Exhibitions2012With An Apple I Will Astonish

Secretive, transgressive, tight, crisp, bitter, sustaining and sweet, apples run through our culture like a small, firm promise in our hands. Both simply domestic and densely resonant, the apple has inspired numberless artists and writers. It remains a symbol, not only of sin and The Fall, but also of knowledge, life, love and hope. Apples may remind us of childhood, spices, baking, exciting thefts. They may confront us in sterile supermarket displays, or light our autumn hedgerows. They may breathe sweetness in our houses and please our mouths. Their names: Broxwood Foxwhelp, D’Arcy Spice, Keswick Codlin, Court Pendu Plat, Hubbardston’s Nonesuch make poetry without poets. Apples glow in still lives, tempt in advertisements and hover between Eve and Adam like a threat, a joy, a naked pleasure.

And apples have history. They travel with conquerors, they change in changed lands, they have revealed the universe, they blossom surprisingly and intoxicate. Korbinian Aigner, know as The Apple Priest, was an outspoken critic of Hitler’s rise to power. He was deprived of his liberty for almost six years and came close to death in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Transferred to Dachau, Aigner was able to work in “the plantation” and there pursued his love of apples and orchards. Determined to create in the midst of destruction, he bred four new varieties of apple: KZ1, KZ2, KZ3 and KZ4. (KZ was the code used to designate a concentration camp.) KZ3, his most popular creation has now been renamed the Korbinian Apple, in his honour.

Remembering both paradise and the inferno and remembering that Cezanne once vowed to astonish Paris with an apple, Large Glass has asked artists and thinkers to consider the apple, its narratives, meanings and beauties. The results are here: delights for the eye and ear: drawings, paintings, objects, sounds – one part of a continuing harvest.

AL Kennedy

List of Participants
Edwina Ashton, David Austen, Bobby Baker, David Batchelor, Louise Cattrell, Hannah Collins, Michael Craig-Martin, Tristano di Robilant, Annie Freud, Martino Gamper & Francis Upritchard, Helena Goldwater, David Harker, Fergus Henderson, Craigie Horsfield, Dan Knight, Christian Marclay, Connolly & McLaren, Jeff McMillan, Jeremy Millar, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Kathy Prendergast, Deborah Saunt, Fiona Shaw, Cherry Smyth, Gavin Turk, Jane Wentworth, Ian Whitfield, Alison Wilding and Duncan Wooldridge.