- Venue
- ARTHOUSE1.
- Location
- London
Ruth Dupré: circling about the material world
by Michael Glover, art critic of the Independent
Not so long ago, most artists stuck to their individual disciplines. Anthony Caro was a sculptor, and Howard Hodgkin a painter. All that has now changed. The young tend to be multi-media artists these days, mixing and matching materials, shifting disciplines, as the project seems to demand.
Ruth Dupré has been moving up and down gear, changing disciplines, mixing and matching materials, in short darting about like a magpie with its eye on the latest bit of shininess, almost since her beginnings as an artist in the 1980s. In those days she sculpted alarming bird forms (the flattened, the chubby, the soaringly beaky) in ceramic, adding glass and fragments of lace to thicken out their textures, make them more gorgeous looking in their menacing unpredictability. When she showed with the young Grayson Perry in a show at the Barbican called The Raw and the Cooked in the early 1980s, she re-imagined the idea of the shoe as fashion object and fetishistic flight of fantasy. You could have almost kissed those shoes.
Then, ever restless, she shifted to painting, and later to film, winning the Bombay Sapphire Prize for Roker Breakfast, a dartingly humorous film which re-enacted the dangers of engaging with molten glass in the hot shop. Just three summers ago, she triumphed as a sculptor, winning the Royal Academy Summer Show’s prestigious Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture with a work called Butchery, which showed us four hefty, meat-like slabs of glass, deep-shot with veins of madder, slithering off the edge of a table.
Now she is back with a new show at a cutting-edge gallery in Bermondsey, and she is just as astonishing, wayward and delightfully irreverent as ever. Once again, she rams materials together with violence. Ceramic, crimped and folded like fabric, fuses itself to glass in great floral efflorescences that seems to bind together the surging energies of the flower with all the breathlessness of live sex. In Gorged Ruby, a multi-coloured floral form suddenly bursts forth from a black bomblet of glass. Colour is never innocent, the piece seems to say to us. Some of the works are enclosed in deep, box-like frames where enigmatic tales get part-told. A boy-angel leaps though the air; a madonna admires her own halo; the image of a sex-queen ghosts at the back of her rackety parlour as a lumpish animal lumbers forth from the booth, penitent, sadly post-coital…
