Untitled: Furniture Island No. 3
2009 - Installation (Installation)
210 x 210 x 130 cm
Matthew Darbyshire
Matthew Darbyshire has made several Furniture Islands, all of which employ different objects and different color values. Furniture Island No 3 looks like a shop display tastefully arranged in complementary colours. Darbyshire’s use of colour is like that of a designer or a painter. His materials are all easily found in shops and are individually catalogued but they provide an ironic perspective on the art of the past. The green tables have the simple lines of modernist furniture, the purple cubes reference Robert Morris, the rug plays on the rotor reliefs of Duchamp as well as the target paintings of Noland, while the white plastic stool is a take on Brancusi. The work of all these artists, which was utopian in its project, has now entered culture on the most basic of levels and is found in homes throughout the western world, representing an aspirational mode of living that is plastic or ersatz. The shop displays and estate agents details that lure in prospective clients present an ordered world that is as utopian as the works of art originally referenced. On another level, however, Darbyshire paints with sculpture. The objects themselves have no use value but are used as shapes and colours to form a painterly composition, a three-dimensional painting. In this regard Darbyshire’s work can be seen as a continuation of the tradition of sculpture initiated by Anthony Caro and the New Generation artists while also referring to the pure colour of Matisse’s paper cut outs.
Matthew Darbyshire is interested in the non-specificity of today’s design language. Parodying corporate branding and mass-produced design, Darbyshire’s installations expose the hollow realities behind urban regeneration and government arts investment in social regenerative projects. At the centre of Darbyshire’s work is the observation that certain core human concerns – among them the look and feel of the built environment, the intersection of art and the social realm, the idea of community and eve the possibility of visual pleasure – are, very often, framed in ways that are reductive, philosophically empty and serve only to further the interests of embedded power. Unusually for an artist who belongs to a generation that regularly revisits episodes form the (usually Modernist) past, Darbyshire’s focus is on what he calls the ‘mush and fug’ of contemporary Britain’s visual environment, something that in a high-wire act of chromatic and formal management he sequences into works that, while they speak eloquently of the quasyhomogeneity of much present day architecture and design, also have a resonant sculptural presence.* Matthew Darbyshire was born in Cambridge, UK, in 1977. He lives and works in London. *Tom Morton, Frieze no, 148.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » ARTOBSERVED
Henry Taylor, I Got Brothers All Ova The World But They Forget We’re Related (2023), via Hauser & Wirth Marking its inaugural outing at its new Paris exhibition space, Hauser & Wirth looks west to the work of critically acclaimed Los Angeles artist Henry Taylor, whose major career survey arrives at the Whitney Museum of American […]...
© » KADIST
Kadar Brock
2007Kadar Brock creates dynamic abstract paintings that are born from a process of painting, scraping, priming, sanding, and painting again...
© » KADIST
Hank Willis Thomas
2012Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
© » HYPERALLERGIC
Protesters Demand Brooklyn Museum "Take a Stand Against Genocide" Skip to content Protestors unfurl a banner that says "Brooklyn Museum: No Silence on Genocide" Photo by Hrag Vartanian / Hyperallergic The guerrilla action involving twenty activists at the Brooklyn Museum yesterday, December 8, was merely a drop in the bucket compared to the turnout during today’s planned march from the institution on Eastern Parkways to across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Manhattan...
© » KADIST
Robert Therrien
1985In No Title (Blue Chapel) Therrien has reduced the image of a chapel to a polygon...
© » DAZED DIGITAL
Caroline Polachek gets festive with Bimba y Lola | Dazed â¬…ï¸ Left Arrow *ï¸âƒ£ Asterisk â Star Option Sliders âœ‰ï¸ Mail Exit Fashion Q+A Shot by Petra Collins, the singer is the face of the Spanish label’s latest Christmas campaign Bimba Y Lola 11 December 2023 Text Dazed Digital Bimba y Lola by Petra Collins featuring Caroline Polachek 6 Last year, Bimba y Lola enlisted photographer Petra Collins for its AW22 campaign...
© » KADIST
Yuri Ancarani
2016The Wedding is a silent film, a probing observation of marriage rituals in Qatar in which we soon notice that there is not a single woman visible...
© » KADIST
Bahar Noorizadeh
2022The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism is part of a three project lineage, following Bahar Noorizadeh’s research on the architecture of the Soviet Union...
© » KADIST
Diane Simpson
2012Simpson’s sculptural practice connects architecture, clothing, furniture and the body to explore the functional and sociological roles and the influence of the design and architecture of various cultures and periods in history...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Migrant Ecologies Project: A Grain of Wheat Inside a Salt Water Crocodile | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Grain of Wheat July 8, 2019 The artists outside Mine 3 of Platåberget Mountain, in a moment of silence with their boxes in the goodbye ceremony to the exhibition...
© » KADIST
KADIST is seeking a Collection Fellow based in the Asia Pacific for November 2023 (6-month position with 8-10 hours per week commitment) KADIST offers a paid six-month collection fellowship to an emerging curator or recent graduate of art history, museum studies, critical writing, or a related field from college or university programs...
© » SLASH PARIS
Nina Azoulay — Comme un rond dans un carré — Frac île-de-france, le Plateau — Exposition — Slash Paris Connexion Newsletter Twitter Facebook Nina Azoulay — Comme un rond dans un carré — Frac île-de-france, le Plateau — Exposition — Slash Paris Français English Accueil Événements Artistes Lieux Magazine Vidéos Retour Précédent Suivant Nina Azoulay — Comme un rond dans un carré Exposition Installations, sculpture Derniers Jours Nina Azoulay, Olivia, 2024 © Nina Azoulay Nina Azoulay Comme un rond dans un carré Encore 7 jours : 11 janvier → 18 février 2024 La Project Room est le nouvel espace prospectif et expérimental du Frac qui prend place dans la dernière salle du Plateau...
