RUTH CLAXTON: 'A Place of Rainbows' 2006

Press Release
15 September – 21 October 2006
‘By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forest, and jewelled alligators glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown...’
J.G. Ballard ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964)

ARQUEBUSE is proud to present the first solo exhibition outside the UK by the emerging British artist Ruth Claxton (b. 1971, UK). In her most ambitious installation of sculpture to date, Claxton will distort, disrupt and enrapture the space within prisms and spheres of coloured glass, mirror, and steel, in conjunction with a series of ‘drawings’ that reinvent a collection of portraits from the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva.

The exhibition’s title is taken from the J.G Ballard short story ‘The Illuminated Man’ written in 1964. This prophecy of mankind’s final doom is one that glitters and is ultimately longed for as a final crystalline form of peace; more a vision of utopia than a form of dystopia.

In Claxton’s ‘A place of rainbows’, ‘blinded’ porcelain figurines, collected on eBay, or street markets, are placed in an installation whose organising principle is found within modernist-inspired structures of welded steel. Their position as players in the sculptural landscape created for them is undermined by their inability to see beyond their own individual bejewelled rapture.

Portraits by Hodler, Corot or Liotard, are collected as lowly postcards, and re-enchanted and reclaimed as artworks. The surfaces are cut and peeled away, or embellished with gold leaf, ink or paint. The postcards are transformed into relief sculptures, and the subjects of the original masterpieces are re-contextualised, their vision subverted inwards.

The audience as well as these markers of both high and low art and bourgeois taste are caught within a vision of transcendental experience. Circular rings of steel, coloured glass and mirror subvert any potential lines of vision and we are all offered a moment to glimpse a very material and alluring form of transcendence.

Ruth Claxton (b. 1971, UK) completed her MA at the Royal College of Art, London in 2002. She has been included in exhibitions at Transition, London (2006), The Collective, Edinburgh (2006); The Drawing Room, London (2006), Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (2005), fa projects (2004), East International, Norwich (2003). She will have her first solo Museum exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 2007/8.

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Installation view 'A Place of Rainbows', 2006 ARQUEBUSE Geneva