Artist Sarah Oppenheimer Reconfigures a London Gallery With an Architectural Installation
Visual artist Sarah Oppenheimer explores the built environment through interventions of exhibition spaces. While solidly within the realm of art-making, her work touches on the worlds of architecture and engineering. Recently opened is “S-01,” an exhibition at Annely Juda Fine Art in London, which includes two new pieces that reorient the gallery space. In the main atrium sits S-011110, composed of two glass-and-aluminum columns situated between the ceiling and floor. Attached to the columns are kinetic elements that visitors can activate, allowing them to recompose the gallery space, change sightlines, and refract the light streaming in from the skylight. Another gallery contains S-010100, an aluminum-and-glass piece contained within a partition. This work also allows visitors to rotate it, changing the view within the wall and beyond. “S-01 makes evident the temporal and material engagement with the world around us,” Oppenheimer writes.
“S-01” is the New York-based artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. For the first show, in 2009, she bisected the London space with a massive diagonal plane, with interrupting apertures that provided an unusual exterior view. More recently, the artist has had two large U.S. installations. At both the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, Oppenheimer placed aluminum-and-glass elements that visitors could physically rotate. Throughout, architecture informs her practice through “representation, methods of construction, engagement with the building envelope, and interaction with a viewer,” the artist writes.
Sarah Oppenheimer’s “S-01” is on view at Annely Juda Fine Art in London until October 21.