Atelier Van Lieshout (or AVL) creates pieces both manifestly functional and strangely primitive, like archaeological finds. After their presence at the Design at Large section of Design Miami/ Basel 2015 brought us a hybrid between a prehistoric cave dwelling and mid-century modernist architecture, AVL return with a solo show at the Mayfair space of Carpenters Workshop Gallery, presenting a selection of their best pieces in bronze. Joep van Lieshout and his workers have consistently managed to re-frame familiar, industrially manufactured objects that surround us in our home, drawing out both the layers of cultural meaning that imbue them, and revealing something chaotic, almost primitive, in their process of manufacture. Working at the intersection of art, product design, and architecture, the Atelier has manufactured functional prefab pig pens, museum toilets, weapons, large scale sculptures, and everything in between. While his early work was anarchist, violent, comparable to (and synchronous with) Damien Hirst's, the turn towards art design, and collectible objects, has enabled van Lieshout to disturb us in a subtler, more sophisticated way. His later pieces, working against the grain of typical production process, fully enter the realm of the industrial abject. In 2005, van Lieshout has had a Chinese company mass-produce a plastic chair working only from a napkin sketch. Even in hundreds of identical copies, the chair retained a rough, handmade look and an irregular shape. The Bronze exhibition is no exception. For Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Atelier Van Lieshout have created a series of perfectly functional everyday objects that nonetheless appear to eerily reveal the most primitive impulses of furniture. The Caretaker, a lamp whose base recreates Michelangelo's Pietá in stick figures, or Swing, a sculpture splicing Goya's hanged corpses with a playground scene, disturb with their excess of cultural signification. The Pappamamma lamp, where the lighting body is almost an afterthought placed on a bronze base shaped as a mangle of male and female reproductive organs, is more complex. Pappamamma references a body of work AVL have done in recreating sculptures of verimilar human organs, often turned into useful objects (including a few version of the penis/gun). The grown together ovaries, uterus (with a growing baby inside) and testicles of Pappamamma is an exceptionally sinister image, all the more so for the simple lampshade sprouting at its top. The choice of bronze is not random. An alloy associated with pre-history, but also with fine sculpture, its heaviness and texture simultaneously rebels against the polish of civilization and celebrates it. Van Lieshout originally trained as a sculptor, but never practiced, and his work has the rough imperfection of an artist who is not an artisan – at least not in this medium. This exhibition is also part of the London Design Festival. Atelier Van Lieshout: Bronze will run from 24 August till 2 October 2015, at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Mayfair, London, UK. London Design Festival will run from 19 – 27 September 2015.
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