Eric Bainbridge at Cornerhouse - Manchester, England - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Eric Bainbridge has abandoned his signature mode of speech of the 1980s. He no longer overspreads exaggerated versions of everyday phenomenons with gaudy fun furs. To signal his departure from this format, a certain quantity of of the earliest works in this take a view of of the past six years incorporate the fabric make go rounded inside out. Grande Bretagne (1993) is an 8-foot beige sausage, the pair somber and silly, and despite its size for a like reason realistic that you can imagine it squirting grease if cut

In greatest in quantity of the new work, fabric makes no appearance at all. Released from its dominance, the artist has rummaged end hardware stores and flea markets, using what he finds there to make art works whose arch formalism is giddily undermined through their materials.

The six composings of The way the world was at the beginning of time overlayed a 30-foot expanse of gallery floor. Unpainted chipboard pedestals, a constant in Bainbridge's of recent origin work, support both found and made percepts that seem to bear little semantic or formal relationship to individual another. A small bronze head sits upon a vinyl chair. A male doll, commercially produc and of normal toy scale, balances upon one leg, his white pass by a leap suit pulled down over single shoulder to expose his conventionally completed plastic chest. A green leather armchair signals an absent human figure, and fluorescent lights the one and the other define and dissolve the space of the work. although the visual cues linking these ultimate parts appear tenuous at best, when taken together they form a kind of inventory of traditional sculptural affects -- scale, balance, gravity, negative space, the figure and with equal reason on. Bainbridge here seems to be taking methodical account of in what way we have learned to perceive phenomenons in space, so that the installation as a whole functions as a kind of perceptual primer.

Despite the didactic, summary nature of this ambitious assemblage, Bainbridge is at his best when slapping together les considered constructions from chipboard, busted-up furniture and Melamine countertops. A 1996 series of "self-portraits" in these materials is in greatest in quantity cases identifiable as such sole by a pair of dots that can be read as organ of sights Still, Bainbridge manages to imbue these "likenesses" with a surprising amount of characterization, for the most part of a startled, wide-eyed variety. (A notable exception to this treatment is a vanitas in which a horse cranium contemplates the opaque backing of a square of leftover pleasantry fur.) Bainbridge's startled look also appears upon the skinny snowmanlike figures he pinchs from muddy clay and places in a variety of hapless predicaments -- balanced upon the edge of a pedestal, stuck in a drawer or strapped to a carbonized iron girder like the melodrama heroine tied to train tracks.

Despite these implicit assertions that peril is the fate of the artist in the 1990 Bainbridge takes obvious pleasure in his work, and that happiness is infectious. In the face of thus much freewheeling artistic invention, itself a kind of optimism, the studious stock-taking of The way the world was appears beside the point.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group