Lucy Glendinning — Only Human — Da-End Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 12 → June 23, 2018

Inside the animal stirs / stretching limb and pulling flesh / amongst the twisted guts / and unchewed food. The creature grows in skin and bone / from skull to toes it pulls me in. With the slow pulse of red flows / it pumps itself to every limb. I wrestle logic against its grip / argue fact to stop its fix. but each time it comes and goes / part of me wishes it was always here

Lucy Glendinning, Animal

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Lucy Glendinning, The Last Bird 1, 2018 Cire, jesmonite, acier, plumes de canard et pintade — 50 × 38 × 58 cm Courtesy de l’artiste & la Galerie Da-End

After showing her work recently at the Villa Tamaris art center, the Château de Maisons and the Château du Rivau, British artist Lucy Glendinning returns to Galerie Da-End for her third solo exhibition, titled Only Human. Since the beginning of her career, she pursues protean researches on the representation of the human body, a theme that she mainly deploys in her sculptural work, but also in series of drawings that will be presented here.

Lucy Glendinning’s art stages the intrusion of fantastic within our everyday life, illustrating with brio the notion of uncanny conceptualized by Freud in 1919. Her half-animal half-human figures, somewhere between mythological stories and transhumanist experimentations, allow her to express her own epistemological and philosophical interrogations as for man’s place in nature.

Lucy Glendinning, Sans titre, 2018 Mixed media on paper — 23 × 30,5 cm Courtesy de l’artiste & la Galerie Da-End

« I am interested in our subconscious, how our animal instinct affects us outside of our control or awareness,_ she explains. _While evolution may have endowed us with opposable thumbs and larger brains, our actions and emotions can often fall short of our expectations. I am exploring the animal within us and how that creeps over our decision making in the light of the current political climate; how we need to remember we are animals. »

Filled with a sort of brisk lucidity, her reflection brings us to imagine what we would be like if we didn’t continuously repress this fundamental closeness with the rest of the animal reign? Emphasizing this tension intrinsic to our species, Lucy Glendinning projects the viewer in a near-future era where genetic engineering has given birth to a hybrid humanity. Most of the sculptures are covered with exogenous attributes (feathers, fluff, cotton embroideries), which brings to light the empathy or repulsion one feels when confronted to otherness, the different, the monstrous.

Other artworks, fragmented members made out of silicon, resin or wax, compose a reservoir of raw shapes and give us a nearly intimate insight on the artist’s creative process. An approach that claims an evident connection with her renowned predecessors, such as Rodin.

Lucy Glendinning, The boy who wasn’t real 2 (detail), 2018 Jesmonite, gesso et acier — 165 × 48 × 38 cm Courtesy de l’artiste & la Galerie Da-End