The first exhibition in Paris by Scottish artist Jim Lambie will open during FIAC at Galerie Patrick Seguin on 21st October 2010, presented by Sadie Coles HQ, London. Jim Lambie’s recent works involve a virtuoso conjuring of shape and colour, ranging from minimalist blocks of compressed metal to dog-eared aluminium sheets in a myriad of colours. Lambie’s works combine to form elaborate super-installations whose different elements interact with quasi musical energy. Indeed, he has compared the different elements of his art to jazz ensemble, with the baseline represented by his expansive, vinyl tape floors. These site specific installations trace the contours of their architectural settings to create dazzling linear patterns, mixing together the influences of Op-Art and abstraction. For his latest series of sculptures, Lambie has crushed seven suits of armour into cubes in the style of scrapped cars. Several of the works also incorporate assorted household objects (cookers, coffee tables, ladders, a filing cabinet). While the resulting sculptures look back formally to minimalism, their materials evoke Nouveau Réalisme, notably the compact assemblages of César. The playful reformulation of everyday items is a hallmark of Lambie’s art: his Psychedelic Soulsticks combine multicoloured thread, bamboo cane and small personal talismans such as buttons, cigarette packets or broken pieces of ceramic, to create voodoo instruments or shamanistic staffs. Jim Lambie’s work repeatedly carries strong references to music. His titles frequently refer to iconic bands and song lyrics, while his Found Flower Paintings collage fragments of floral oil paintings with photographs of iconic musical heroes such as John Lennon and Dizzy Gillespie. His Sonic Reducer sculptures, sheared concrete cubes that seem to sink into the floor, are embedded with miscellaneous record spines – a metaphor for the death of vinyl. A new series of ‘pop paintings’ have brightly painted aluminium sheets folded by hand at the corners and layered on top of each other to create concertinas of rumpled planes. Their use of colour echoes many of Lambie’s previous pieces – whether the fluorescent vinyl floors or floral collages – while at the same time looking back to Colour Field abstraction and the expansive canvases of Morris Louis, Yves Klein, Ellsworth Kelly and others. These works also exude a sense of effortlessness: their weighty material seems exhilaratingly light and organic.
