RICKY SWALLOW

Swallow makes sculpture in ways that foreground curiosity, precision, and hands-onprocess. The bronze works at the centre of his project are the results of a highlyintimate relationship to material, both the humble objects with which he often begins andthe foundry-centered casting and refining procedures through which the works find theirfinal form. He has become an influential figure not only for younger artists, but for thosewho are interested in redefining the past, present, and future of sculpture as a mode ofthinking about the poetry of the physical world.

Index Piece (2010–2024) gives viewers a unique opportunity to survey the scope andparticularity of Swallow’s approach within the parameters of a single work. The long,shelf-like vitrine holds a group of bronze objects the artist has been making, arranging,and rearranging during an extended period that has included a studio move andsignificant evolution in production and foundry processes. Some of the objects, forinstance, represent the artist’s first experiments with the casting of a particular material,while some retain gates and other elements associated with bronze casting that areordinarily edited out during the completion of a work but remain in this presentation tocommunicate their own sculptural particularities. Others are studies that Swallowconducted for functional items, such as door pulls or window locks, and perform here asdiscrete statements which test the limit between sculpture and non-sculpture. For all theformal possibility implied by each discrete object, the work speaks to a sense of ongoinginquiry rather than a fixed arrangement of finished things, an effect enhanced by thetop-down view that the vitrine makes possible and the associated recontextualisation ofwhat would ordinarily be wall- or pedestal-based forms.

Two recent chair-based sculptures highlight Swallow’s increasingly nuanced and farreaching use of bronze as a medium for abstraction, representation, and compositionalexperimentation. Each work is cast from an existing, readymade chair that Swallow identified for its archetypal “chair-ness.” Elegant, plain, utilitarian, and classical, thechairs undergo alchemical transformation as Swallow renders them in bronze andapplies patina. They support lengths of wood that Swallow has slot in to fit in andaround the seats, backs, and legs, and that also shed light on the intuitive compositionalfacets of his studio activity. In bronze, their surface textures become vivid, highlydetailed patterns that demonstrate the artist’s creative commitment to the multiplestages of production, each of which makes room for its own kind of looking, reflection,and material intervention. Throughout his career, Swallow has pursued the investigationof relationships between things that have been joined and combined so that theyaccommodate each other in unlikely ways.

Spirit #1 (2024) exemplifies this tendency as well as a surrealist strain that providesSwallow with the space to find energising strangeness in ordinary things. Patternedafter a spirit level, the wall-based sculpture is a study in positive and negative spacethat contains contrasting geometries: cast bronze chestnut cowrie shells occupy thecircular and rectangular openings where the fluid-containing vials would be, setting up adialogue between organic, symbol-rich forms and non-objective ones. Related concernsimbue Bracket with Cane (2024) with dynamism that reads differently depending on thedistance from which it is viewed. The work’s overall design gives it the gestural freedomof a drawing in space and a lightness that belies its honed materiality; closer lookingreveals a network of relationships among varying levels of detail. Casts of small lengthsof string tie curved lengths of bronze to a seemingly delicate grid. The places whereeach component joins the others become intersections of weight and colour—Swallow’sapproach to patina communicates its own set of volumes and spaces, movements andstillness—and make possible a separate but related composition traced in the shadowsthat appear on the wall behind the work when hung.

The thematic consistency and steady evolution that Swallow brings to his project areeverywhere apparent in COMPONENTS, including in earlier sculptures whoseroughhewn, craft-inspired feel is the vessel for domestic monumentality. In othersculptures, like those designed to hang in corners, installation specifications drawattention to—and energy from—frank confrontations with surrounding architecture. It isin rarely seen works on paper, however, that the recurring elements of his sculpturalvocabulary come into new focus. Produced by tracing sculptural elements or by using the elements themselves to make impressions on the paper, these cross-genre worksbring together techniques from painting, printmaking, and process-basedconceptualism. They allow Swallow to isolate and re-position motifs that, in their newiterations, suggest that sculpture transcends distinctions between two- and three dimensional form. At the same time, they provide windows into an ultimately immaterialplace where mind, eye, and hand meet, and where the instinct to make one thing intoanother—to make art—arises.

Press release David Kordansky Gallery