SARAH MAYHEW contemplates the artwork of Amalia Pica at Modern Art Oxford and finds it speaks volumes

London-based Argentinean artist Amalia Pica’s exhibition at Modern Art Oxford explores nuances in languages, and the places between levels of comprehension in quotidian social interaction.

This major presentation of work, by this relatively young artist, shows the artist’s delightful, thought-provoking, mixed-media oeuvre spanning the past six years of her career; varying from installation to sculpture and works on paper, many of which are shown in the UK for the first time.

Greeted by a soap-on-a-rope-style microphone which, suspended from the ceiling, I almost walked into as I cast my gaze around the gallery space, at once attracted and distracted, like a magpie, by bright coloured installations at the other side of the room – the scene was set.

Playful, tactile, and comfortingly domestic, Pica’s sculpture and works on paper reach out to the viewer though their celebratory familiarity. However, it is important not to overlook the hand-made simplicity present in some of Pica’s work and miss the complex social relations that this glorious simplicity distills.

A newly-commissioned sculpture sits, at odds with the rest of the city, in the Pembroke Street entrance to the gallery. A substantial plinth awaits the viewer’s interpretation, its showcase stolen, missing, invisible, unanswered… leaving behind only the oxide traces of the sculpture it once supported. Pica’s plinth is as much about the object itself as it is a suggestion of an absent counterpart – one thing existing for another, and without the other.

Made in 2012 when the UK came together over all things Olympic and Royal, Strangers on Common Land is exhibited in Modern Art Oxford’s yard off St Ebbes Street – an area of Modern Art Gallery that probably sees the most action in terms of celebration and natural exchanges between individuals. Strangers on Common Land comprises black and white photocopied enlargements of a photograph of two strangers standing in an open landscape, connected by the common land on which they stand and a line of bunting held in their hands. Examining the nature of participation and interaction between people Pica’s works are injected with a colourful vitality, and in this instance present a metaphor for the possibility of coming together through cultural celebration.

Beyond the bunting, pools of paint, and sculptural podium in the first floor gallery space is a series of sculptures, highly eloquent, yet at time perplexing visual tongue-twisters. The title of the series takes the name of something for which there is no name, Catachresis. Made up of sculptural assemblages, or tools of communication, made from found materials that can be read to denote the leg of a table or the elbow of a pipe, Catachresis highlights Pica’s fascination for the use and mis-use of language.

A further exhibition space shows what appears to be an intricate latino-inspired tiled floor in a space whose asymmetric foot-print is highlighted by the regularity of the recurring pattern that the artist has laid on it. Upon closer inspection it becomes evident that this unfathomable pattern is actually made up of beer mats, a reference to the Modern Art Oxford building’s former life as the City Brewery, and the inextricable and evolving connection in the United Kingdom between public houses, alcohol, and social interaction, which belies any latino social parallel.

Reflecting upon what at first might appear to be quite a flippant and/or fragmented exhibition it becomes clear that Pica is questioning the conventions of participatory art practice and the immediacy of visual perception that is grounded within an intimate encounter with the artwork, and in particular the importance of two-way communication and the interaction between individuals in this exhibition.

This is an internationally acclaimed artist, and this exhibition continues a conversation that began with Pica’s first UK solo show at London’s Chisenhale Gallery earlier this year; beautiful, and wholly accessible this is an exhibition by an artist whose artwork speaks volumes, if only the viewer will take time to look and listen.

The exhibition continues until February 10 at Modern Art Oxford, Pembroke Street.
Call 01865 722733 or see modernartoxford.org.uk
Amalia Pica runs alongside the exhibition Documenting Cadere:
1972-1978