Events, Festivals and Exhibitions

Turner Contemporary presents “preserve,” the most comprehensive survey exhibition of British artist Anya Gallaccio to date. Set to open in Autumn 2024, the exhibition will cover three decades of Gallaccio’s pioneering work, featuring several of her seminal pieces alongside a new site-specific commission. The exhibition aims to showcase her ongoing exploration of the interplay between art and the environment, highlighting works that resonate with Kent’s natural legacy.

Anya Gallaccio

Owing to the ephemeral nature of her creations, Gallaccio’s art is predominantly known through documentary photography and recollection. The forthcoming exhibition will bring her sculptures and expansive installations to an audience currently focused on environmental sustainability and the conservation of delicate ecosystems.

Celebrated for her innovative employment of organic, transient materials like ice, apples, flowers, grass, salt, trees, and even chocolate, and her investigations into transformation and impermanence, Gallaccio has revolutionised our perception of contemporary sculpture. Her work maintains a formal connection to artists linked with Minimalism and Arte Povera, such as Giovanni Anselmo, and mirrors the unconventional, subversive material use found in Lynda Benglis’s creations. Gallaccio’s art is distinguished by a deep fascination with the ephemeral rather than the enduring. Her installations, which often feature materials that naturally alter, decompose, or flourish throughout an exhibition, have challenged traditional notions of sculpture. They welcome the unforeseeable outcomes of this process, prompting viewers to reflect on themes of temporality, transformation, and the human connection with the natural world.

Drawing inspiration from Kent’s rich agricultural legacy, known as ‘The Garden of England’ with its plentiful orchards, hop gardens, and farming customs, the exhibition will showcase Gallaccio’s deep investigation into our intricate connections with nature’s cycles and the confluence of work, production, and consumption. Gallaccio aims to convert local substances into reflections on ecology and life’s transient essence.

preserve

The exhibition will debut a bold new piece by Gallaccio, interacting with Kent’s celebrated White Cliffs and chalk terrains. This significant new creation will demonstrate the importance of chalk not just to the area’s ecological heritage but also to its working traditions, mined for lime in building and as fertilizer for crops. Gallaccio’s selection of this essential material echoes with Turner Contemporary’s coastal setting, encircled by safeguarded marine chalk reefs, and the initiative to create a Cross-Channel UNESCO Global Geopark linking the Kent Downs and adjacent regions in France.

The exhibition will feature a site-specific installation by Gallaccio, alongside the restaging of several historic pieces, such as her renowned wall-based gerbera sculpture and the reimagining of a felled tree that will extend across one of the first-floor galleries.

Anya Gallaccio says, “I am invested in process and material without a fixed outcome in mind. By restaging a selection of my works in Margate they are regenerated within the context of Kent, its landscape and industries.”

Clarrie Wallis, Director of Turner Contemporary, says: “Anya Gallaccio: preserve will offer a well-deserved spotlight on an important artist. Her works will create a thought-provoking dialogue between formal concerns and a deeper engagement with the cycles, processes, and materials of the natural world.”

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