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I Had the Landscape in My Arms | Josh Lilley

What an impressive last few months at Josh Lilley! Tucked away on a quiet corner in Fitzrovia, just next to the old Middlesex Hospital site - and its bonkers neo-Byzantine chapel, that I’m tempted to write a whole separate post about - this little gallery is on a tear.

Late last year came a knockout show from Philadelphia-based Alex Da Corte. And now, it’s a group show of sculpture, using mainly found objects, with the descriptive title ‘I Had the Landscape in My Arms’.

Installation

The show includes a couple of US artists, but the set of sculptures that really stood out to me came from Austrian-born, London-based Sarah Pichlkostner.

There are three in all, each with the same (baffling) title: KAY, turned around, KUY, “don’t stress me, I gonna have a walk now”. They’re sort of figurative, made mainly of swoops and curves of aluminium. Two of the figures (if that’s what they are) are stood on the floor; one’s wall-mounted. All three incorporate silverised glass, gravel and dust. The most complex of the set is stood on a neat circular pile of gravel in the middle of the floor. The figures are sinuous, sentry-like. Lightweight but grounded. Urban.

The gallery says the various sculptures represent a means of understanding the “landscape of today”. To me, these tightly-worked, mysterious objects seemed a concentrated expression of the huge, baffling city surrounding that little corner gallery.

I Had the Landscape in My Arms is at Josh Lilley (London). 23 February - 29 March 2018.