Exhibitions / Group

V22: The Sculpture Show

The Biscuit Factory, Bermondsey, London
26 April – 31 May 2009

V22: The Sculpture Show was a group exhibition including Richard Bartle at The Biscuit Factory, Bermondsey, London, in April and May 2009.

Exhibition Text

V22: The Sculpture Show was an off-site V22 project presented at the Almond Building, The Biscuit Factory, Bermondsey, London, from 26 April to 31 May 2009.

The exhibition formed part of V22 Presents, a series of collaborations with artists, curators and organisations producing exhibitions, performances and events across London. For The Sculpture Show, Shahin Afrassiabi & Sam Basu, Simon Bill & Cedric Christie, and Fergal Stapleton were invited to develop three separate exhibitions: Data Wall, Oysters Ain't and The Real.

Richard Bartle exhibited as part of Oysters Ain't, curated by Simon Bill and Cedric Christie. Bringing together emerging and established artists, the exhibition explored the diverse possibilities that had come to exist within the definition of sculpture.

Participating Artists

Oysters Ain't included Karen Ay, Fiona Banner, Richard Bartle, David Batchelor, Rob Beckett, Simon Bill, Hartmut Bohm, Cedric Christie, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Clem Crosby, Penelope Curtis, Charlotte Cullinan & Jeanine Richards, Cathy de Monchaux, Arnaud Desjardin, Valerie Driscoll, Richard Ducker, Garth Evans, Urs Fischer, FREEE, John Gibbons, Kathy Gili, Tom Gidley, Paul Gilda, Andrea Giulius, Stewart Gough, Naum Gabo, Brian Griffiths, Nicola Hicks, Peter Hide, Flore Nore Josserand, Helene Kazan, Philip King, Simon Liddimant, Ed Lipski, Colin Lowe, Christina Mackie, Bruce McLean, Rebecca Johnson Marshall, Haroon Mirza, Henry Moore, Zadoc Nava, Lawson Oyekan, Nicholas Pope, Richard Priestly, Pablo Picasso, Michael Sandle, Paul Sakoilsky, Celine Scott, Dallas Seitz, Meg Shirayama, Jane Simpson, Anthony Smart, Bob & Roberta Smith, Richard Smith, Sarah Staton, Dan Stevens, Michael Stubbs, Vanya St Van Bray, Simon Stringer, Gavin Turk, Jessica Voorsanger, Keith Wilson, Christian Wulffen, Mark Woods, Richard Woods and Lars Wolter.

Curated by Simon Bill and Cedric Christie.

Exhibited Artwork

For V22: The Sculpture Show, Bartle exhibited Big Science, Little Shed, a small mixed-media sculpture that developed from ideas later expanded in Deities at the Bottom of the Garden.

The work repurposed the model shed originally used in Bartle's degree show, where it appeared as a coin-operated artwork that spun in a white void for sixty seconds. Reworked for V22, the shed contained a small white stool and a book, with a panel placed on the wall behind the sculpture.

The thinking behind the work centred on amateur inventors and speculative, world-ending physics imagined at the bottom of the garden. Looking through the shed door, the viewer encounters a small interior world, while the landscape beyond the window appears to sit within the white void of the gallery itself.

Legacy

Although modest in scale, Big Science, Little Shed became an important bridge between Bartle's earlier sculptural experiments and the larger installation project Deities at the Bottom of the Garden. The work developed a self-contained miniature world, using the shed as both a physical object and a symbolic site of invention, retreat and speculative imagination.

Shown within the wider context of V22: The Sculpture Show, the work connected Bartle's practice to a broad discussion around contemporary sculpture, scale, display and the expanded possibilities of object-based work.