Rebecca Warren is a British contemporary artist recognised for her sculptural works. Engaging with materials ranging from unfired clay, bronze, steel, and neon to assemblages of found objects, Warren both parodies and pays homage to the history of Modernist sculpture.
Read MoreWarren studied in London, receiving her BA from Goldsmiths' College, University of London (1989) and MA from Chelsea College of Art (1993).
Among Warren's early works is Helmut Crumb (1998), a clay sculpture consisting of two pairs of legs. The larger pair features stylised buttocks and high-heeled legs, held together in the middle by a genital bulb; between its heels stands the smaller pair, with what appears to be undergarments wrapped around its knees. While evoking the sexualised imagery of women commonly found in mass media, the title of the sculpture also references photographer Helmut Newton and cartoonist Robert Crumb, whose works feature similar iconography.
Helmut Crumb foreshadows Warren's continuing engagement with existing images in sculpture as well as other fields of art, which she appropriates in a characteristically satirical manner. In the hand-painted plaster casts titled An Intimate Scene (2004), for example, the artist quotes the tradition of idealised female statues—her renditions, however, only show the lower half of the body with the buttocks tinted in a suggestive red.
Warren's references to art history have seen the artist add soft, irreverent pompoms to her sculptures. The canonical subject in Reclining Figure (2011) is manifest through panels of steel at an angle, and features a brown pompom where a human head may be otherwise found; in Los Hadeans (III) (2017), a pompom similarly serves as a head for the thin, skeletal bronze figure reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti's sculptures.
In works such as You Are Not TheRe and Its Soul (both 2020), Warren endows her pedestals with the same importance as the sculptures they present in an echo of Constantin Brancusi. These bronze sculptures, which the artist painted by hand, depict crudely modelled, flag-like forms mounted on tall, elegant MDF plinths.
Though evoking museological cabinets in form, Rebecca Warren's vitrine installations contain seemingly unrelated objects collected by the artist herself. The row of three narrow wall-mounted vitrines in In The Bois (2005), for example, includes polystyrene balls, clay lumps, and pompoms, while the right side of the vitrine in Radio Caroline (2015—2016) extends off the wall, venturing into the exhibition space. Regardless of their apparently negligible value, every object is enshrined carefully in the cabinets, forming an environment of their own that is illuminated by small neon lights.
Selected solo exhibitions include V, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (2021); souls, Maurren Paley, Morena Di Luna, Hove, United Kingdom (2019); Carte Blanche, Fiac Hors les Murs, Musée National Eugène Delacroix, Paris (2018); Sculptures, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles (2017); All That Heaven Allows, Tate St Ives, United Kingdom (2017); The Main Feeling, Dallas Museum of Art, Texas (2016); The Living, Kunstverein München (2013); and Rebecca Warren, Serpentine Gallery, London (2009).
Selected group exhibitions include A Little After the Millennium, Gallery Baton, Seoul (2020); Objects of Wonder: From Pedestal to Interaction, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2019); A TIME CAPSULE: Works Made by Women for Parkett 1984—2017, Parkett, Zurich (2018); ISelf Collection: Bumped Bodies, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); THE GAP BETWEEN THE FRIDGE AND THE COOKER, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2017); Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, The Met Breuer, New York (2016); and The Body Extended: Sculpture and Prosthetics, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2016).
Rebecca Warren was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2006. She was elected as a Royal Academician in 2014 and awarded the OBE for Services to Art in 2020.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
