Mark Handforth

The British artist Mark Handforth (1969) prefers to derive his work from objects and elements in public space, like lampposts, traffic signs or fluorescent lights. Sometimes he uses them as ready-mades, in other instances he creates an exact replica. There is always some sophisticated transformation going on, testing the viewer's perception. The seemingly destructive interventions give Handforth's sculptures a subversive quality. Are they the aesthetic celebration of the results of vandalism, of unrestrained commercialization, of decay, in short: of the ‘Verelendung' of public space?

Handforth focuses on failures: the breakdown of modernism (both the art-historical phenomenon and the actual objects themselves), the transience of the utopian dream, dilapidated structures, expressions of well-intended urban planning. Just like Robert Smithson, who in the sixties used the language of Minimalism to describe the ruins and garbage heaps in the American cities as pieces of art, Handforth identifies the corroded elements of the urban environment as sculptures.

Mark Handforth's work refers to ‘minimal art', not only in its actual appearance, but also in ‘purpose', making the viewer conscious of both the object and the spaces it resides in and refers to. The work is closely linked to that of an artist like Carl Andre. The exhibition of Mark Handforth can be regarded as a follow-up to the farewell exhibition last January of Lily van Ginneken, Stroom's former director. In this exhibition she showed early works by Carl Andre, consisting of casual arrangements of materials Andre had found on construction sites in The Hague. Through simple means Handforth, too, draws the exterior space into the exhibition space; thus public space becomes manifest, both as a physical and as a social phenomenon.

Mark Handforth was born in Hong Kong, grew up in London and lives and works in Miami. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Kunste/Städelschule in Frankfurt.

The exhibition at Stroom Den Haag features two large, new works and is the first presentation of Mark Handforth's work in The Netherlands. In Europa he had solo exhibitions at The Modern Institute (Glasgow), Le Consortium (Dijon) and Kunsthaus Zürich.

Courtesy: Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York.

23 Oct '05 - 04 Dec '05
Hogewal 1-9, The Hague