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Cornelia Parker, War Room, 2015, image courtesy MCA Sydney, Australia
Cornelia Parker, War Room, 2015
Installation View, 'Cornelia Parker', 2019, MCA Sydney, AustraliaWe are delighted to present an online viewing room featuring works by one of Britain’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, Cornelia Parker.Using a combination of visual and verbal allusions Parker's work triggers cultural metaphors and personal associations, which allow the viewer to witness the transformation of the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary. This viewing room features a selection of artworks from across the artist’s career, including installation, embroidery, works on paper, and a selection of small-scale objects. -
Endless Column IV
2012Endless Column IV is one of Cornelia Parker’s installations that feature found, acquired, or modified objects. A hallmark of Parker’s work is her distinctive take on the cultural and emotional content of history as embedded in the commonplace and the anonymous. To achieve the effect in Endless Column IV, Parker laid out an arrangement of familiar domestic silverware and then crushed them; the pieces becoming figuratively and literally flattened as the bowls morph into silhouette reminders of what once was. The action Parker takes in modifying such objects breaches the standard decorum and deference we bring to what is valued as precious, rare, or symbolic in our culture.
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Alter Ego (Under Water)
2018Parker's Alter Ego (Under Water) is from an ongoing series of pairs of silver-plated objects, one intact and one flattened. Sometimes their reflection is a double, at other times it may be a near relative. Thoughts of identity crises and class divides abound, as well as ideas of life and death, inhaling and exhaling, conscious and unconscious, reflection and shadow. At times there is a sense of a dark psychological undertow, an underlying threat; at other times, just reflected glory.
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Falling Facade
1991Falling Facade is a classic early suspended work composed of the artist’s signature flattened and suspended silver trophies which seem to float out of the mirror’s surface and escape its bounds. The mirror rests on an easel, that might support a painter’s canvas or a classroom blackboard. The trophies call to mind victories in sport or essay writing while at school, proudly displayed and then gathering dust on mantelpieces across the land. The doubling of the objects in the mirror’s surface in this unusual work anticipates Parker’s Alter Ego series.
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Us, Them
2019Us, Them is an embroidery of two opposing dictionary definitions on either side of a single piece of linen. The words have been sewn as mirror writing on both sides, so the definitions are face to face within the fabric. Therefore, the viewer has to read the underside of one meaning as it appears simultaneously underneath the opposing meaning, which has to be read in reverse. The text itself has been stitched in HM prisons under the supervision of Fine Cell Work, a social enterprise that trains prisoners in paid, skilled, creative needlework to foster hope, discipline and self-esteem.
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Bullet Drawing (Crosshairs)
2018Parker’s Bullet Drawing (Crosshairs) is from an ongoing series which uses melted down bullets drawn into wire, so they somehow become a trajectory of themselves. A bullet’s worth of lead wire is threaded through paper and framed, so it looks like a pencil drawing. The grids might refer obliquely to those used by Minimalist artists such as Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt or Richard Serra, but confounding their abstract appearance is the fact that they are by the very nature of their material, ‘loaded’.
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Poison and Antidote Drawing
2012Cornelia Parker’s Poison and Antidote Drawing takes the form of Rorschach blots: abstract symmetrical ink blots which would be presented to patients undergoing psychoanalysis for interpretation as a means of revealing their subconscious thoughts and desires.
Parker’s version is made using bright yellow rattlesnake venom mixed with black ink, and its antidote mixed with white ink, to create a drawing which literally contains the kill and the cure.
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Prison Wall Abstract (A Man Escaped)
2012-2013Cracked walls provide the inspiration for Prison Wall Abstract (A Man Escaped). This set of 12 photographic prints depicts the perimeter wall of Pentonville Prison in London. The damaged surface of the wall had been repaired by workmen with white filler in gestural patterns worthy of any abstract expressionist painter. Parker photographed the marks literally seconds before they were obliterated forever by a layer of magnolia paint. Later that day, after the paint was barely dry, a prisoner (incarcerated for a shot gun murder) escaped after scaling the walls.
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Cornelia Parker
If you would like further information about these works or other works in these series, please email sales@frithstreetgallery.com. Prices do not include VAT.-
Cornelia Parker, Endless Column IV, 2012
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Cornelia Parker, Alter Ego (Under Water), 2018
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Cornelia Parker, Falling Facade, 1991
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Cornelia Parker, Us, Them, 2019
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Viewing Room - Cornelia Parker
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