Anthea Hamilton: Mash Up

For nearly two decades, Anthea Hamilton has developed a complex practice that spans sculpture, installation and performance. Hamilton dives without restraint into the meandering history of visual and cultural production, using her eye as a both subjective and productive lens through which to view (and recreate) the world. Her installations—which combine unexpected materials, scale and humour—propose an alternative and fragmented reality where gender roles, sexualities, food, domestic life, nature, and the traditions of different cultures, all rescind their status of firmly established clichés and become fluid notions. Hamilton’s practice therefore relies on a strong belief in cohabitation, complexity and, by extension, imagination, positing the artworks’ ontological ambiguity as a means to constantly challenge our perceived realities.

Using the “mash up” as her method, she masterfully filters and assesses elements culled from the present and recent past of fashion, art, food, nature, design, architecture and pop culture. She then resituates what we might otherwise consider familiar or comforting tropes and motifs in a continuous bid to sidestep obvious and hegemonic meanings.

Influenced by the early 20th century French writer and dramatist Antonin Artaud and his call for the “physical knowledge of images”, Hamilton aims to elicit a bodily response to an idea or an image when we encounter her works. The artist is best known for creating compelling and immersive large-scale statement pieces in which bodies, images, materials and spaces perform under the terms and conditions of a particular frame.

Mash Up draws a comprehensive and precise picture of a practice characterised by devotional creativity, unexpected research trajectories, highly visual aesthetics, cross cultural interests, and interdisciplinary modes of production. Hamilton’s exhibition invites us to think about the knowledge of forms and images, and raises relevant questions on representation, identity politics, and methodologies of freedom.

Curator: Anne-Claire Schmitz

Weekly performances each Saturday from 17 February until 15 May 2022 in collaboration with DE SINGEL, Antwerp and as part of Carta 22, biennial festival of creation 21– 30 April 2022

Anthea Hamilton is a visual artist working across installation, sculpture and performance. She completed her studies at the painting departments of Leeds Metropolitan University and the Royal College of Art London in 2000 and 2005 respectively. In 2016, Hamilton was one of four shortlisted artists for the Turner Prize presented at Tate Britain. Anthea Hamilton lives and works in London and is currently a guest tutor at the free, independent art school Open School East, in Margate (UK).

Anthea Hamilton has exhibited her work internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include: The Prude, Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2019); The New Life, Secession, Vienna (2018); A is for… and, am, anxious, adore, Kaufmann Repetto, Milan (2018); The Squash, Tate Britain, London (2018); Love IV (with Nicholas Byrne), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2016); Anthea Hamilton Reimagines Kettle’s Yard, Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, (2016); Lichen! Libido! Chastity!, SculptureCenter, New York (2015); Kabuki, The Tanks, Tate Modern, London (2012); Sorry I’m Late, Firstsite, Colchester (2012); Les Modules, Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); and Gymnasium, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2008). In recent years, she has taken part in multiple group exhibitions including: Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2020, South London Gallery, London (2021); The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2020); May You Live in Interesting Times, Biennale di Venezia 58, Venice (2019); La Vie Moderne, 13eme Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2015); Burning Down The House: 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2014) and Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics, M HKA, Antwerp (2014).

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