Patrick Hill — Curls, Kinks, and Waves — Almine Rech Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 12 → February 23, 2012

Curls, Kinks and Waves sets a stage — an abstract scene of fragmented landscapes, wavy horizons, and sensual feminine silhouettes. Precisely engineered, the sculptures are constructed from overlapping panes of glass and pieces of marble that are fixed to a wooden base with brass pins. The flatness of these materials exaggerate the sculptures’ facade-like quality while recalling the graphic shapes and imagery of 1980’s design.

The marble is stained with a palate similar to artist David Hockney’s pool paintings. Bright blues splash the wavy edges of marble sheets decorated with neon yellow squiggles, sperm, jelly beans — a pattern repeating throughout the show. The works evoke So Cal beaches, pools, O.P., Esprit and all the surface that came with 1980’s opulence.

Hill’s new work moves away from the blacked-out gravitas seen in his 2008 solo exhibition with David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, attending to issues of market, wealth and regionalism through the whimsical and subtly erotic lines and curves of his beachy tombstones. The unreal (or extra-real?) colors buoy these heavy, sinking grave sites letting the sculptures float throughout the gallery space:

“I like the idea of a floating space, the idea that these sculptures are almost in a state of free fall, that they are in a state of weightlessness”

Patrick Hill

The sculptures, levitating at the command of the artist, are bound and forced to submit again to gravity and time through a subtle fastening system inspired by the clasp on Cartier’s LOVE bracelet.

Born in 1972 in Royal Oak, Michigan, Patrick Hill lives and works in Los Angeles, California.