, spaces that typify the baroque exuberance of the original decor. The titles of his new sculptures, though, draw in a wide range of references from the contemporary world from New York’s greatest disco venue (Paradise Garage) to song titles that sound like window advertisements for food. Lambie’s titles thrive on the constant mutations in language, and the fluctuating hybrids of street life. Likewise, his new sculptures morph and shapeshift as he reworks domestic doors and mirrors, squeezing them, slicing them and reclassifying them. Collapsing their dimensions, the doors twist and accordion as they implode in bright bursts of colour, Dulux deluxe. Mirror strips and slices capture the reflections of the palazzo’s baroque surroundings, multiplying an already dizzying set of images. The interrupted, angular floor piece holds everything together while hinting at the vertiginous force of the sculptures. Lambie’s work continues to explore the nature of space, as much through-the-looking-glass as a riff on objects and images in popular culture, devouring the worlds of art and design.
Jim Lambie is represented by The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Sadie Coles HQ, London; and Anton Kern, New York.
Starling’s construction is full of surprising resonances. A floating island stranded on the first floor of a palazzo in a floating city, it is equipped to withstand any flood. It is a prototype rather than the real thing, it is an island of weeds originally proposed for Loch Lomond in Scotland.
Rhododendrons, brought from the south of Spain in the eighteenth century to Scotland are now seen as threats to the native ecosystem, therefore classified as weeds and destroyed. The work floats in the moment between cultivation and extermination. In an earlier project, Rescued Rhododendrons, Starling documented his journey south through Europe while returning some rhododendrons to their homeland. Island for Weeds (Prototype) obliquely challenges the openness of any system, whether natural, nationalistic or conceptual and questions the ability to absorb new organisms and ideas.
Simon Starling is represented by The Modern Institute, Glasgow; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin and Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York.