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Artworks
Ricardo Brey
Unsettling, 2019-2020Mixed mediaDimensions variableRBR187Further images
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Unsettling (2019–2020) is one of Ricardo Brey’s sculptural assemblages housed inside unfolding archival Boxes. Once opened, the archival Boxes reveal intricate collections of artifacts like found objects and sculptural miniatures....Unsettling (2019–2020) is one of Ricardo Brey’s sculptural assemblages housed inside unfolding archival Boxes. Once opened, the archival Boxes reveal intricate collections of artifacts like found objects and sculptural miniatures. Unsettling brings together a small, ornate metal bicycle wheel mounted atop a large raw piece of stone that sits on two leporello books.
Unsettling is exemplary of an ideological framework that underlies much of Brey’s work: art as a form of alchemy. Brey elaborated on this topic in an interview, discussing his belief “that if art doesn’t produce alchemy, it’s meaningless. … Alchemy is the transformation of reality. Good art enables you to see the artist’s struggle with raw material to transform the way we see the world.”
Art writer Evan Moffitt has pointed to dualities common in Brey’s art as manifestations of the principle of art as alchemy, visible in the way he combines “elements that are very rough and very smooth, or dark and light, sacred and profane. Such combinations have a transformative, almost alchemical effect on their constituent materials.” In Unsettling, this can be seen in the way Brey incorporates the worked metal wheel and the raw piece of rock crystal, juxtaposing their artificial and natural qualities while simultaneously transforming them into something wholly new and distinct.Exhibitions
2022: Elsewhere(s), ANOTHER SPACE, New York
2019: Ricardo Brey: Adrift, Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Bremen, Germany
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