Hayloft Galleries

July 99

This stunning new installation marks a turning point in the artist’s oeuvre.

Flamboyant yet reserved, meditative yet hyperactive, the pieces bear testimony to the true abandonment, one might even say the ecstasy, of the spirit in which they were created.

They form, of course, part of Pollock’s late existentialist period. Operating in the space between subject and non-subject, the pieces deconstruct popular conventions of commodification whilst wryly mocking the mythology of identity (see in particular: "Uppermill,tarmac,dung" 1999).

At once hugely focused and desperately aimless, this installation offers compelling documentary evidence for the fractured narrative of this period of the artist’s work. It asks questions about corporeal absence and presence, hovering wryly between nature and culture, but never rejecting important signifiers.

Indeed, the most acute critics of his existentialist period insinuate the possibility that these late works may well be about life or death. Or, one need hardly add, about both.

July 1999