DLA Piper: Sculpture Remixed, Tate, Liverpool

Curated by Wayne Hemingway & Son

Lighting Design: Kathrine Sandys

Red or Dead founder, Wayne Hemingway & Son present symbolic sculpture in a contemporary, interactive environment. The sculptures are displayed in a deep purple room filled with spot lights, disco balls and a light up dance floor. Outside the room, there are pairs of headphones that you can wear when inside the disco room, they play 70’s disco music to help you become engrossed into the atmosphere. As I walked around this room I felt that I became one of the sculptures, as though it was a party.

‘The life-size figurative works, created over a period spanning one hundred and twenty years, tell the story of the human body as represented through sculpture, from the neo-classical ideal of beauty of the late nineteenth century to the increased naturalism typical of the early twentieth century.’ - www.tate.org/liverpool

“Ghost”, 1998 by Ron Mueck. It is a sculpture of an adolescent girl, she leans against the wall looking vulnerable, sad and aloof. At closer examination, the girl has light hairs on her top lip. Mueck's early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films, more famously the film Labyrinth, and the Jim Henson series The Storyteller. Mueck's sculptures reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce distorted and almost frightening figures. This sculpture is also shown in Hemingway’s Sculpture Remixed collection.

"La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans" ("Little Dancer of Fourteen Years"), 1881, is a sculpture by Edgar Degas of a young dance student. The sculpture was originally made in wax before it was cast in 1922 in bronze. When it was shown in Paris at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition of 1881, it received mixed reviews. The majority of critics were shocked by the piece. They thought it was ugly, that it looked like a medical specimen, in part because Degas exhibited it inside a glass case. Some considered the head and face grotesque and primitive. Shown in Hemingway's Sculpture Remixed room