Spring has come early to London’s South Bank: on a grey February day inside the Hayward Gallery, a burst of huge silken flower-lights drops from the ceiling, opening into many-layered luxuriant blooms. Then a motor pulls them back into bud and, slowly closing, they rise, out of reach, like dancers gracefully rippling backstage.
Delicate and joyous, “Shylight” is a kinetic sculpture by Drift — Amsterdam-based duo Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta — mimicking flowers whose petals furl and unfurl in response to light, and using precision engineering to create hypnotic, ethereal choreography. It’s a dazzling opening to When Forms Come Alive, a new exhibition gathering a score of mostly contemporary sculptors “inspired by movement, fluidity and growth”.
Swollen with cloves and peppers, Ernesto Neto’s turmeric-dyed crocheted loops and pods in “Iaia Kui Dau Arã Naia” hang like a brilliant jungle canopy. Spray-painted metal body parts — elephantine yellow ear, orange legs shooting into a handstand — emerge from oozing clay bases in Teresa Solar Abboud’s cartoonish Tunnel Boring Machine series, “hybrids between biology, geology and engineering”, she explains.
Choi Jeong Hwa’s “Blooming matrix” is a garden of tall, bright, densely clustered stacks: tropical plants fashioned from junk, found objects, plastic — remnants of the overconsumption causing the environmental destruction of the vegetal life Choi depicts. Simple and alluring, what looks from a distance like a calligraphic wall doodle turns out to be a sleek scroll in Alaskan yellow cedar, solid but weightless, by African-American magician of wood Martin Puryear.
All this can be enjoyed purely as a winter tonic of colour and natural abundance, and at best there’s invigorating anarchy here: irregular forms and odd tactile surfaces disrupting the Hayward’s austere concrete interiors. Ralph Rugoff’s thoughtful show also asks what this sort of vitality is about: how and why artists “who traffic in non-Euclidean geometries” adopt asymmetry, with indefinable shapes that undulate, coagulate and proliferate in imitation of biology and botany.
Antecedents are Jean Arp’s and Henry Moore’s biomorphic abstractions, but their forms are fixed, usually in bronze. By contrast, flux, process, transience and mixed media are keynotes here.
The oldest and most beautiful works are by Ruth Asawa (1926-2013): her diaphanous spherical and oval forms nested in hourglass shapes, woven in wire and suspended like cascades of lanterns and domes, sway gently, casting shadows all around. Asawa said her inspirations were “the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning” — impermanent, contingent things, the opposite of sculpture’s historic monumentalising impulse.
Asawa trained with Josef Albers and her intricate, buoyant sculptures combine formal discipline with airy freedom. By contrast, for many sculptors emerging half a generation later, the excitement was liberation from elegance — awkwardness, slippage, improvisation.
In the late 1960s, challenging (male) sculpture’s iterations of hard power, Lynda Benglis set out to “resist geometry” with unruly soft abstractions made by pouring latex or heaping polyurethane foam on the floor. Cast in lead, “Quartered Meteor” is based on a foam piece, “King of Flot”, and has an uncanny sense of liquidity, like lava stopped mid-flow.
Phyllida Barlow’s painted polystyrene and plaster construction “untitled: girl ii; 2019” is a massive anthropomorphic rock precariously perched on three legs. Barlow plays on body-landscape ambiguities in these ungainly, off-kilter pieces with wobbly surfaces, experienced differently from various angles as we walk round. “Sculpture unfolds and refolds and unfolds again,” Barlow said.
Her prankster Austrian contemporary Franz West similarly used painted polystyrene for misshapen globby forms such as a crumbling sugar-pink asteroid, installed with two seats as “Epiphany on Chairs”, where we are invited to sit and contemplate this meaningless object — the opposite of art’s transcendence. “Cain Approaching Abel” is a pair of resin and lacquer lumpen forms in Pop colours, vaguely implying the human form with outstretched arms, wildly failing — fratricide as bathos and absurdity.
Celebrated only towards the end of their lives, Barlow (1944-2023) and West (1947-2012) now appear frequently in international exhibitions. Rugoff suggests they, and the contemporary artists here, represent a strand of sculpture where “form is dynamic — rather than being defined by a fixed border . . . more like a set of fluid relationships”. This speaks to restless times, and as “our encounters are increasingly digitised and disembodied”, this urgent “exploration of physical experience” expresses how “everything in the world . . . is moving, seething, changing, transforming”. Anxiety about climate change is an underlying theme almost everywhere, and prominent in some of the show’s most theatrical pieces.
In Michel Blazy’s ephemeral comedy “Bouquet Final”, bath foam cascades down a four-metre scaffolding of plastic tubes and troughs, seeping out to the floor; it was originally shown in a Cistercian monastery in Paris, contrasting age-old stone with the cheap accessibility of soap suds and chemicals, and alluding to industrial spills.
Entirely filling one large gallery, Tara Donovan’s “Untitled (Mylar)” is constructed from flat circular sheets of metallic polyester film, folded and hot-glued into clusters of spheres, multiplying in all directions, light bouncing off ribbons of silver tape. It evokes simultaneously a mysterious lunar landscape, a gigantic diagram of molecular chains and a sci-fi horror scenario: out-of-control proliferating elements — cellular structures, a virus, everyday flotsam? — overwhelming, destroying us. Grand, bizarre, paradoxical, this is a baroque drama of agglomeration amassed from an everyday manufactured material; a warning about material accumulation which is itself a product of that accumulation.
It’s long been clear that conceptual shows such as this — and global biennales where bigger is ever better to grab short-span attention — catastrophise ecological change while contributing to it. Where will these vast installations end up in 20, 50 years? Donovan is incisive, inventive, but too many younger sculptors ignore formal rigour to sprawl into overlarge, loud, narcissistic vacuums. That’s a problem here: the world doesn’t need Eva Fàbregas’s hundreds of metres of pink latex and inflatable balls, “Pumping” (“I have fun, I mix materials, I play . . . [My sculptures] are endlessly becoming”), or Holly Hendry’s “Sottobosco”, green-painted steel ducting, stainless steel, concrete canvas installed on the Hayward’s window ledges to imitate lichen. It’s “twitching with life”, Hendry claims; as sculpture, it’s deadly.
Where life does pulse is in two fabulous beeswax, worm-eaten walnut and handblown glass towers “The Guardian of Ancient Yeast” and “The Holder of Wasp Venom” — these ingredients are also added — by the ingenious Marguerite Humeau. The first is inspired by spirelike termite mounds, the second calls to mind a tree of mushrooms, the branches tapering to tiered honeycombs. But Humeau enchants rather than preaches: “There are forms of life that will survive us,” she says. “How can we take them as our guides or companions to understand how to navigate our own futures?”
To May 6, southbankcentre.co.uk
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