The Last House on The Left (2022), a recent iteration in Alex Da Corte's ongoing 'Cel Painting' series, references a playful mural on the windowless exterior of Jo Skymer Lighting, a famous lighting store in Pennsauken, New Jersey, which has since been painted over.

The artist's monumental painting and its original function as an advertisement for domestic lamps, has inspired our current group exhibition titled SHINE ON. A reflection of Da Corte's simulacra, this lively assembly of sculptural lights made by artists are busily displayed as a lamp supply shop within the white cube of our Davies Street gallery.

The possibilities of lamps have long engaged artists, the self-illuminating quality adding the functional to the determinedly anti-functional nature of an artwork. There are numerous historical examples (not included in our 'showroom') by Alina Szapocznikow, David Hammons, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Pablo Picasso, Martin Creed and others, that use the lamp form to address class, race, gender and desire, often with the element of light itself as conceptual or metaphorical component. But as you can see in our incomplete selection for SHINE ON, these sculptural lamps can also be playful mood enhancers, ripostes to architecture, evocative of the body or natural forms, a direct descendent of the readymade or a challenge to the rules of both conventional design and good taste.

Or they could just be lights. Made by artists. SHINE ON!

Press release courtesy Sadie Coles HQ