Nathaniel Rackowe - Shift

BISCHOFF/WEISS is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by British sculptor Nathaniel Rackowe, featuring a new, large-scale kinetic sculpture.

At 5 x 3 x 2 metres, Sixty Eight Doors completely fills a substantial gallery space, from top to bottom. The artist's most ambitious work to date; it is made up of 68 hollow-core domestic doors, mounted upright on a plinth, one in front of another, in two evenly spaced rows. Attached to the inside edge of each door is a 1.8 metre long fluorescent light bulb. The space between the rows, lit by the fluorescent bulbs, forms a corridor through which the viewer walks. "Arranged in this way," explains Nathaniel Rackowe, "the doors don't function as doors, but create another kind of portal."

The doors' outside edges are slightly cut down, so that when seen from the outside, their cavities and honeycomb cardboard inner packing are revealed. "You think of a door as a solid, honest object," continues the artist, "but slice into it and you expose something else."

However, the cut edges hug the gallery walls and so only become visible when the sculpture moves. The doors sit on bearings, and every five minutes the rows start to converge, becoming narrower and narrower until there is no space between them; at that point, instead, an area around the edge opens up.

The uncompromising squeezing of the space between the rows imposes aggressive restrictions on the viewer, while the dramatically changing lighting states, the cranking and whirring noises of the bearings and motorised mechanism, and the expansion of the newly exposed perimeter, create new conditions too. "You have to adapt your behaviour," says Rackowe, "because the space will not adapt to you."

The theme of how bodies relate to space is common to most of Rackowe's work; but in Sixty Eight Doors his concern with our physical negotiation with the places we inhabit, particularly in an urban environment, becomes brutally, and beautifully, explicit.

Also included in the exhibition will be photographs, screen prints, a wall-mounted sculpture and a static "sliced door" work, Four Door Slice .

Nathaniel Rackowe was born in 1975. He studied Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and at the
Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 2004 he received a solo exhibition at Garden Fresh Gallery, Chicago and at Scope Miami during Art Basel with Bischoff/Weiss. In 2005, he has completed a residency and solo installation at Hull Time Based Arts, a public sculpture, LP4, with EPR Architects, for Land Securities at Cardinal Place, Victoria, London and exhibited in the Serpentine Pavilion the work produced for project commissioned by Stanhope PLC. 2006 will include a specially commissioned large scale sculpture for a group exhibition in Richmond Virginia.