Oren Pinhassi: After Pleasure
Opening reception | Thursday 18 January 6-8pm
Edel Assanti is pleased to present After Pleasure, Oren Pinhassi's third solo exhibition at the gallery. Featuring a series of new and recently produced sculptures, the show follows Pinhassi's first UK institutional solo exhibition, False Alarm (2023), at Mostyn, Wales, and coincides with his participation in the Chicago Architecture Biennial, USA (2023-2024).
After Pleasure comprises six vertical sculptures that evade categorisation. The works' hybrid features incorporate vegetal and insect-like attributes seamlessly alongside architectural details and everyday objects. Evoking living ecologies, their self-replicating forms echo the rhythms of organic and built environments, insinuating a symbiotic relationship between body, ideology and ecosystem.
Akin to a carnivorous plant, the anthropomorphic form of Whole Hole Hole Whole (2024) consists of biomorphic cavities stretched over intricate, interleaved chambers, resembling gaping mouths or embedded eyes, while the top of the sculpture takes on the form of a perforated container.
The Tower of Babel's (2024) ascending composition is engulfed by the nebulous foliage of hollow cones. Clusters of lotus-like pods sprout from a primordially rugged surface, suggestive of both utilitarian tools and vegetal attachments that seem both intrinsic to and invasive of the essential structure. Standing eight feet tall, the sculpture symbolises the human quest for progress - a pursuit that often culminates in the destruction and dissolution of conceived customs and morals. Just as architectural systems draw influence from the natural world upon which they are constructed, Pinhassi's installation address questions of humanity's ambiguous, extractive relationship with landscape and nature.
Built primarily from burlap and sand, permeable materials that maintain an aesthetic of historicity, the figures are balanced between stability and a fall, with their feet in a curled grip over the edges of boulders serving as bases. Despite their monumentality, their materiality suggests an inevitable return of these edifices to the earth. As Pinhassi has noted in relation to his sculptures: "Sand or dirt, reminds us of our fragility and temporality of our bodies. As it is the dirt we will return to, at the same time, it is the mythic material from which we are told to be created, so there is in sand a creativity too, a possibility to shape, shift form and animate matter. It is a material holding together beautifully so many of our stories of life and death that we often experience as contradictions."
After Pleasure explores the aftermath of desire-fulfilment, when all longings have been satiated. Like fossils that accumulate physical layers through time, Pinhassi's sculptures, built up from numerous coatings of sand, encrypt seemingly idiosyncratic ideas, urging us to envision the alternative realms we could inhabit.
The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by Rachel Thomas, Chief Curator of the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre, London.
