Anya Gallaccio

Quint Gallery is pleased to present a selection of direct-cast bronze sculptures, photography, and drawing by the British artist Anya Gallaccio. Gallaccio is recognized for her use of organic materials to make sculpture and installation, at times taking the formal language and structural logic set forth by Minimalist art of the 1960s, and subverting them with the use of natural elements like dirt, flowers, fruits, and trees, subject to inevitable changing states of life, death, decomposition and transformation. 

 

By establishing formal parameters with inherently unstable materials, unexpected and poetic gestures ultimately emerge. Within this slippage, her artworks frequently change over time: melting, molding, or disintegrating. This tension between intense beauty and eventual decay is central to her practice. In works such as in her Preserve series utilizing fresh flowers like daisies, roses and sunflowers that eventually mold and decompose, the visual seduction is inseparable from its fragility, finally leaving just an imprint or mark in their space.

 

Silver Seed, a suite of 16 silver gelatin prints stemming from a commission at the Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute, Scotland, contain highly magnified images of conifer seeds taken with an electro scanning microscope. Inspired by the lush grounds of the estate, she focused on one of the tallest pine trees and applied metallic leaf directly to the bark up the entire length of the tree, creating a dialogue between microscopic detail and monumental gesture.

 

Also included is an example of one of her mineral drawings, a process based on traditional marbling techniques using pigments ground from locally sourced minerals and organic matter. Collecting dirt and minerals like amethyst and tourmaline across the Southwest desert landscape from various sites such as Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, and a meteor crater in Arizona, these drawings reflect geologic time and create chance outcomes that determine the composition. 

Additional works on view include direct casts in bronze of a tree, an overgrown yam, and celery roots, plated in sterling silver and zinc.  While Gallaccio often leaves organic material to its natural course, in these works she freezes this natural process of decay, growth and bloom in traditional sculptural mediums. This delicate casting process of encasing the original object in a fireproof mold, incinerating it to create a cavity, pouring molten bronze, and ultimately breaking the mold, making the form unrepeatable.  These direct casts display the precarious states of change undergone by these objects, with delicate but unruly roots and branches that extend outward into the visual field. 

 

Gallaccio was born in Scotland and lived in London until 2008, when she moved to San Diego to join the faculty of the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego where she is now Faculty Emerita. She attended Kingston Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College at the University of London, and first gained public recognition in the late 1980s as part of a cohort of young artists brought together by the Freeze exhibitions in London, curated by Damien Hirst. Her work is featured in numerous international public and private collections, with solo exhibitions at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; SculptureCenter, New York, NY; Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom; and Serpentine Gallery, London, United Kingdom, among many others. Her permanent commissions are located at The Whitworth, Manchester, United Kingdom, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, Scotland; and Houghton Hall, Norfolk, United Kingdom. In 2023, she was awarded the Kenneth Armitage Foundation fellowship in London and was nominated for the Turner Prize, resulting in a survey exhibition of her work at the Turner Contemporary in Margate in 2024. The same year, she was awarded the commission for London’s first HIV/AIDS Memorial. Beautiful Minds, her ongoing project of 3-D clay printing Devils Tower in Wyoming, is simultaneously mounted in San Diego for the exhibition Erratic Fields, organized by INSITE. She now lives and works between San Diego and London.