- Venue
- Hardy Tree Gallery
- Starts
- Sunday, July 1, 2012
- Ends
- Saturday, July 7, 2012
- Address
- Hardy Tree Gallery 119 Pancras Road London NW1 1UN
- Location
- London
Curated by William Kherbeck, Ultra Cave is a group show in celebration of the decline of European civilisation and the resolute march into ignorance, violence and oblivion. Combining sculpture, painting and supported by live performances, Ultra Cave proposes a future in which the remnants of civilisation are assembled in the various forms and modalities the eternally-pending apocalypse permits. Work includes pieces by Paul Desborough, Jörg Obergfell and Irene Pérez-Hernández: Paul Desborough re-imagines the dynamic of painting and photography by distilling the iconography of magazine photography and advertising in a new modality which he refers to as “cave photography”. JörgObergfell’s sculpture reduces the world’s tallest buildings to 1/1400th of their actual scale. These business stalactites droop from the Ultra Cave’s ceiling to memorialise and undermine the external, anthropogenic environment. Reversing these totems as formations of contemporary human endeavour, the economics of the architectural “race to the top” are literally turned upside down. Irene Pérez-Hernández addresses modalities of structure relative to exhaustion in her work Fulfil the Gaps. In the piece, a more-or-less willing victim engages in a series of physical exertions in the radically circumscribed gallery environment. Ambivalence is the licensing agreement imposed by modern political and social interaction; in Fulfil the Gaps it is possible to see terms of service in extensive detail.
