Tim Noble And Sue Webster’s Nihilistic Optimistic Installation Is Currently On Show In London

moray mair | Art and design | October 13, 2012

Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s ‘Nihilistic Optimistic’ installation is currently on show in London and features six large works – a continuation of their investigation into self-portraiture – that further deconstruct the relationship between materiality and form.

Each piece, which the artists call a ‘street composition’, is made from old discarded wood and other materials, debris that looks, for all intents and purposes, like piles of rubbish they collected in their studio and put into a clean formal gallery space. However when illuminated, the chaos, the piles of debris, cast beautiful shadow portraits – of the artists as individuals and together – onto the walls of the galley.

Here’s what Tim Noble has to say about the work:

There was a kind of deliberate choice not to use such recognisable objects any more, and to start fracturing things up – splintering things. So the mind has to wander in a different way, like you’re giving and taking, and it’s as much about the gaps and holes in between.

Noble and Webster have been making art together for over fourteen years and in that time have created numerous anti-monuments that mix the strategies of modern sculpture and punk to make art from anti-art. Much of their work is about opposites and the tension between; form and anti-form, high culture and anti-culture, male and female, craft and rubbish, sex and violence. It’s exciting work and I’d love to see the show but know I won’t be in London between now and then. However, if you’re there anytime until 24th November 2012 you should check the show out at the Blain Southern Gallery, 4 Hanover Square, London