Lucy Skaer: Available Fonts

In autumn 2017, KW Institute for Contemporary Art presents the first solo exhibition by British artist Lucy Skaer in Berlin. Comprising of a large body of new work embedded in a selection of existing works from the last ten years, the exhibition presents the most substantial survey of Skaer’s work to date in Germany. Lucy Skaer (born 1975 in Cambridge, GB) draws on pre-existing imagery, narrative and forms shaped by usage and the determinations based on mass production and global trade to make combinations of sculpture, film and print. Form, meaning, and value are traced in her work through various states of formal and allegorical existence.

For her new commission for KW, Lucy Skaer continues her scrutiny of the conventional classification of objects and production methods in critical exchange with art historical motives and references. Skaer aims to unite these leitmotifs that have long accompanied her work into one large-scale sculptural tableau. Here, she draws from her own oeuvre, reworking her existing sculptures to become representations of animals in a medieval hunting scenery referencing the famous Livre de chasse, a medieval transcript with miniature illuminations on Renaissance hunting techniques from 1331-1391. Doing so, Skaer explores the mutable meaning of these works and playfully critiques their language of desire, their status as definitive works of art and their potential for self-reproduction. In line with her prevailing attitude she rejects the understanding of materials or works as finite things, recognizing every manifestation as only one latent version amongst many others. Skaer’s sculptures function in that way more like idiosyncratic processes, which insert themselves into an already existing chain of material conversions and transformations, consuming one manifestation to give birth to another.

The exhibition will travel to the Salzburger Kunstverein in February 2018.