A bronze cast of six full black bin bags arranged in a pile, painted to look real.
A bag full of discarded products, unrecycled organic matter thrown in with the by-products of our wasteful consumerist lifestyles. This rubbish is encapsulated in the formal roundness of this classic trompe l’œuil artwork. We are defined by what we throw away and conversely we are deconstructed by what we choose to display in our hallowed museum halls.
Exhibitions
- The Golden Thread - White Cube, 2004
- Negotiation of Purpose, Grenoble - Magasin, 2007
- Last Year in Eggenberg (The Paradise Show) - Schloss Eggenberg, 2006
- White Elephant - Sean Kelly Gallery, 2005
- Art Out of Place - Norwich Castle, 2005
- The Negotiation of Purpose - GEM, 2007
- Who What When Where How and Why - Newport Street Gallery, 2016
Essays
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Trompe L'oeil - Rikke Hansen
SHOW
Trompe L'oeil - Rikke Hansen
Like the carefully staged crime scene, trompe l’œil tricks the viewer through the arrangement of misleading appearances and false clues. Literally meaning ‘cheat the eye’, the art technique involves the realistic depiction of phenomena to create optical illusions, often turning flat surfaces into seemingly three-dimensional objects. Trompe l’œil art does not belong to a particular ism or medium but slips in and out of focus through the ages, depending on dominant regimes of representation.
Although the term was not coined until the early 1800s, the genre can be traced back to Greek and Roman times. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder writes of a rivalry in ancient Greece between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, both accomplished in this particular art. Largely forgotten during the Middle Ages, the technique was given a new lease of life by the Italian Renaissance and the era’s advanced understanding of perspective, while painters of the Baroque era applied it to the then increasingly popular genre of still life. Artists of the Modern period, however, made limited use of trompe l’œil, as works no longer strived towards illusion or imitation but were made to investigate the grounds for art’s own existence. Nonetheless, a few -
Kicked Out (after “Pile” by Gavin Turk) - James Flint
SHOW
Kicked Out (after “Pile” by Gavin Turk) - James Flint
Those were my bags. My bags, filled with my stuff. My stuff, that she chucked out in the street. Grabbed my stuff she did, the bitch, and shoved it in the fucking bin bags that I’d fucking bought – my fucking bin bags! – and chucked them out the window into the road behind the block.
It wouldn’t’ve been so bad but the silly bint lives on the fifteenth floor and my bloody CD decks were in there and all. Fifteen hundred quids’ worth of kit that was, ruined, not to mention the splinters that got into my calvins.
And then that frigging Gavin Turk artist cunt swanned by in his poxy House of Fairies V-fucking-W camper van and swiped them and cast them all in fucking bronze and according to what Col says is flogging them down at that poncey tent they have in Regent’s Park. Fifty grand he’s going to get for them, he reckons. Fifty-frigging-grand! I mean, you have got to be having a laugh.
And House of Fairies? Fuck that shit. What’s all that about then? Bunch of arse bandits talking wank and sitting in the warm while I’m out here