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Event- Cornelia Parker in Conversation with Richard Cork
Cornelia Parker in Conversation with Richard Cork
The Eye of the Storm
5.30pm, Tuesday 6 November
Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, strand, WC2R 0RN
Visitors to the 1997 Turner Prize exhibition were confronted by Cornelia Parker’s arresting installation. Deftly and poetically, she suspended in a vertical downpour the scorched fragments of a Texas baptist church struck by lightning. But many of her major works are the outcome of destruction initiated by the artist herself. In 1988 she asked a steamroller driver to flatten 1,000 pieces of silverware carefully laid out in a curving line. Then Parker picked them up and set about making an installation from the squashed remains. Her most celebrated work, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, is even more dramatic. With expert help from the British army, she blew up a shed whose shattered contents were then transformed into a suspended masterpiece which threw shadows on the surrounding walls. But aggression is always countered by dry humour in her work. And the fragments achieve an alternative beauty of their own as they float and spin, like something resurrected, in the air.
Richard Cork is an award-winning art critic, historian, broadcaster, exhibition curator, and former Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University and Senior Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Four volumes of his critical writings on modern art were published by Yale in 2003, and his new book is 'The Healing Presence of Art: A History of Western Art in Hospitals’.
ENTRY DETAILS: £7 (one price only). Space is limited so advance booking is required. BOOK ONLINE here: http://courtauld-institute.digitalmuseum.co.uk
Organised by Professor Caroline Arscott