Lot 5: GARY WEBB

B. 1973
LITTLE SPLIT

approximately 200 by 200 by 15cm.; 78 3/4 by 78 3/4 by 5 7/8 in.

American white ash wood, metal brackets, mirrors and tinted mirrors

Executed in 2006.

PROVENANCE

Donated by the artist, courtesy of The Approach, London

NOTE

Gary Webb's work is marked by an intuitive approach to materials, arranged with a visual flourish that is almost baroque. His is a distinctly urban, fast-paced aesthetic born out of synthetic materials such as acrylic, resin, neon and rubber. At times glass, wood, sand and marble appear, organic materials that are nonetheless given a synthetic twist when rendered in biomorphic, sci-fi forms. Webb has spoken about his work in relation to contemporary 'indoor culture', an aesthetic of shopping malls and drive-ins awash with bright colours and shiny plastics. Experiencing his work is like entering a Las Vegas casino or amusement arcade, spaces that are dedicated to the pursuit of an intense and intoxicating p/leisure experience. Occasionally his work even comes with its own soundtrack -- notes that fill the air like foot soldiers on reconnaissance, sent ahead to hook us with the disembodied promise of material joys to come.

Webb assembles his materials according to a logic of contradiction and proliferation: perspex placed on glass placed on rubber; neon on plastic on granite on steel; a wall of tilted mirrors that bounce back the whole as a thousand, distorted reflections. His forms and shapes likewise combine solid and open, transparent and opaque, soft and rigid, speaking in fluent tongues of contradictory sculptural possibilities. Somewhere between the functional and imagined, Webb's sculptures create a sense of exhilarating freedom in the possibilities generated by such juxtapositions; they maintain a form of poetic lightness afforded by suggestions and allusions, rather than the burden of a need for weighty explanations.

In recent years Webb has created a number of modular works that seem to play with minimalism's more restrained language. The first, begun in 2002, is an ongoing series of triangular rubber mats, produced in a growing variety of colours. Hovering somewhere between the car mat and the bath mat -- the two lowliest forms of carpet -- Webb displays these either independently, laying them on floors like ziggurats of differing shape, size and permutations; or uses them like a plinth for other works. The artist titled these mats Matte Module, a German sounding neologism that gives a characteristic twist to their structured order, while a corner of each mat bears the artist's name and surname embossed in the flamboyant style of Elvis Presley's signature. His dazzling assemblages were recently shown at the Chisenhale Gallery in 2004, the 2003 Lyon Biennale and in The Moderns at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin in 2003.

The present work is the second example in a more recent series of wall-mounted works that, like the floor mats, operate both independently and by interacting with their vicinity. The work consists of a series of rectangular mirrors mounted on wood, arranged in rows and columns that are contained within a larger rectangular shape. The linear geometry of this configuration is broken up by the random insertion of tinted mirrors, while others are tilted up or down, lending the whole a drunken, syncopated feel. The room that contains the work is in turn absorbed by the work itself, reflected back in a broken perspective of odd angles and crooked corners, while the viewer's eye moves back and forth between the coloured surface and the reflected space contained within. Like a sequined curtain it shimmers and shines, creating a heady visual noise that blends Soviet montage, Cubist fragmentation and minimalist seriality with the dancing light and colours of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43. As with his use of music or his floor mats, this work demonstrates Webb's ability to create self-contained works that nonetheless take on the expansive quality of an environment, giving form to an attitude that we experience through the engagement of all our senses. AT