The Henry Moore Institute turns inside out as the outside of the building becomes a site for sculpture. The next Event Sculpture presents Urs Fischer who will be creating a work for the project. The other nine sculptures include Lara Favaretto (b. 1973, Italy), Ceal Floyer (b. 1968, Pakistan), Simone Forti (b. 1935, Italy), Simon Martin (b. 1965, UK), Anthony McCall (b. 1946, UK), Maria Nordman (b. 1943, Germany), Tino Sehgal (b. 1976, UK) and Roman Signer (b. 1938, Switzerland) to present a single work on the exterior of the building which then moves into the gallery spaces. Lasting from a few seconds to several hours, the works encompass actions, objects, performance, moving image and ephemeral public proposals.
The Event Sculpture builds upon the Institute’s continuing enquiry into the relationship between sculpture and documentation in art history. Inherently temporary, the events harness movement, light and sound to challenge assumptions of sculpture as immovable, stable and fixed. Made from durable materials, such as stone, bronze and steel, traditionally sculpture is made to stand the test of time. The Event Sculpture takes a different approach, freeing sculpture from gravity, weight and stasis.
Until 8 March 2015 an event sculpture will take place every other Monday outside the Institute building. On 3 February, the morning after the seventh event, the sculptures will begin to gather in our gallery spaces. A sculpture in the public realm is associated with permanence and memorial, indeed directly in front of our building stand two sculptures that embody this definition: Henry Charles Fehr’s Leeds War Memorial and one of Joseph Beuys’ ‘7000 Oaks’. When presented in public space, the nine works in The Event Sculpture are concentrated, impermanent and transitory with each outdoor event highly public, spilling out into the life of the city and firmly placing the encounter within the momentary present. When presented in the gallery spaces, the nine works move to a private form of encounter, and rooted within a centre dedicated to the study of sculpture they become situated within the ever-expanding field of sculpture.
The Event Sculpture invites each artist to control the legacies of their event as it passes from being bound by time to being situated in space. In some instances, material fragments track the event, in others it is captured in photographs, video and language, while some works continue to unfurl over time as they move from exterior to interior. Temporal artworks demand to be witnessed, yet it is through documentation that they resound in art history from where research takes place. The Event Sculpture explores the assumptions at the heart of the activities of the Henry Moore Institute, a centre for the study of sculpture.
Urs Fischer (b. Switzerland, 1973) lives in New York. Recent major exhibitions include those at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2013; Madame Fisscher, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy, 2012; and Skinny Sunrise, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2012. He has had solo shows throughout Europe and the USA, including Oscar the Grouch, The Brant Foundation, Greenwich (CT) (2010) and Marguerite de Ponty, New Museum, New York (2009). In 2004, Not My House Not My Fire took place at Espace 315, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the retrospective Kir Royal was held at Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland. Urs Fischer’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the Venice Biennale in 2003, 2007, and 2011.