Keith Arnatt (1930–2008) emerged in the 1960s into the tumult of the London art scene to become a key figure in the history of British conceptual art and photography. In a self-reflexive practice that questions with a deadpan wit the status of both the art object and the role of the artist, Arnatt carefully examined and critiqued an increasing reliance of product over process and object over idea. Visually, his work embraced many of the tropes of international conceptualism and minimalism, yet by imbuing his work with an absurdist humor, Arnatt was able to develop a unique artistic language.
Keith Arnatt
Eden 69–89
November 22, 2023–February 3, 2024
London
Sprüth Magers is pleased to present a show of Keith Arnatt’s work at the London gallery, focusing on the period 1969 to 1989. The exhibition Eden 69–89 mixes photographs taken around his home on the Welsh border with physical interventions, proposals and jokes that targeted his own and others’ conceptual interests of the late ’60s and early ’70s. In texts and contextual interventions shown alongside color and black-and-white photographic works of the ’70s and ’80s, there are surprising connections: facileness of analysis exposed, a kind of Beckettian dross associated with that; the totemic, the beautiful; the sharply reductive; the whole thing, the individual, its breakdown in parts.
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