Lot 118: Simon Patterson (b.1967)

Cinerama
signed, titled and dated 1997 on the overlap
acrylic on canvas
66.5 x 183.2 cm. (26 1/8 x 72 1/8 in.)

Lisson Gallery, London.

The present work is a scaled-down version of Patterson's wall drawing, First Circle, exhibited at his Turner Prize installation in 1996. Illustrating Patterson's interest in the ability of language to alter visual or presumed reality; to create retinal imagery that cannot possibly exist. Here, the utopic worlds familiar from myth, legend, religion, literature and popular culture - Xanadu, Oz, Shangri-La, Cockaigne, Nirvana, El Dorado, 7th Heaven and Cloud 9 - are set in a planetary ellipsis. Writing on First Circle Bernard Fibicher postulates that Patterson has created what Foucault describes as a 'heterotopia' - "an other-place (an empty space within speech), which endows various things...with the possibility of meeting, while at the same time acting as a reminder that they are situated in different places." (quoted in Simon Patterson, Iwona Blazwich and Bernard Fibicher, ed. London, 2002, p. 8)