GRIMM is pleased to announce the acquisition of Charles Avery's Untitled (Square Circle) (2021) by Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (NL). This is the first acquisition of the artist's work by the museum.
Charles Avery has dedicated himself to a singular world-building project through the depiction of an imaginary island. Titled The Islanders, this project describes the formation of Avery's extensive fiction through drawings, writing, objects, architecture, and design.
The Island at the center of Avery's constructed world is located among an archipelago of innumerable constituents. The gateway to the Island is the town of Onomatopoeia, a highly-textured metropolis that bears the hallmarks of an evolving urban landscape. Once the stepping off point for the pioneers who first came, the town experienced rapid transormation from a colonial outpost, to boom town, bustling metropolis, depression-ravaged slum, and finally a regenerated city of culture and tourist destination. The culture and fabric of the Island continue to evolve, further illuminated with each successive work.
The spirit of Avery's imaginary Island is highly engaged with the disciplines and currency of mathematics, philosophy, economics, and anthropology, and he takes inspiration broadly from literature and comedy. Key elements from his drawings are rendered in physical form in his sculptures and installations. As Avery has said, the Island is "a gymnasium for the imagination and an earnest attempt to align the experience of the viewer with that of the artist."
"If Avery’s paintings are concerned with the subjective realm of fiction, then his sculptures inhabit more objective terrain. Untitled (Square Circle), (2021) is a large bronze form that loops above and below the paintings’ horizon line like a three-dimensional sinewave (a mathematical curve defined in terms of the sine trigonometric function, which occurs in nature in light and sound-waves), and when viewed in plan describes a perfect rectangle of the proportions 2:1.
Referred to by Avery as a ‘Henge’, a term that suggests a prehistoric monument whose meaning has been lost in the mists of time, this work alludes, as its title suggests, to a question first formulated by the Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras: how might one create a square equal in area to a given circle? This is a problem that admits no geometric solution, hence ‘squaring the circle’ has become (via literary works including Dante’s Paradiso and James Joyce’s Ulysses) a common metaphor for impossible enterprises – something with which the Hunter is, of course, familiar, whether he knows it or not."
- Tom Morton, London, 2022
Exhibition history:
The Hunter returns / goes away from, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL), 12 May - 25 June, 2022
a wall, a bridge, an arch, a hat, a side-show, a square circle, a group of friends, and two one-armed snakes, GRIMM, New York, NY (US), 6 May - 19 June 2021
