Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present a new work in The Box by young British artist Amba Sayal-Bennett.
The work’s title, Yutu, refers to an unmanned lunar rover that formed part of the Chinese mission to reach the moon’s surface in 2013. Retro-futuristic in style, the sculpture is characterised by a kitsch, sci-fi quality that is redolent of the defunct utopia depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Sayal-Bennett’s sculptures and assemblages destabilise common conventions of communication. Salvaging symbols and signs embedded into the fabric of everyday life, the artist reformulates them as lexical units within her work. Sayal-Bennett unpicks the make-up of the urban landscape, taking inspiration from road markings, discarded objects and architectural structures. She then captures the essence of these visual stimuli by reducing them to their most rudimentary form, using the resultant shapes and colours to inform the construction of her work.
Alongside her project in The Box, Sayal-Bennett will exhibit a new series of futuristic drawings in the viewing room that correspond closely to her sculptural works. The artist often translates these 2-D structures into real space as architectural assemblages, using simple materials such as foam, MDF and lino to homogenise the surface of each component, enabling the viewer to concentrate on the affective sensation triggered by their formal arrangement.
Amba Sayal-Bennett lives and works in London. She received her BFA from Oxford University and her MA in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute. Sayal-Bennett has recently completed her PhD in Art Practice and Learning at Goldsmiths. Her work can be found in the collections of Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Saatchi Gallery, London and Art Jameel, Dubai.