Jim Lambie

OSCAAR MOULIGNE is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Glasgow-based artist Jim Lambie, entitled Concrete Sphinx, on view from May 25 until August 3, 2024. Featuring an installation of new sculptures and paintings, the exhibition is conceived from its architectural setting and the artist’s dynamic transformation of everyday objects and materials including household items, fashion accessories, music album covers and posters, and repurposed chairs. Known for his expansive use of the color spectrum combined with multiple layers of references to popular culture, music, and art history, as well as quotidian scenarios and rituals, Lambie’s diverse practice elicits an intense sensory and perceptual response to the physical experience of time and space.

One of Lambie’s new series of works Body and Soul is created with deep-hued pigments from palettes of cosmetic makeup that are applied directly from the artist’s body onto the canvas. Connected to the idea of the body and its relationship to the awareness of a space and memory, these paintings employ a distinct “language of material” while recalling gestural articulations of internal sensations as found in the work of Maria Lassnig and drawing upon the tradition of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s- a recurrent theme across Lambie’s oeuvre. Using an approach of painterly expression through the conceptualization of material, rather than the historical lineage of abstract painting, Lambie’s works reverberate between abstraction and representation and the mind’s explorations of memories constructed over time. The frame bordering the canvas, marked by the artist’s signature use of metallic automotive paint, is also an integral part of the work, serving as an anchor to the physical reality of the world.

In direct relationship to the painting Body and Soul (River Blue) is Psychedelic Soul Stick #87, part of an ongoing series of sculptures that Lambie has been creating for over two decades by wrapping yards of multi-colored thread around a bamboo stick hung with small, cocooned objects the artist has found or used in the course of his daily life, such as pieces of carpet, ribbon, rubber bands, spectacle frames, buttons, and wire. While the Soul Stick works stem from sculptural tradition, they are also rooted in the idea of a meditative practice through the various interactions and improvisation of color, form, and material.

This element is also expressed in other works on view in the exhibition such as the brilliantly gold-colored sculptural work created with cling film and cello tape that have been cut based on the aggregate dimensions of the floor area of the gallery staircase, as well as a sculpture resembling a guitar amp modified and filled with concrete in response to the architectural site. This work, which beguilingly reveals the title of the exhibition, explores language as another kind of found material, liberating the readymade object from commonplace associations and creating sensual juxtapositions that challenge and surprise the viewer.

The exhibition collectively brings together a suite of new works that evoke Lambie’s seminal works such as Bed Head (2002)- composed of thousands of buttons hand-stitched on a mattress transforming plastic buttons into a glittering jewel-like surface- as well as his famous vinyl floor work, Zobop, first exhibited in 1999, where the artist speaks of filling and emptying a space simultaneously. Ideas that loop throughout Lambie’s practice are connected as if in a celestial space, extending out from the artist’s expression of poetic engagement with the world through the physical body, intellectual mind, and intuitive soul.

About the artist

Jim Lambie was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1964 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. In 2003, he represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2005. He has exhibited extensively worldwide and his work has also been shown in several museums in Japan, including a solo exhibition at the Hara Museum and a permanent installation that opened at the Towada Art Center in 2008. With solo exhibitions in Athens, Guadalajara, Istanbul, London, Melbourne, New York, Oxford, Tokyo, Washington D.C. and work in the collections of MoMA, Tate, and the National Galleries of Scotland, Lambie is one of Scotland’s most renowned contemporary artists.