Filipino artist David Medalla merged physics and poetry in his ephemeral sculptures, which invite viewers to contemplate the unfixed and unstable forces that surround us.
Read MoreMedalla was born in Manila, the Philippines. When he was young, reportedly around 12, the poet Mark Van Doren recommended him for admission at New York's Columbia University, where he studied philosophy and literature as a special student.
Medalla lived and worked in Europe from the 1960s onwards. In 1964, he established the London gallery Signals with curator Paul Keeler, critic Guy Brett, and artists Gustav Metzger and Marcello Salvadori. The short-lived gallery had an enormous impact on London's avantgarde art scene, introducing the art world to ground-breaking artists such as Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel, and Takis.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Medalla co-founded several collectives, including Artists for Democracy, the Baroque Buddha Brotherhood, the Synoptic Realists, and Mondrian Fan Club. In 2000, he initiated the London Biennale. Medalla also lectured at several universities, including the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, St. Martins School of Art, Chelsea School of Art, Goldsmiths College of Art, and the University of Southampton.
Working across performance, sculpture, installation, and conceptual art, David Medalla's unpredictable works embrace variation in their constantly shifting formal associations.
Medalla is perhaps best known for his kinetic, self-generating 'Cloud Canyons', a series of bubble-producing machines begun in 1963. The 'auto-creative' works responded to the 'auto-destructive' sculptures of Gustav Metzger, a contemporaneous Polish artist who utilised destructive art processes to protest the violence of the Cold War era.
'Cloud Canyons' consists of transparent tubes on a base that emit foamy beams of soap bubbles, which are constantly generated over the course of the machines' display. Compressors underneath the tubes project soapy liquid upward, forming a jet of foam that slowly emerge out of the top of the tubes and droop back down to the base, to be subsumed back into the liquid.
These works generate a completely variable bubble landscape, where random discrepancies of gravity, atmospheric pressure, and air currents transform the vertical energy of his tubes into collapsed, curling masses of foam. 'Cloud Canyons' produce immaterial sculptures, giving tangible yet temporary form to intangible scientific forces. Like cellular structures, the columns of white foam are formal exercises in free abstraction, but also evoke associations with fertility and orgasmic biology.
Medalla related the origins of these sculptures to a personal trauma, where he witnessed a young Filipino guerrilla fighter being shot by a Japanese soldier. As he explains, 'The sight of him lying there dying, red blood bubbles foaming from his mouth, made a strong impression on me.' He also connected his bubble sculptures to less violent provocations, such as a soap factory visit in France, clouds in tropical Manila sunsets, and a brewery visit in Edinburgh.
Begun in 1968, Medalla's textile project 'A Stitch in Time' was initiated when Medalla invited two ex-lovers to stitch designs onto a pair of handkerchiefs. He would encounter one of these handkerchiefs many years later in the assembled knick-knacks of a Dutch backpacker. The project expanded over the following years into a celebrated participatory series, where museum and gallery audiences were invited to add stitches to large bolts of cloth. Each iteration is specific to its site, with audiences around the world stitching their personal memories, keepsakes, names, poems, and images into a larger collaborative work. In this series, Medalla highlights the magic of collective memories, how tangible things can store shared and personal histories.
David Medalla's work was exhibited widely throughout his lifetime and continues to be exhibited internationally.
Select exhibitions include Harald Szeemann's Weiss auf Weiss (1966) and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969), Kunsthalle Bern; DOCUMENTA 5, Kassel (1972); Perfotijd, Theatre de Lantaren, Rotterdam (1984); The Other Story, Hayward Gallery, London (1989); L'Informe, Centre Pompidou, Paris (1996); Live/Life: British Artists Today, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (1996); A Quality of Light, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (1997); Travels II, Clocktower Gallery, New York (1998); Art Lifts Berlin, DAAD Galerie, Berlin (1998); Live in your Head, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2000); Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic, Hayward Gallery, London (2000); and Century City, Tate Modern, London (2001).
Peter Derksen | Ocula | 2022
