Helen Marten, a nominee for the 2016 Turner Prize, has installed a heavily-researched series of assembled interiors for her latest London exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler until November 20.The exhibition, which runs alongside Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s contrasting group of interiors at the Serpentine, sees Marten transforming the Sackler space into a “Drunk Brown House.” She exhibits works loosely based on interior spaces, united by a site-specific installation comprising the sketch of a hand holding a knife exploded into a series of metal strips that circle the walls of the space. This work could be seen as representative of the whole exhibition, with the the hand image simultaneously domestic and threatening, specific but disembodied, readable but abstract.As anyone who has seen Marten's work previously — either at the Turner Prize exhibition or elsewhere — can testify, her work is so dense and allusive that to name it something as simple as an “interior” seems fairly reductive. For example, a piece like “The Cat from the Bacon,” 2016, which opens the exhibition, could loosely be interpreted as a kitchen. It has a worktop-like surface, a sink, and a female figure represented by a pair of breasts, playing on stereotypes of gender roles. However, like Richard Hamilton’s interior works, the space is complicated by a bombardment of other images — pieces that look like readymades but are actually hand-crafted by Marten herself (or her craftspeople collaborators). And there are also visual puns, such as a ceramic representation of the brown house of the title, to the gallery, the domestic space, and other works within the exhibition. These installations are joined by a series of screenprints that equally elucidate and obfuscate these works further.“Helen Marten: Drunk Brown House” runs through November 20 at the Serpentine Sackler.
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