Bringing together archive, film, sculpture and installations, an ambitious new exhibition at Kettle's Yard will submerse visitors in Gustav Metzger’s world of creative experimentation and activism.
Bringing together archive, film, sculpture and installations, an ambitious new exhibition at Kettle's Yard will submerse visitors in Gustav Metzger’s world of creative experimentation and activism.
When I was young I wanted art that would lift off – that would levitate, gyrate, bring together different, perhaps contradictory, aspects of my being.
Gustav Metzger
LIFT OFF!, which runs from 24 May to 31 August, is an exhibition devoted to Metzger’s auto-creative art, and offers fresh insight into his long interest in science and the expansion of sculpture beyond its traditional boundaries. The exhibition will include a new film of Metzger in conversation with curator Elizabeth Fisher, reflecting on this aspect of his practice. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue and a wider programme of lectures and events. There will be a one-day conference in Cambridge that explores the relationships between art, science and technology then and now.
The exhibition includes Metzger’s landmark piece Liquid Crystal Environment (1965 remade 2005) on loan from Tate. This hypnotic environment is composed of projections that create constantly shifting psychedelic patterns. The exhibition will also showcase seminal works that Metzger first made during a three-week long exhibition in a university laboratory in Swansea in 1969, which, due to their experimental nature, have not been seen since. The artist has creatively revisited these exciting works using air, water and heat and has made variations, including new work, for the exhibition. LIFT OFF! will present for the first time a brand new series of photographic works made by Gustav Metzger while working with Lizzie Fisher in Cambridge in May 2014. By using air to manipulate the movement of fibre-optic light across photosensitive paper, Metzger brings together ideas that have permeated his work since the 1960s.
The show highlights Metzger’s close connections with the city of Cambridge. Born in Nuremburg in 1926, Metzger came to Britain as a refugee in 1939. He began his education as a student at Cambridge School of Art in the 1940s and lived in East Anglia throughout much of the 1950s. Two of his most significant lecture demonstrations, in which Metzger presented his ideas around auto- creation and auto-destruction, were staged at Cambridge University in 1960 and 1965. The latter, organised by the Society of Arts and entitled The Chemical Revolution in Art, was a formative event in his career; Metzger first experimented here with his projections of liquid crystals that were later refined in his Liquid Crystal Environments.
Gustav Metzger: LIFT OFF! is curated by Elizabeth Fisher in collaboration with Gustav Metzger and Kettle’s Yard.
24 May - 31 August 2014 Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
https://www.kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions/2014/metzger/index.php/
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