Lucy Skaer (born 1975) is a contemporary English artist who works with sculpture, film, painting, and drawing. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Skaer is a member of the Henry VIII’s Wives[1] artist collective, and has exhibited a number of works with the group.

She currently lives and works in Glasgow and London.[2]

Early life and education

Skaer was born in Cambridge. She studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art.[3]

Work

Lucy Skaer's works often depicts relationships between abstraction and the direct material nature of objects. Many of her works are replicas of historical objects which are translated and re-contextualized in new mediums.[4] Skaer's work has had a particularly strong engagement with images and historical objects depicting archaeology, ecology, the English landscape, British Empire, and Neolithic architecture as her 2008 installation, The Siege.[5]

Much of Skaer's work also consists of objects which interact with and change public spaces. In one piece, she took up a paving stone on Glasgow's Buchanan Street and then had the Earl of Glasgow ceremoniously lay down a replacement, while in an Amsterdam-based piece, she left a diamond and a scorpion side-by-side on a pavement. She has also secretly hidden moth and butterfly pupae in criminal courts in the hope that they will hatch in mid-trial.[citation needed]

Lucy Skaer Sperm whale skull from 'Leviathan Edge' shown at Tate Britain

In 2003, Skaer was shortlisted for the Beck's Futures prize.[6] In 2008, Skaer was the subject of a retrospective of her works since 2001 at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland which included newly commissioned work, and a comprehensive monograph book was published to accompany the show.[7] In April 2009, Skaer was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize for the sculptures Black Alphabet, (26 slender sculptures made of coal dust in the shape of Constantin Brâncuși's Bird in Space), and Leviathan Edge, an installation which included the skull of a sperm whale, drawings, and sculptures.[8] (She lost out to Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright).

Skaer has made a number of 16mm films with the British artist Rosalind Nashashibi including Flash in the Metropolitan in 2006, which depicts the artifacts and artworks of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as they appeared in a dimmed light of the museum interrupted by the flashes of a strobe.[9] The two have collaborated on the films Our Magnolia and Pygmalion Event, as well as several others.[citation needed]

Exhibitions

References

  1. ^ Henry Viiis wives. Archived 2011-09-09 at the Wayback Machine Frieze.
  2. ^ a b "Lucy Skaer" (PDF). Doggerfisher. 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 May 2009. Retrieved 17 October 2009.
  3. ^ "Bloomberg SPACE Lucy Skaer". London Mithraeum. Retrieved 23 August 2021.
  4. ^ Mousse Magazine. Lucy Skaer. Archived 2013-06-17 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ Interview at Location One, NY. 2010. For: Rachael, Peter, Caitlin, John.
  6. ^ "Becks Futures 2003: shortlist". Guardian Unlimited. London. Retrieved 17 October 2009.
  7. ^ Skaer, Lucy, and Fiona Bradley. Lucy Skaer. Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery. 2008.
  8. ^ Georgina Langford (October 2009). "Turner Prize 2009". Glass Magazine. Archived from the original on 17 July 2011. Retrieved 17 October 2009.
  9. ^ Schwendener, Martha (9 February 2012). "'Spies in the House of Art' at the Metropolitan Museum". The New York Times.
  10. ^ Lucky Skaer. Archived 2013-07-12 at the Wayback Machine Fruitmarket Gallery. 2008.
  11. ^ Turner Prize 2009 Artists. Tate.org
  12. ^ Rosalind Nashashibi/Skaer. Art-agenda. 2010.
  13. ^ "Lucy Skaer: Film for an Abandoned Projector.", Artforum. 2011.
  14. ^ "Harlequin is as Harlequin Does." Murray Guy.
  15. ^ "Flash in the Metropolitan." National Galleries. 2012.
  16. ^ "Previous Exhibitions: Lucy Skaer." Archived 2014-12-04 at the Wayback Machine 2013.
  17. ^ Lucy Skaer. Yale Union. 2013
  18. ^ "Lucy Skaer, Available Fonts". 16 June 2017.
  19. ^ "Talbot Rice Gallery: Lucy Skaer: The Green Man : Edinburgh Art Festival". edinburghartfestival.com. Retrieved 14 August 2018.

General references

External links

Authority control databases
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