Born in New York in 1966, Rachel Harrison lives and works in Brooklyn and is the 2011 Calder Prize winner.

 

Rachel Harrison creates multiform sculptures, composed of photographs and collected elements, which the artist assembles and diverts to create new objects. Rachel Harrison disrupts the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, associating sculpture with other media, navigating between real and imaginary space. Her sculptures seem both finished and still in the making, fragile and ephemeral. Most of his works mix the "ready made" and the "handmade", disturbing the perception of the whole work.

Thus, on an abstract sculpture may emerge a small recognizable object or the portrait of an actor. These contradictions constantly disturb the perception, which the spectator can have of the work.
Rachel Harrison questions and disturbs the traditional codes of sculpture. Some sculptures are placed directly on the ground, others on cardboard packaging, on plastic buckets, on wooden boxes containing other objects, or more classically on white pedestals.
Here again, Rachel Harrison confuses the issue, since faced with all the possibilities of interpretation one realizes that in the end she also uses the pedestal as a disturbing element, or on the contrary totally integrated into the works. This allows the artist to realize associations of materials, colors, cultural references totally surprising, reinforcing the confusion of codes.

This hybrid artist whose work multiplies the references, to photography, found objects, sculptural elements, solicits the intellectual knowledge of the spectator not without a certain humor sometimes black or squeaky. The challenge of Harrison's work is to bring us to reconsider the definition of sculpture while at the same time placing it within the History of Art.

 

Rachel Harrison's work is closely linked to her environment, being immersed in Saché for three months in a totally different context from the one in which she usually lives, has allowed her to approach a new formal aspect in her work.

 

The works produced in Saché were exhibited on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition entitled "Villeperdue" at the Meyer Kainer Gallery in Vienna, Austria from April 10 to June 1, 2013.

 

His work has been exhibited around the world since the early 1990s, as has his solo exhibition "Consider the Lobster" curated by Tom Eccles, at the Center for Conservation Studies, Museum of Hessel, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, (2009), as well as her exhibition "Haycation" organized by Daniel Birnbaum and Mélanie Ohnemus, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2010) and "Conquest of the Useless" presented by Iwona Blazwick, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 2008, the Dijon consortium hosted her solo exhibition: The Lay of the Land.
Harrison has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as Notations/Everyday Disturbances at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2011), Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy of London (2011), Contemporary Art from the Collection and The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2010), participation in the Venice Biennale (2003, 2009) at the Whitney Biennial, New York (2002, 2008).

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Photos Guillaume Blanc

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