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Eva Rothschild: Kosmos Education Kit Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 1 Exhibition Introduction Artist Biography Eva Rothschild: Kosmos is the latest exhibition in Eva Rothschild was born in Dublin in 1971. She studied ACCAs ongoing International Artist Series. It focuses art in Dublin and Belfast, and later completed a Master upon the sculptural practice of contemporary artist of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, in Eva Rothschild. The exhibition was co-curated by 1999. She has lectured in art at the Slade School of Fine ACCA’s Artistic Director Max Delany and Senior Curator Art and currently lives and works in London where she Annika Kristensen. It comprises artworks from the last has a studio. Recently, Rothschild was announced as decade of Rothschild’s practice and is the largest ever Ireland’s representative at the 58th Venice Biennale in exhibition of her artwork in the Southern Hemisphere. 2019. Her artwork is primarily sculptural, and she has The exhibition includes three major new commissions discussed her art as being influenced by minimal art of that have never been exhibited elsewhere before, the 1960s and 1970s, classical architecture, spiritualism alongside significant earlier works. After leaving ACCA and pop culture. Rothschild’s artworks explore the the exhibition will tour to the City Gallery Wellington, formal language of sculpture; including form, shape, New Zealand, in 2019. The exhibition is presented colour, structure and scale. Most of her artworks are in partnership with the Melbourne International Arts made for indoor gallery contexts, however she has also Festival and City Gallery Wellington. completed several large-scale public artworks around the world. Both the materiality of sculpture and its physical presence in space are of significant interest to the artist. Rothschild is a studio-based artist and she uses hands-on processes such as casting, construction, painting and carving to create her artworks. In order to realise many of her artworks, especially very large- scale pieces, she engages professional fabricators and technicians who possess specific skills. Image Eva Rothschild in her London studio. Photograph: Royal Academy London/ Anne Purkiss 2 How to use this kit Exhibition Floorplan The Eva Rothschild: Kosmos Education 1. Iceberg hits 2018 Kit has been developed for use alongside 2. Stool 9 2018 visiting the exhibition.Teachers can select 3. Hazard 2018 and adapt the questions and activities 4. An organic threat 2018 provided within the resource for learning 5. Black atom 2013 experiences in the gallery or classroom. 6. Cosmos 2018 7. Stool 3, Stool 5 (both works) 2018 Each key artwork is accompanied by 8. Crystal healing 2018 an inquiry question that is scaffolded to content descriptors from both the 9. Stool 4, Stool 6, Stool 8, Stool 10 (all works) 2018 Australian and Victorian Visual Arts 10. Tooth and claw 2018 11. The way in 2018 Curricula. These descriptors are also 11 listed at the end of the document. 12. Risers (black) 2018 13. Troublemaker 2018 13 14. A sacrificial layer 2018 9 Contents 15. Technical support (ACCA) 2018 16. Do-nut 2009 10 Exhibition Introduction & Artist Biography Artworks & Floorplan 12 8 Key Artworks 15 14 - Hazard 2018 - An organic threat 2018 - Cosmos 2018 - Stool 4; Stool 8; Stool 6; Stool 10 16 (all works) 2018 - The sacrificial layer 2018 - Technical support (ACCA) 2018 3 6 - Cutout 2018 2 4 List of Works Key Ideas & Vocabulary 1 Curriculum Links 5 7 3 4 Hazard 2018 concrete, steel, synthetic polymer paint 163.5 x 625.5 x 30.0 cm Inquiry Question What kind of sculpture could you make to Hazard 2018 is a sculpture made of a carefully aligned guide exhibition viewers stack of concrete blocks, painted on both sides in through ACCA’s largest an abstract geometric pattern of diagonal shapes. It gallery in a similar way to bisects the gallery, interrupting the path of the viewer Hazard? Think about how and causing them to negotiate the sculpture by walking your sculpture could be around it. In this way, the sculpture shapes a path for adapted from an everyday the viewer to follow through the exhibition. You can structure, like a fence, think of this as being similar to choreography - the wall, or set of stairs. Make instructions used in dance to tell the performers how to a drawing to show how move. your artwork would be installed and label it with Hazard is industrially-scaled and reminiscent of the the title you would give to form of a wall or fence. Rothschild has used the same your artwork. industrial processes required for building an actual concrete wall or fence. The work is hard-edged, Curriculum Links (5&6) non-representational, non-figurative; sharing many VCAVAE029 similarities with minimalist artworks of the 1960s and ACAVAM116 70s. The form and the title Hazard also refer to the roadblocks and control structures which have become Images a feature of our public spaces – what the artist has P. 4 & 5: Eva Rothschild, referred to as ‘hazard architecture’, which is increasingly Hazard 2018; Iceberg hits prevalent in today’s urban spaces. 2018 (detail) Photograph: Andrew Curtis 5 6 An organic threat 2018 Jesmonite, resin, steel, hand-dyed cotton, wax, paint, Inquiry Question fibreglass, foam and plywood Rothschild has put a lot of dimensions variable thought into the placement and order of her sculptures throughout the ACCA An organic threat 2018 is an assemblage of soft and hard, galleries. Take a moment to open and closed sculptural forms. It was commissioned notice how the sequence especially for Kosmos, so it has never been exhibited and spacing shapes a journey elsewhere before. There was some complex planning and for the viewer. Consider coordination involved to make the artwork. Firstly, the fabric how you could arrange the was designed and printed by the artist at her studio in London. artworks differently to create It was then sent to Melbourne, along with detailed plans for an entirely new experience of its transformation into three-dimensional forms. Fiberglass, the exhibition. For example: foam and polystyrene forms were first fabricated and then bundling all the artworks very covered with the printed material. This part of the work was close together in one spot; done by an upholsterer, a person with specialist skills in or, leaving some galleries working with padding and covering items of furniture (such entirely empty. How would as couches and chairs). The slender steel element was also these spatial contrasts fabricated in Melbourne according to the artists plans. change your experience of the exhibition? Because the artwork was produced in Melbourne, the artist only saw it for the first time after arriving in Australia, and then Curriculum Links (7&8) had decide how and where to exhibit the work. An organic VCAVAR038 threat was originally envisaged for a different gallery, however ACAVAM120 once in the space with the artwork Rothschild changed her mind and decided to shift it to another gallery instead. The Images artist then set about arranging the elements. Each piece is P. 6: Eva Rothschild, separate from the others, so the process of building up the sculptural composition happened through placement and An organic threat 2018 arrangement. Many contemporary sculptors use arrangement Photography: Andrew Curtis as a technique to create their artworks. P. 7: Eva Rothschild, For comparison: American artist Carol Bove is an example of An organic threat 2018 a contemporary sculptor who has often used arrangement to (detail). Photograph: Andrew create sculptural compositions. For the exhibition Sculptural Curtis Matter at ACCA in 2012, Bove contributed La Traversée Difficile (The Difficult Crossing) 2008. This work consisted Carol Bove, La traversée of items including sand dollars, petrified wood, gold chain, difficile 2008. Photograph: and a carved bust. These disparate forms came together to Andrew Curtis constitute a sculpture through Bove’s arrangement of each element in relation to the others. 7 8 Cosmos 2018 spray painted aluminium Inquiry Question 350.0 x 370.0 x 340.0 cm Move slowly all around the sculpture (this action is sometimes called At over four meters, the sculpture titled Cosmos 2018 is circumambulation). What large scale, and sits somewhere between architecture changes as you move? and artwork. Viewers of the exhibition are allowed to What in the work appears walk through the sculpture, meaning that it can be differently from different inhabited, even if only temporarily, in a similar way to directions, and how architecture. Cosmos engages traditions of minimalist does this change the sculpture – geometric forms, tilted planes, and ultra- experience of the artwork smooth industrially-fabricated surfaces. This is true of for you? Hint: consider the several other artworks in the exhibition, such as Hazard artist’s use of colour. and The sacrificial layer, so we can understand these qualities as part of the artist’s visual language. Curriculum Links (9&10) VCAVAR045 Cosmos is a textbook example of sculpture in the ACAVAM125 round. This is because it has no obvious front, back or side, and there is seemingly no ‘ideal’ or ‘correct’ Images perspective(s) from which to view the sculpture. The P. 8: Eva Rothschild, title of the artwork reinforces this idea. Cosmos is Cosmos 2018. another word for the universe, which, because it is all- Photograph: Andrew encompassing and its limits unknown, is also an entity Curtis with no hierarchy of front or back, up or down. Cosmos plays on spatial perception – it shifts its arrangement P. 9: Eva Rothschild, of angle and planes according to the movement of the Cosmos 2018 (details) viewer. The use of black as a tone can make the artwork Photograph: Andrew appear as a flat silhouette in the bright gallery space. Curtis Moving around Cosmos reveals colour gradients on interior facets of the tilted planes so the artwork does, from certain angles, appear to flicker between a flat shape and a three-dimensional form.