Review: Phyllida Barlow RIG

‘RIG’ is overwhelming. Stepping into Hauser & Worth, expecting to escape the city bustle and enter the cool calmness of a gallery space, one is instead confronted by a chaotic forest of sculpture that bars the way to the reception desk. This cloud cover of concrete blocks, teetering overhead on spindly stilts, is only the beginning.  Monolithic, unstable sculpture clutters every crevice of the building, invading even the warren spaces behind the pristine gallery – the rafters of the attic, the vaults of the basement. These brutish intruders seem, everywhere, simply too big for the space, and loom threateningly, so that, at all times, one is fighting for the room to breathe.

But, as you pick your way around Barlow’s assault course, it gradually all becomes clear: it is you, not them, that is on the wrong scale; they have appropriated the gallery – this is their space, you are the trespasser. In ‘RIG’, Barlow has successfully brought the cacophony of the gallery’s external surroundings inside, capturing the urban congestion ‘like something wild or feral’. The exhibition is an exemplary exercise in Barlow’s pronunciation that ‘Things aren’t just visual: they are sensations of physicality.’ In this, ‘RIG’ simulates the city – that loss of self in pandemonium.

[Review by Thomas Keane]