Solid States, 2015

An Te Liu - Toronto, Canada

Installation

The Toronto Sculpture Garden sets the scene for a new installation by An Te Liu, an internationally exhibited Toronto-based artist. 

Solid States (2015) continues Liu’s practice of creating hybrid sculptural objects evocative of modernist and ethnographic traditions in art and the detritus of consumerism. Liu’s practice combines these elements, finding the primordial form lurking within domestic artifacts, household electronics and their packaging, the recto/verso as it were of contemporary manufacturing processes. Through bronze casting these works transform to embody the artist’s perception of a culture in transition.

The cultural tendency Liu summons is one that moves between resource extraction to the technological juggernaut, from nation states to the transglobal, from ethnic tradition and identity to polyglot amalgam. At its root, modernism found vitality by embracing non-Western traditions in art and the most relevant antecedents of Liu’s practice are the sculptors’ Brancusi, Hepworth and Noguchi.

Liu could be said to, in particular, update Brancusi’s practice of combining folk tradition with modern art idiom. More pertinent is the idea that Liu makes artworks within this frame of reference to help heighten awareness about unique aspects of our own historical moment.

An Te Liu Exhibitions incl. Art Labor; Kunsthalle Wien; Witte de With; Louisiana MoMA; Ursula Blickle; Venice Biennale (Architecture). Monographs incl. An Te Liu: Matter (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2009); An Te Liu: MONO NO MA (Gardiner Museum, 2014); Blackdog Press (forthcoming).

Represented by Division Gallery (Montréal/Toronto).

Learn More

mocca.ca/exhibition/solidstates

116

Toronto Sculpture Garden

115 King Street East

This project is outdoors.