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JIM LAMBIE |
Jim Lambie’s work draws from everyday reality and transforms the mundane into something new and colorful. In Plaza, we immediately recognize the common, plastic shopping bags that Lambie uses. Inspiration for this work came from an incident that Lambie witnessed on the streets of Glasgow: milk leaking from a hole in the bottom of a red shopping bag, as the unassuming shopper carrying the bag trekked home. The image of white liquid flowing out of red plastic stuck with Lambie, who essentially replaced the milk with paint and recreated the event seven times using different color combinations, a reference to the daily act of grocery shopping. When installed, the bags hover above the floor at a height similar to where they would be if one were carrying them full of food. The piece, based in reality, becomes abstract as liquid pours out of the bags in streams of color, down the baseboard to the floor.
Blurring the line between everyday reality and art, Lambie also blurs the line between painting and sculpture. Each time Plaza is installed, chance controls how the paint flows. The piece exists somewhere between mediums: is it a painting? Is it a sculpture? And are these distinctions really all that important in the end?
This beautifully simple and thought provoking piece was first installed at the Albright-Knox as part of the exhibition Extreme Abstraction. Jim Lambie, a Scottish artist closely associated with the Glasgow art scene, is best known for his striped vinyl floor pieces, which have covered the floors and stairs of multiple gallery and museum spaces in the United States and Europe. The pieces are site specific: the pattern of stripes, dictated by the space they appear in, transform an otherwise mundane space into something that is mesmerizing and disorienting.
– Anna Kaplan, Curatorial Assistant