Published 12 NOV 2024

Opening – 22 NOV 2024, 6-9 pm
23 NOV until 1 FEB 2025
Linienstraße 155, 10115 Berlin

In Project for an Exhibition, Part 1: Time Takes (Scenario for a Conversation), Simon Starling’s eighth solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, the artist dedicates a series of sculptural portraits to the integral role that collaboration plays in his body of work. A group of minimal, abstracted figures presents key accomplices from throughout the artist’s career – architect and astronomer Mike Davies, marine biologist Sam Bowser, playwright and director Graham Eatough, pianolist Rex Lawson, designer Fulvio Ferrari, conservator Sherry Phillips and artist Rasmus Nielsen – standing as tributes to the diverging apprehensions of time that each embodies, and to the cross-disciplinary expertise embedded within Starling’s research-intensive projects. Surveying an artistic approach of over three decades, the likenesses find their counterparts in a collection of photographs and sculptures that stems from the contributions of those depicted. 

The cultivated ethos of collaboration has indelibly marked Starling’s practice, forming and informing it since its inception. As a trained photographer and artist whose far-reaching complexes of historical and cultural inquiry often pull from specialized, obscure or rarefied bases of knowledge, he has come to regularly call upon the technical competencies of others to help in faithfully, thoroughly actualizing his concepts. An acute awareness of his proficiencies is alchemized into a pointed strength under Starling’s care, with guidance and close exchange allowing him forays into new worlds. Here, the transformation and translation that characterize Starling’s production expand and extend to his process itself. It too undergoes a metamorphosis, crucially integrating the artist’s facilities with those of his collaborators, fusing them to something uniquely generative, their dialog creating work that grows beyond just the sum of its parts. 

Project for an Exhibition, Part 1: Time Takes (Scenario for a Conversation) assembles seven of these collaborators and Starling himself upon a circular platform, sectioned to a clock’s twelfths, his sculptures taking the stage as a cast of characters in the round. Each are given shape by pared-down skeletons of welded steel or fastened tubing, left bare, coated with paint, clad in costume or augmented with readymade or found objects. The likenesses, in their various constructions, distill their subjects, becoming portraits not by way of the hyperreal, but by virtue of their adornments: Tube-bent flippers and a reclaimed oxygen tank define a marine biologist, cast joints link piping to sketch an astronomer and his self-built telescopes, while a workstation’s table and ventilation hardware morph into a museum’s conservator. A measured, referential reductionism takes hold, expanding to the full ensemble, with Starling at its conceptual center. The artist is appointed as the enchanted broom of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and its adaptation in Disney’s 1940 “Fantasia.” The work’s split base curves to a triad of feet lined with bound reeds in a reflection of Starling’s recent engagement with thatching methods, and tools of the trade are yielded by arms draped from the organically ascending tree fragment that is the broom’s handle. Masks, inspired by Japanese Noh theater and crafted traditionally in Osaka by frequent collaborator Yasuo Miichi, sit atop a selection of the figures, while others wear facial stand-ins – hoods, punched scrolls or optical devices – by Starling. The individual apparitions deconstruct notions of resemblance and reconstitute them within the bounds of a new narrative – one born of time in its many permutations, and inscribed in Starling’s history of shared artistic operations. 

Simon Starling (b. 1967) has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at international museums and institutions including Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin (2022); Frac Île-de-France, Le Plateau, Paris (2019); Musée regional d’art contemporain, Sérignan (2017); Japan Society, New York (2016); The Common Guild, Glasgow (2016); Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City (2015); Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2014); Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2013); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart (2013); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima (2011); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2008); The Power Plant, Toronto (2008); Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine (2009); Tate Britain, London (2013, 2009) and Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin (2009). He was chosen to represent Scotland at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Simon Starling lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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