Inauguration

7 Jul–30 Sep 2011
Guided by the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, Large Glass inaugurates its gallery programme with an eclectic presentation of artworks, design and found objects, including lights by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and a ‘dipped’ portrait painting by Jeff McMillan. Further juxtapositions include a lamp by Austrian artist Franz West, a leather hook by Jacques Adnet, a boat propeller and a torn old football.

Two works in particular engage with Duchamp’s reconfiguring of the readymade. The American artist James Croak presents a cast of a traditional French window out of road sweepings, its title, Soiled Window a pun on Duchamp’s work Fresh Window. British artist Richard Wentworth has created a tragicomic window display, papering over the gallery’s shop front window with ‘Poverty Maps’ by Charles Booth, a series of annotated maps tracing wealth disparities in Victorian London made between 1886-1903, drawing an uncomfortable with the empty storefronts in the area, whose windows are pasted over with old newspapers.

The writer Deborah Levy has created captions for a number of objects on display, riffing on their placement, form, function and feeling. See below for a selection of Levy’s captions: 

On Franz West’s lamp: ‘Tightrope walking: an erotic exposure at a great height.’

On Carl Auböck’s objects: ‘Bookends: Pierced metal, reply and question, left and right, attached and detached, night and night.’

On Jeremy Millar’s photo collage: ‘Beautiful Vapours, Beautiful Pharmacy; a game of love – outcome unknown (perhaps sodomy). C’est la vie.’
Alvar Aalto, Jacques Adnet, Carl Auböck, James Croak, Bertel Gardberg (for Boda), Susan Collis, Jeff McMillan, Jeremy Millar, Timo Sarpaneva (for iittala), Bernard Schobinger, Franz West, Tapio Wirkkala (for iittala and Rosenthal), readymades and found objects.

Shop window by
Richard Wentworth




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