Simon Starling is the first recipient of the Blinky Palermo Grant and thus also the first artist to whom we can offer our hospitality in our newly built studio. A jury chose Starling from nominations made by well known curators. The weeks od co- operation with Simon and for a time with his friend Dave Allen remain a pleasent memory. The artist’s start was made to measure, his works being already developed, but not yet played out at full value. The use of the site which he found in Leipzig was ver economical. In spite of the modest budget for the exhibition and catalogue, Simon succeeded in presenting a precise and conciving view, sensually as well as intellectually, of three stages of his artistic development, one of which was created here. They all work with the same plausibility of cause and effect which make us better understand breath- taking connections across all needs and projections of continent, period and culture. Everything seems light, natural and calm. Starling’s replica of a ‘Swan Chair’, which Charles F. A. Voysey had designed in the 1880’s, calls to mind the era in which the villa at Karl- Tauchnitz- Straße 11 was built. Voysey’s chair, with its Arts and Crafts spirit, had already left behind pompous Victorian furniture, while Eelbo’s Leipzig villa still seems deeply rooted in the Mediterranean flair of Rapallo architecture. Starling cleverly takes advantage of his compatriot Voysey’s ‘lead’- that small element of dissent in the creator’s mentality. He positions the replica- chair in the exhibition in such a way that the viewer’s gaze simultaneously falls on the very incision in the wood of a feld oak tree outside the gallery which self- confidently documents the removal of the material for the ‘Swan Chair’- double from 1999 as a contemporary art and nature strategy. Additional furniture metamorphoses lie in the future. But for the time being Starling is content with this suggestion.
(Klaus Werner: Foreword)
Catalogue:
›Simon Starling‹
mit Beiträgen von Charles Esche, Stefanie Sembill, Simon Starling, Klaus Werner
Ausstellung: 14.3.-11.4.1999, Hrsg.: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, Leipzig 1999
(de/en)
