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Status Quo

Jim Lambie

Date
2006
Medium
Wooden doors, gloss paint, mirrors
Dimension
84 x 212 x 183 cm
Credit

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

This artwork is part of the donation and long-term loan from TBA21 to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Details

(...) a horde of glossified doors – titled after prototypical dad rockers Status Quo – conjoined at contorted angles, pose in confusing seduction somewhere between Richard Serra and a stoners’ squat, equally monumental and squalid.

It’s Lambie’s approach to making that gives his work its edginess. His sculpture’s high-polished ambitions are short-circuited from the start, establishing their own compositional economy. Their end game isn’t flawless beauty but its approximation; his readymade materials have no pretence to being anything other than what they are. Through Lambie’s negotiation, the common and neglected become re-valued as colour, form, mass and texture, precisely balanced and poised in new relational, fetishized structures. Re-fab is the spend-thrift’s authenticity, as his objects are given makeovers with sticky-back plastic and hangover sparkle, elevated to the plateau of haute couture.


Excerpted from Patricia Ellis, "Glasgow Pomo,", in: TBA21 Collection Book

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