Glittery, gritty ceramic … Liz Larner, Nyx, 2022. Photograph: © Liz Larner. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Anton Kern Gallery, The Modern Institute, Regen Projects View image in fullscreen Glittery, gritty ceramic … Liz Larner, Nyx, 2022. Photograph: © Liz Larner. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Anton Kern Gallery, The Modern Institute, Regen Projects Art and design Review Liz Larner review – crystal comets crash to Earth yet fail to make much impact Camden Art Centre, London These portentous works, based on scans of a real asteroids, seem to warn of societal collapse, but this first UK exhibition of the US sculptor needed a simpler approach
Prefer the Guardian on Google C orporations are already selling off mining rights to asteroids. These massive balls of rock and ore and minerals and ice up in space, far out of the reach of humanity, and mostly named after ancient Greek or Roman goddesses, are being traded like real estate by greedy suits with telescopes.
There are half a dozen asteroids in American sculptor Liz Larner’s exhibition at Camden Art Centre, her first institutional exhibition in the UK, plonked on the floor like they’ve just burned through the atmosphere on their way in from space. Each one is based on a Nasa scan of a real asteroid and then re-formed out of glittery, gritty ceramic. They’re gleaming symbols of corporate greed, ecological collapse and sexism – comets of misery, sent from the future to crash land on Finchley Road.
View image in fullscreen Complex bundle … Contrary Brunette, 2021. Photograph: © Liz Larner. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Anton Kern Gallery, The Modern Institute, Regen Projects Feminism, ecology, post-humanism – you’re only beginning to scratch the surface of Larner’s complex, heavily referential, ultra-layered approach to sculpture, which she’s been honing since the 1980s in Los Angeles. Throughout the rest of this show you bump into references to art history, literature, music, grammar, mythology, Japanese kintsugi. It’s dizzying, confusing, a bit bewildering. It’s almost all new ceramic and plastic works, with a few older pieces dotted around the place.
The exhibition functions as a sort of bleak hike across a scarred, arid landscape. Slabs of rock and mounds of plastic are pinned to the wall, boulders litter the ground, rubbish has been strung across the ceiling. As you meander through like an amateur geologist, you see cracks and crevices in stone, rocks split apart, shards of gold. The slab works on the wall – all made of ceramic – look like fossils of mesozoic fungal growths.
The best slab works are pockmarked with agates and marble and crystal, or have cracked down the middle like broken fossils. Two have shattered into pieces, laying splintered across the floor.
Some of the slabs are stunning: they feel heavy, earthy, ancient, primordial. Others look a bit like big decorative dinner plates. The little clusters of plastic detritus – discarded single-use spoons and cups tied together – form sculptural mini-galaxies out of rubbish. They’re great.
Most of the newer plastic and ceramic works make aesthetic sense shown together like this, but the show starts to stumble when it widens the conceptual net. There are a handful of early sculptures: fractured metal tubes twisted into the shapes of smiles, and a network of ribbons, hair and measuring tapes stretched across the gallery. It’s hard to see what relationship these have to the ceramics. Worst of all is the newest piece, a sleek, ga…