Jealous Saboteurs

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce the first major survey of London-based, New Zealand-born APT artist, Francis Upritchard at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) in Melbourne, Australia.

Spanning almost twenty years of work, MUMA is excited to present the first major survey exhibition of London-based, New Zealand-born artist, Francis Upritchard. From her early collections of mock burial artefacts, to primate-like figures constructed from discarded fur coats, and her more recent enigmatic gurus, Upritchard has developed a highly idiosyncratic language of sculpture that frequently borrows from craft practices and a broad range of references from the deep recesses of museum collections, folklore and counter-cultures to high modernist design.

This exhibition will include little-seen and significant early artworks, her arresting sloths, a selection of curious personal and ritualistic artefacts and talismans, small sculptures accompanied by their bespoke furniture supports, as well as recent life-size free-standing technicolour figures, such as Blue and Green Scarf 2013 (pictured above), which blur the lines between the archaic and futuristic.

Upritchard’s work deftly interweaves reality and imaginary. Early works such as Pretty Necklace 2009, made of plastic straws and cigarette butts, appear to be part ancient object, part absurd dystopian artefact. Charlotte Day, Director of MUMA adds, 'Upritchard evokes historical narratives and forms but subverts that use of cultural material and imagery. Each of her sculptures appear to come from a different realm further complicating their readings as a whole.

Traveller’s Collection 2003 brings together collections of Canopic ceramic jars and clay pots, beaded jewellery, and grotesque ‘shrunken’ animal heads presented as the strange and wonderful mementos of a cloth-wrapped figure transitioning from one world into the next. This makeshift funerary chamber along with mummified heads (as in Untitled 1 2002-3, pictured bottom left) and bizarre hunting instruments (Jealous Saboteurs 2005) are props that populate the surreal worlds created by Upritchard.

Upritchard’s sculptures scramble suggestions of ethnic and cultural stereotypes, and are hard to place. Robert Leonard, co-curator of the exhibition and Chief Curator of City Gallery, Wellington questions, 'Are they Kabuki performers, dervishes, American Indians, harlequins, or hippies in technicolour dream coats, gurus or imbeciles? Have they transcended history or been discarded by it. Upritchard neither ridicules her subjects nor takes them so seriously.

Upritchard's beguiling works linger out of the reach of any clear rationale.’ Conscious of creating an expanded space for her mythologies to play out, Upritchard often collaborates with other practitioners including various writers, UK fashion house Peter Pilotto, jeweller Karl Fritsch and her partner, Italian furniture and interior designer, Martino Gamper who has created bespoke supports for many of her most recent figurative sculptures. These plinths, or the tables and benches that Upritchard often uses, create spacious landscapes across which the figures interact.

The exhibition will travel to the City Gallery Te Whare Toi, in Wellington, New Zealand and will be on view from May 14 – August 7, 2016.