Oliver Laric
Giving Away the Moulds Will Cause No Damage to His Majesty’s Casts
April 23–July 3, 2015
Opening: Thursday 23 April, 7pm
Austrian Cultural Forum London
28 Rutland Gate
London SW7 1PQ
United Kingdom
Curated by Victor Wang
Objects move generously online, freely accelerating beyond institutional borders and geographies. From sculpture to image and back to sculpture again, we present the first institutional solo exhibition of Austrian artist Oliver Laric in London. Confronting the movement of sculpture by bridging different moments in time, this solo exhibition brings together Laric’s 3D scans of objects and artworks from selected museum collections, including a contested Yuanmingyuan marble column from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.
Scanning objects from museums in Lincoln, UK (The Collection and the Usher Gallery), as well as the KODE Art Museums in Bergen, amongst others, Laric publishes historical material online to be downloaded and used without copyright restrictions. As artworks travel away from institutions and collections as information they encounter a diversity of audiences globally. Authorship is forfeited for a continuous engagement with planned and unplanned collaborators, developing a collective expansive project. Artworks and collections exist simultaneously in various spaces around the world, within both museums and computer hard drives, at the same time as being temporarily hosted and rematerialized at the Austrian Cultural Forum.
With this break from source material and context, the value of sculpture is levelled. Marble becomes plastic; traditional galleries become office tables and bedrooms. Multiple perspectives take hold of the image, with the original continuously reshaped as it moves across networks and galleries.
Accompanying the exhibition will be the release of Oliver Laric’s publication Lincoln 3D Scans, a catalogue of scanned objects to act as the starting point for new iterations.
About the artist:
Oliver Laric (b. 1981, Innsbruck, Austria. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.)
The exhibition is supported by The Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria (BKA).
