Image: © Do Ho Suh. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London. Photos by Daniel Kukla
A large-scale sculpture created in collaboration between the Centre for Print Research (CFPR) collaboration and artist Do Ho Suh is being exhibited in New York Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
Do Ho Suh is a London based sculptor and installation artist, originally from South Korea. He also works across various other media, including drawing, photography, and film. Suh engages ideas of home, memory, psychic space, and displacement, drawing from his life experiences, including the homes he has lived in and the people he has met.
Some of his works are currently on exhibition in the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York, one of the key pieces being the “Inverted Monument”, which was created in collaboration with the robotics team at UWE Bristol’s Centre for Print Research. The large-scale sculpture, which arose over the course of the pandemic, is made of extruded thermoplastic polyester, and was developed as part of an ongoing research project. The intricately rendered sculpture combines robotic and analogue techniques, drawing on generalised ideas of an “ideal” monument based on the lexicon of Western statuary and the power structures it upholds. The requisite commemorative figure is positioned upside down within the body of a classically proportioned pedestal, the top of the figure’s head touching its base. The viewer’s eye is redirected from the top of the pedestal to its bottom, turning the logic of the public monument upside down and challenging what and who we choose to elevate in civic spaces.
Being a great admirer of Do Ho Suh’s art, Fabio D’Agnano, the project leader at the CFPR, is very happy to see the work installed in New York: “[…] it makes me proud to have collaborated with his studio and the CFPR team on this work.” He goes on to explain how the role of the artist is to push the limits and how the task of creating the piece was undoubtedly challenging: it required a lot of technical expertise, due to the non-traditional approach to 3D printing, which was based on a fully three-dimensional print and not on a combination of 2D slices, as usual. Creating the sculpture entailed many difficulties, particularly in the handling of supports during printing because of the enormous size of the object.
What is more is that, along with the technical challenges, there is always the visual component that has to express the artist’s vision.
The result speaks for itself: “Monument” is a visual and technical success as Fabio D’Agnano will testify: “This combination of craft and technology is the signature of the Centre for Print Research and what I am passionate about in my career, always balancing technology and creativity.”
The Do Ho Suh exhibition will be on show until October 29, 2022 at Lehmann Maupin New York. View the online exhibition.