BLUM is pleased to present a solo exhibition with Malibu-based artist Thomas Houseago, his first with the gallery and his first in Japan.
The Egg Is the World: Thoughts on the Work of Thomas Houseago
Certain memories remain vibrant, such as the time I first met Thomas Houseago. Back in 2009, I joined a dinner in honor of an exhibition of work by Houseago and Aaron Curry, hosted in a flamboyant castle approximately seventy kilometers outside of Berlin. I recall stumbling into the artist as he frenetically chanted about the brilliance of an approximately twelve-meter-high outdoor sculpture by A.R. Penck in the surrounding park. The work stood tall and steadfast alongside Houseago’s delightful gestures. The honest and open candor of his energy on this day colored all my future encounters with his work.
For an exhibition of Houseago’s work curated by Jan Hoet at S.M.A.K., Ghent in 2003, the museum didactic read: “For Houseago, sculpture is primarily a means of channeling his energy. For him, artmaking means above all dealing with tangible matter. Averse to the ever-advancing virtualization of society (…) he consciously works with difficult, labor-intensive materials such as clay, plaster, and stone. He painstakingly transforms these ‘earthly’ materials into massive, imposing figures and objects. The sculptures are fueled by a fusion of memories, fantasies, a fascination with the human body and an inspiration rooted in classical tradition. They are unfinished, surreal, golem-like creatures. Part human, part animal. Anonymous but also animate. Terrifying but also familiar.”
Roughly twenty-two years later, the question might arise: What has changed in the work of this artist? In fact—and this is a good thing—not so much. He is still navigating the borders of sculptural precariousness, of touch, of image versus matter, and still circumnavigating sculpture’s eternal relationship between core and shell, and to the body. The artist’s visual vocabulary slowly expanded with different materials and media, such as painting, and along with it, a broad spectrum of color came into play. The owl, as both an ancient keeper of wisdom but also an animal with special meaning in Houseago’s hometown of Leeds, joined the family of his motifs. As did the basic form of the egg, along with its art historical gravity. Just like a human lifespan, the work of this artist constantly measures the personal in relation to the universal. In his novel Demian, the author Hermann Hesse described it like this: “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.” It seems that Houseago’s journey broke many shells, and each break can be compared to the artist’s continuous confrontation of his practice with Western Modernism and canonized forms within.
Houseago has recently relocated to a large outdoor studio close to the beachfront in Malibu, a refuge that puts him in immediate proximity to nature and its processes of change. While his earlier sculptural work reanimated hidden forms of mythical knowledge, nowadays, the wilderness itself is a co-author of his works. Large-scale canvasses and tapestries spread out on the earthy grass, and together the sun and its infinite array of color scales imprint the universe’s agencies onto these works. This occurrence is not only a gesture of sharing authorship with planetary forces, but a reminder to us that we’re part of something larger.
In recent years, too, more distant forms of knowledge began to inform the artist: the California coastline could be also read as a segue to Japan on the other side of the Pacific—between them only the vastness of the ocean. Houseago has become fascinated by Japanese haiku, along with its unique quality in giving the most elegant shape to ungraspable universal impressions mirrored in the spare words of one individual poet. Countless poets have focused on the subject of the moon, considering that the night, along with its shadows, is the preferred state in Japan. To quote the philosopher Kurt Singer, who, when in Australian exile wrote one of the most acclaimed studies on Japan: “No life is created in the glaring light.”
The central work of this new exhibition presented in Tokyo, entitled Moon Tapestry for Tokyo (for D.S. and Basho) (2024), captures Houseago’s amazement by the infinite moods the moon is able to radiate. This tapestry literally embraces the show—a color-intense time-scape painting of night and day, on which the artist worked for over a month outside. Almost as a silent witness, an owl painting came into being alongside, with a set of new flower works, and a composition of an elder tree, which can also be seen as a constant in his work. The transmutation of these universal symbols throughout cultures and ages offers the capacity to provide steadiness in a world falling apart. From that respect, Houseago’s work is one of connection and of providing foundation—an aspect which also materializes in a set of smaller, diary-like paintings, which are comparable to daily meditations. As massive as his works may appear, they remain precarious and operate on the verge of collapse, which can be said about his unique approach in general—an artistic practice that has always operated restlessly and without any safety nets in its search for the next shell to break.
—Martin Germann
Thomas Houseago (b. 1972, Leeds, UK) studied at Jacob Kramer College, Leeds, UK, from 1990 to 1991, received a BA in 1994 from Saint Martin’s School of Art, London, UK, and studied at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from 1994 to 1996. Recent solo exhibitions of Houseago’s work include LOVERS, TANK Shanghai, China (2023); Thomas Houseago—WE with Nick Cave & Brad Pitt, Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland (2022); Vision Paintings, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium (2021); Almost Human, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (2019); Royal Academy, London, UK (2019); Lovers, Académie Conti, Vosne-Romanée, France (2015); Studies ’98–’14, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Netherlands (2014); Striding Figure/Standing Figure, Galleria Borghese, Rome (2013); As I Went Out One Morning, Storm King Art Center, Cornwall, New York (2013); Where the Wild Things Are and Hermaphrodite, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, England (2012); The Beat of the Show, Inverleith House, Edinburgh, Scotland (2011); The World Belongs to You, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2011); What Went Down, Modern Art Oxford, England (2010, traveled to Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; and Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Ile de Vassivière, Beaumont-du-Lac, France, through 2011). His work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Houseago has collaborated with the New York Public Art Fund on two public sculptures: Statuesque (2010) and Masks (Pentagon) (2015).