
British artist Phyllida Barlow creates sculptures and large-scale installations that infuse humble materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, and cement with a boundless energy, persuading the viewer to experience form rather than reflexively projecting narrative and meaning. ‘glimpse’, the artist’s first solo Los Angeles exhibition in her five decades-long career, will feature all new large-scale works in the gallery’s Downtown Los Angeles complex. Here Barlow will respond to the conditions of the site: the works will be made and assembled in situ. Within the Neoclassical South Gallery, she will create a structure reminiscent of a stage that serves as a proscenium for the surrounding works. A staircase suspended on stilts will occupy the upper realm of the gallery space, dreamlike but assertively physical. Visitors will be able to walk through and around the sculptures, advancing Barlow’s longstanding penchant for exploring the ways in which sculpture can create different realms of experience.
Hauser & Wirth Publishers recently released Phyllida Barlow: Collected Lectures, Writings, and Interviews a career-spanning publication assembling 50 texts by Barlow. This reader illuminates Barlow’s thoughts on art, making, teaching, drawing, and other artists, and provides a wonderful accompaniment to the works on view in the exhibition.
For more than 50 years, British artist Phyllida Barlow has taken inspiration from her surroundings to create imposing installations that can be at once menacing and playful. She creates anti-monumental sculptures from inexpensive, low-grade materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, polystyrene, scrim and cement. These constructions are often painted in industrial or vibrant colours, the seams of their construction left at times visible, revealing the means of their making.




Hauser & Wirth was founded in 1992 in Zurich by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, who were joined in 2000 by Partner and Vice President Marc Payot. A family business with a global outlook, Hauser & Wirth has expanded over the past 26 years to include outposts in Hong Kong, London, New York, Los Angeles, Somerset and Gstaad. The gallery represents over 70 artists and estates who have been instrumental in shaping its identity over the past quarter century, and who are the inspiration for Hauser & Wirth’s diverse range of activities that engage with art, education, conservation and sustainability.

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