Massimo De Carlo gallery in Milan is pleased to present Grid & Spike a new exhibition by British artist Steven Claydon.

Steven Claydon’s second solo exhibition for the gallery in Milan brings together a group of new works and installations that question the meaning of objects and their representation. Central issues in Steven Claydon’s work are the possible connections, coherent or obscured, between objects and diverse histories, forecasts and trajectories, produced in the most various materials and in different geographical and economical contexts. Claydon’s sculptures and installations are assemblages of parallel or perpendicular universes that take the viewer for a journey into materials, forms, history, techniques, sounds, images, and icons.

The exhibition Grid & Spike examines our attempts to objectify and classify into a scheme the world in which we live and the universe beyond, constructing works that reference the precise taxonomies and grids in which every element of reality could fall within, emulating the ambitious anthropocentric intention of mapping/capturing the whole of the physical and subjective universe. Figuration and abstraction, found objects, castings and new creations, modified antiquities and props, mix together to create new orders, anthropologies and mythologies, as in the sculpture The she from another P. In this work an original votive statue dated more than 3.5 thousand years is sitting next to science-fictional objects all augmented chemically chromed to reach a state of unprecedented horizontality.

Both rooms of Steven Claydon’s exhibition, downstairs and upstairs, feature an architectural intervention realized with coloured vinyl curtains: as if they were recording devises, interventions or screens, they alter the enviroment and generate different visual perceptions, so that they create a relational process with the other works in the show.

In Steven Claydon’s world every categorization is blurred and every object gains a new universal status: olive barrels, plinths, ancient Greece images, fictional architectures, masks, tubular systems, stones, Gremlins, ropes, and even paintings are hybrid elements that connect history with the future, the material world with the pure abstracted perception of every entity and element.

Steven Claydon (1969) lives and works in London. He has been exhibiting with solo and group shows in prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, Tate Modern in London, and White Columns in New York, among others. Claydon’s work has been recently exhibited with the title Culpable Earth in a solo show at the Firstsite in Colchester, England (2012) and with Golden Times, at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2010). Among his recent group shows are: Busted, curated by Cecilia Alemani, High Line Art, New York (2013); Soundworks, Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2012); Time Again, curated by Fionn Meade at the Sculpture Center in New York (2011); Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, curated by Dominic Molon at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Rings of Saturn at Tate Modern in London (2006).

All images Steven Claydon, Grid & Spike, Installation view Massimo De Carlo, Milano, 2013, Photo by Roberto Marossi, Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milano/London