Roger Hiorns
Seizure, 2008
An Artangel / Jerwood Commission
Harper Road, London
Photo: Marcus Leith, London
Roger Hiorns’ sculptural work generates and inhabits interstices between dissentient ideas: construction and destruction; the theological and the technological; temporality and permanence; authoritarian control and organic spontaneity. His objects are threaded with an unease that ties them, and our experience of them, to the amorphous, unrelenting global anxiety which suffuses our everyday understanding and reality.
Hiorns’ work is centered on investigating interactions between organic and inorganic objects, specifically relating to power relations and the perversity of authority. Exhibited in the atomization of a passenger jet aircraft engine; antidepressants embedded in a complex piece of machinery; the presence of a nude youth aligned with nuanced objects; and a series of aircrafts buried in the earth, Hiorns’ works act as proposals that offer a new understanding of objects, and significantly, of the behaviors they can provoke.
Born in 1975 in Birmingham, England, Hiorns lives and works in London. He has been featured in exhibitions at institutions throughout Europe and the Americas, including the Venice Biennale; MoMA PS1, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Armand Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and De Hallen, Haarlem. Hiorns’ work is included in institutional collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and Tate Modern, London. In 2009, Hiorns was nominated for the Turner Prize for his critically acclaimed work, Seizure, a massive crystallization within the interior of a bedsit in a condemned South London council estate. In 2011, Seizure was acquired by the Arts Council Collection and is currently on a ten-year loan for exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England. Hiorns has recently had solo exhibitions at Centre PasquArt, Biel; Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; and Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires.
For more information, please contact Julia Speed at julia@luhringaugustine.com.
