Introduction
Esther Schipper, Seoul is pleased to present Slapping Pythagoras, Angela Bulloch’s first solo exhibition in Korea. The artist joined Esther Schipper in 1989 and has had numerous exhibitions with the gallery. Slapping Pythagoras combines several new bodies of work conceived especially for the exhibition with important works from Bulloch’s most iconic historical series.
Angela Bulloch’s oeuvre spans many media, manifesting her interest in systems, patterns, and rules, as well as her preoccupation with the history of shapes and human interactions with art. Largely abstract, her work is concerned with structures that organize our surroundings and our behavior. The artist’s work has persistently embraced the combination of new and old technologies, bringing together classical geometry, mathematics, system theory, and virtual layers of her exhibitions. Slapping Pythagoras highlights Bulloch’s development as she expands her pioneering bodies of work, integrating contemporary tools to engage viewers (and listeners) with her works.
On view in The Window, is Pythagoras Theorem, a new work especially conceived for the exhibition, which belongs to Bulloch’s Rules Series. Its text draws on the well-known mathematical theorem about calculating the sides of a right-angled triangle by the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras (approx. 570-500 BCE). Rules are an ongoing conceptual project the artist begun in 1993. Collected and assembled from various sources and contexts, each work in the Rules Series is unique and can be reproduced in any medium or form by the owner. In the closed-off room, a new performative sculpture, The Daily Cloud, once a day produces a dense fog, altering the viewing conditions in The Window.
Introducing a new series of works, all employing the keyword Target in their titles, Bulloch adds a digitally linked, virtual layer to the physical presence of the works in the exhibition. The virtual content, accessible through a machine-readable target image, introduces sound and/or digital animations, creating a hybrid experience, literally, an augmented reality that places her existing works in a new context. The new series pairs hand-made images and motifs affixed to various surfaces with forward-thinking technological means.
Dynamic Stereo Drawing Machine is a unique automated machine that produces drawings on the surface of the wall, its movements triggered by a playlist of six songs chosen by the artist. Bulloch conceived her first Drawing Machine in 1990 for an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. Nearby a Night Sky is installed, which belongs to a body of works begun in 2007 that consists of a blue felt panel with flickering LED lights placed according to the pattern of a galaxy or constellation. Premiering at the gallery, a new series of wall-mounted multi-part glass sculptures, Abacus Tablet, draw on the motif of an abacus, the ancient analogue computing device. Target Slap Happy Bag, a work from the interactive historical series Happy Sacks which are both sculptural object and seat, features a hand-painted label that has been sewn onto the fabric and allows to access a digital animation via a mobile device.
The second floor is dedicated to Angela Bulloch’s series of modular vertical sculptures and the new wall paintings. Conceived and designed within a digital imaging program, sculptures such as One Bean, One Vote combine the artist’s interest in the logic of geometry and seriality with a graphic quality. An important ongoing part of her practice, Bulloch’s wall paintings on view in Seoul, Multi 808 Seoul and Multi Waisted Zero Seoul, have distinct motifs created from sequences of cube patterns named in honor of the British mathematician Roger Penrose. Three wall-mounted sheets of aluminium are entitled Penrose 800 and feature a similar cut-out pattern to form the motifs. Another wall painting is based on the silhouette of the artist’s new vertical sculpture Pythagoras in a Bean Field on view at Frieze Seoul.
Concurrently, works by Angela Bulloch are on view at the Cheongju Museum of Art and were part of the gallery’s presentation at Frieze Seoul 2023.