Kate MacGarry is pleased to announce Renee So’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. The show comprises new tapestries and ceramics. Repeated motifs such as disconnected limbs, the spherical curls of Assyrian beards and lit cigarettes play across both tapestries and ceramics. The ceramic elephants’ feet, anthropomorphic cocktail glasses and giant cigarettes are suggestive of dream logic, the golden age of American advertising and upturned moments of leisure.
The tapestries are defiantly simple and beguiling. Draped legs and smoking cigarettes recall the cocktail hour of the ceramics and suggest twilight worlds of frittered hours or quiet moments of contemplation. The zone described by Luis Buñuel of “tobacco and alcohol, delicious fathers of abiding friendships and fertile reveries.” Together these curious containers and mute tapestries construct notions of displacement, whimsy and imploding narrative.
Renee So was born in Hong Kong in 1974, grew up in Melbourne, and lives and works in London. Recent exhibition include One Day, Something Happens: Paintings Of People (curated by Jennifer Higgie), The Arts Council Collection, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds (2015); Selected By (curated by Michael Marriott and Jesse Wine), Limoncello, London (2014); A Conspiracy of Detail, Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland (2013); Renee So, Marc Jancou Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland (2012); Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London (2010) and The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia (2010-11).
