Anya Gallaccio: Comfort and Conversation main, 23 February - 5 April 2008

Annet Gelink Gallery is pleased to announce Anya Gallaccio's (Scotland, 1963) third solo exhibition. For the past years, Gallaccio had major institutional solo shows at amongst others the Sculpture Centre in New York, Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. In 2003 she was nominated for the Turner Prize. In addition, her work was shown at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Blum & Poe in Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin in New York.

Comfort and conversation consists of a large installation of two works. The middle room displays a big dark tree with sturdy branches and a series of ceramic apples hanging down on black ropes from one branch. This bronze tree with the title Lion Tree is a cast of a tree that Gallaccio found in California, having fallen victim to woodpeckers. The woodpecker's tracks were used to thread the ropes with apples.
I will walk down to the end with you if you will come all the way with me is a work that takes up the middle and back space of the gallery. It is a hand-knotted net made of hop rope that has been hung continuously in two rooms. Gallaccio examines with this work the potency of macramé, the craft of knotting rope or thread in patterns - as frequently employed in the seventies. This interest in knotting nets leads back to Anya's previous exhibition in the gallery in 2003 for which she produced a golden fishing net and collaborated for that purpose with a fisherman from IJmuiden. This was an associative reference to the Golden Age, when Amsterdam with its figurative fish became rich and went through an economic and cultural bloom. Macramé to Gallaccio is an itself generating system of knots, with the possibility of infinite expansion. Gallaccio's installation could also be considered as a homage to Duchamp's chaotic installation "One Mile of String" for the exhibition "First Papers of Surrealism" in New York in 1942. Also Eva Hesse's 'hanging' sculptures from the late sixties are called to mind.
One of the essences of Gallaccio's work is that her works and installations all originate from and are related to each other, both formally and conceptually. Her work could justly be called organic, it keeps on moving (sometimes literally when organic material is used) and in new constellations her works are getting another expression and meaning.

In addition, we are presenting the wine project Motherlode. For this project Gallaccio has made editions of wooden boxes with six wine bottles, five of different vineyards and one bottle with a mix of different vineyards. The bottles have silk-screen printed labels that Gallaccio designed and are all closed off with a cork provided with coloured wax, the colour of the wax corresponds with the land on which the grapes concerned grew. Motherlode is the result of an assignment Gallaccio was given to make a site-specific work in Sonoma, Florida. With Motherlode Gallaccio aimed to make a portrait of this region. She started her project in 2003 and when she met wine expert Zelma Long in 2004 she decided to make wine together with Long. In the course of 3 years they developed and bottled six different Zinfandel wines. With the use of the ground and the fruits that Sonoma offers Gallaccio reached with the essence of this landscape.