No stranger to excess or scale, renowned Scottish sculptor David Mach RA will reveal a series of maquettes for several ambitious, new monumental pieces in his exhibition Heavy Metal with sculpture specialists Pangolin London.
Renowned for his controversial and extravagant use of materials, often inspired by everyday objects, Heavy Metal explores Mach’s ideas and obsessions charting his development from sculpture to architecture and probing the tension between the two disciplines. With architectural projects on the go in London, Edinburgh, Mauritius and Syria this exhibition offers a tantalizing glimpse of Mach’s dynamic working process and his innate desire to push the boundaries of contemporary public art. He says:
After all these years I still don’t like the isolation of the studio. I prefer to build installations and to work as publicly as possible as a kind of sculptural performance artist. I’ve built works in shopping centres, parks, streets and car showrooms as often as I have in galleries or museums. I enjoy the challenges of trying to manipulate unorthodox materials…preferably in vast quantities in the face of an ever-mounting but still beatable bureaucracy. Like all artists I have to deal with the assault course of ever-increasing boundaries and barriers to creativity. With public art there are ever more hoops to jump through, health and safety issues to deal with, social agendas to consider, budgets and curators to get past… all part of the struggle but all do-able… and yes, I have my own axes to grind and I’m having great fun pushing those boundaries.
Indeed, Mach is enjoying an architectural adventure and many of the works presented in Heavy Metal highlight his ongoing obsession with shipping containers. Considering them to be one of the world’s most important inventions, they are intrinsic to the large-scale maquettes that present his designs for Mach1, an art gallery to be built in Edinburgh Park, a library for Antioch University in Damascus and a giant sculpture for Chiswick Roundabout in London. These will be exhibited alongside several more maquettes for public works of art, a series of new prints and in his continuing collaboration with Pangolin London two exciting new signature bronzes that reference his significant previous commissions Temple at Tyre and Darlington’s Brick Train.
BOUNDARIES NEED TO BE PUSHED
DAVID MACHPangolin London
Pangolin London, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG
Wednesday 25th January – 25th March 2023
