Regent's Park | London
https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-london
For Frieze Sculpture Park 2024, Pi Artworks will present Albano Hernandez’s sculpture, The Shadow - the Artist's first public commission. It takes its outline from the shadow of a sweetgum tree (liquidambar styraciflua). In the mid-morning, the shadow of the tree falls on to Hernandez’s piece, repeating its exact outline.
Albano Hernández’s work is strongly informed by his life philosophy of zero waste and awareness of his ecological imprint. In his studio, he upcycles everything: canvas offcuts and paint chips become new artworks. Responding to the invitation to make a new work with a playful twist in the English Gardens, he creates a sculpture that neither rises above the ground nor dents its surface. It mimics the shadow the sweetgum tree, a species that was first brought to Europe by 16th-century Spanish naturalist (also named Hernández). The Contemporary Hernández brings the non-human protagonists of the English Gardens to the foreground, while artistically nodding to another work that uses similar methodology, Richard Woods’ Grass Painted Green, from 2003.
Associations with ideas of the natural world vs. the synthetic, with Plato’s cave, and with shadows across art-history, will ensure that the work re-defines the sculpture park’s landscape, asking visitors to look closer at their surroundings.
