Patricia Piccinini

London

Patricia Piccinini’s work encompasses sculpture, photography, video and drawing and examines the increasingly blurred boundary between the artificial and the natural as it appears in contemporary culture. Through her work she explores both our desire to humanise technology and perfect or homogenise the human body, and challenges our capacity to accept those who don’t measure up to a manufactured idea of perfection.

She is fascinated with both medical science and bio technology and how the subject can be used to explore the fears and concerns of modern society, such as appearance, ageing and disease. Much like an artist in past might, look to religion or myths as a known narrative to present ideas, Piccinini uses science as the underlying mode by which we explain our contemporary world, and of a human desire for a better future for each generation going forward.

The characters in Piccinini’s stories are alien creatures, mutated animal/human hybrids and startlingly lifelike – they simultaneously attract and unsettle the viewer. Her anthropomorphised machines – motorbikes as lovers, staring lovingly at one another – reference both a universal instinct to apply human emotions to all animals and things, as well as an implied genealogy that humans and technology are increasingly intertwined. Her work ultimately questions the way that contemporary technology and culture changes an understanding of what it means to be human and the relationships with, and responsibilities towards, the things mankind creates in the name of progress.

Her current exhibition at Haunch of Venison is her first UK solo show and includes five new large-scale sculptural works alongside earlier works dating from 2005 to 2011.

Patricia Piccinini

Haunch of Venison

November 28th, 2012- January 12th, 2013
103 New Bond Street
London W1S 1ST
UK

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