Roger Hiorns

Roger Hiorns’ Untitled sculpture consists of a BMW car engine covered in bright blue crystals, standing on a metal structure. Hiorns placed the engine inside a tank filled with a copper sulphate solution, resulting in stunning crystals fixing on its surface. It exists in a line of copper sulphate crysalized objects in Hiorns’ oeuvre; he crystalized, among others, thistles, cardboard architecural models, more car engines and even an entire London appartment for his 2008 project Seizure, commissioned by Artangel. For Seizure, Hiorns filled a London bedsit, ready for demolition, with the copper sulphate solution, which through the same chemical process resulted in a cave-like space fully covered with gleaming blue crystal formations. The visitors could do nothing but destroy the crystals on the floor by walking over them... Hiorns often uses processes in which he himself has no influence on the eventual appearance of the work. JJ Charlesworth on the self-producing aspect of Hiorns’ objects: “If crystals grow on the body of a BMW engine, as in The birth of the architect (2003), or in the thistles that hang on steel rods of Discipline (2002), or if foam rises from the vessels of Beachy Head (2000-06), they no longer have anything to do with the human intervention that initially set them in motion. Hiorns makes objects that suggest a sort of independence, a separation from the world of those who see them, as if they have a purpose, or at least a story behind their existence, that exists despite the context in which they are encountered. Whether it is sculpted, constructed, assembled, arranged, photographed or painted, much contemporary art still assumes that the artwork should generate a kind of dialogue between it and the spectator. A common trait in Hiorns’ objects is the aspect of mute indifference to the spectator, who can only query, at a distance, the strange concatention of elements before them, and muse on the obscure intent that brought them into being.” (from: JJ Charlesworth, “The New Citizen. On the Work of Roger Hiorns”, in: ”Roger Hiorns, exh. cat. Milton Keynes Gallery, 2006, p. 6)