Earwig's Copyvio Detector

Settings

This tool attempts to detect copyright violations in articles. In search mode, it will check for similar content elsewhere on the web using Google, external links present in the text of the page, or Turnitin (via EranBot), depending on which options are selected. In comparison mode, the tool will compare the article to a specific webpage without making additional searches, like the Duplication Detector.

Running a full check can take up to a minute if other websites are slow or if the tool is under heavy use. Please be patient. If you get a timeout, wait a moment and refresh the page.

Be aware that other websites can copy from Wikipedia, so check the results carefully, especially for older or well-developed articles. Specific websites can be skipped by adding them to the excluded URL list.

Site: https:// . .org
Page title: or revision ID:
Action:
Results generated in 1.27 seconds. Permalink.
Article:

1976

Francis Upritchard (born 1976 in New Plymouth, New Zealand) is a London-based contemporary artist. In 2009 she represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale.

Education

Upritchard graduated from the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, School of Fine Arts in 1997. She had initially thought to study painting, but became interested in sculpture during her first year.

Soon after graduating, Upritchard moved to London.

Work

Upritchard's early work often referenced museum displays, collections of artefacts, and ancient cultures. She often combined found objects with her own hand-made additions, such as sculpted heads made from modelleing clay of dogs, monkeys and birds inserted into the necks of ceramic and glass vessels, or fastened onto pieces of sporting equipment like hockey sticks and cricket bats. Other works showed faux-antique delicate instruments in shabby velvet-lined boxes. She also became known for her sculptures that replicated shrunken heads, resting on display cabinets or mounted on small pedestals. Made of plaster and paper mache, the heads referenced mokomokai, tattooed shrunken heads made by New Zealand's indigenous Māori, but the features were those of Pākeha peoples.

In 2006/2007, Upritchard decided to start exploring the human figure in her work. In a 2012 newspaper profile she said: 'I didn't think there was so much good figurative work in contemporary sculpture. [...] I went to Munich and saw [the 15th-century sculptor] Erasmus Grasser's Morris Dancers.' Upritchard's figures are made of polymer clay laid over wire armatures; their skin is painted in everything from neutral tones to brightly coloured grids, and they are variously naked and clothed in robes and gowns, also made by the artist. Curator Anne Ellegood writes:

Some hail from long-ago eras—protagonists of medieval mythology like the knight, the harlequin, the jester—while others are from the more recent past—beatniks, hippies, and other nonconformists. Various figures are identified by their vocation—music teacher, potato seller, psychic—or distilled to a primary, and often less than laudatory, characteristic, such as “liar,” “misanthrope,” “ninny,” or “nincompoop.”

Career

Bart Wells Institute and Beck's Future nomination

In December 2001, Upritchard co-founded an artist-run space, the Bart Wells Institute, with fellow artist Luke Gottelier in a semi-derelict Hackney warehouse. The Bart Wells Institute ran for about two years and exhibitions were curated by artists including Sam Basu, Brian Griffiths, David Thorpe and Harry Pye.

In 2003 Upritchard was shortlisted for the Beck's Futures prize for an installation titled Save Yourself, now in the Saatchi Gallery collection. The installation, featuring a small mummy figure, wrapped in rags lying on the floor vibrating and moaning, surrounded by canopic jars, was shown at the Bart Wells Institute. The work was seen by Beck's Future selector Michael Landy, who nominated it for the award. The work was seen by collector Charles Saatchi and the nomination and acquisition were Upritchard's career break-through.

Walter Prize award

In 2005 Upritchard had her first exhibition in New Zealand, Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed at Artspace, Auckland. The previous year her work had been shown at City Gallery Wellington in the survey exhibition of recent New Zealand contemporary art Prospect: New New Zealand Art. Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed was nominated for the 2006 Walters Prize, hosted by Auckland Art Gallery and Upritchard was selected as the winner by judge Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. In her citation Christov-Bakargiev wrote:

I had seen images of Upritchard's work, and of some of the other finalists' works, previous to experiencing this exhibition. But I had never seen the work in the flesh. The difference is astounding. Upritchard's work resists photography and reproduction, and this too, in the age of overwhelming communications and surveillance technology, gives me a good feeling, somewhat of an escape route.

Venice Biennale

In 2008 New Zealand's public arts funding body Creative New Zealand announced that two artists would represent New Zealand at the 2009 Venice Biennale: Upritchard and painter Judy Millar.

Upritchard's work for the Biennale consisted of a number of sculptural installations displayed in the former private residence, the Fondazione Claudio Buziol. Titled Save Yourself, the works showed dreamy or dancing figures displayed on hand-made tables, mixed with ceramic lamps. It was the first time Upritchard mixed figures and furniture in such a way, an approach which has become a signature aspect of her current work. The figures, handbuilt from polymer clay, stand about 50 centimetres tall. Usually naked, or adorned with handmade and hand-dyed cloaks and textilre wrappers, they are painted variously in solid block colours or patterns, including Harlequin blocks and grids. The artist said of these works:

I want to create a visionary landscape, which refers to the hallucinatory works of the medieval painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, and simultaneously draws on the utopian rhetoric of post-sixties counterculture, high modernist futurism and the warped dreams of survivalists, millenarians, and social exiles.

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa acquired the work Dancers from the installation for its permanent collection. Two other works, Horse Man and Rainwob Tree, are in the collection of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Collaborative works

In recent years Upritchard has frequently collaborated with furniture designer Martino Gamper (also her husband) and jeweller Karl Fritsch. In their 2009 exhibition Feierabend at Kate Macgarry was an early outing of their collaborative works, mixing Gamper's furniture with Upricthard's sculpted figures and Fritsch's jewellery and objects.

For their 2011 installation Gesamtkunsthandwerk for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's international group exhibition Stealing the Senses, Upritchard, Fritsch and Gamper collaborated with other New Zealand artists, most from from New Plymouth: weaver Lynne Mackay, potter Nicholas Brandon, bronze-caster Jonathan Campbell, felter Pam Robinson, glass blower Jochen Holz and woodturners Jan Komarkowski and Peter Wales. The exhibition was re-presented at Hamish McKay Gallery in Wellington. The title is a German word meaning 'a total artwork that involves all the parts of the arts and in particular the work of the handmade'. The artists stated:

We don't understand why there needs to be such distinctions amongst art, craft and design. Arts and crafts weren't always separated.

We are interested in collapsing hierarchies that operate in language and value.

We feel that we are making work with similar intuition, care and intent.

Upritchard continues to work collaboratively and enlist others in the making of her work, most recently with New Plymouth potter Nicholas Brandon, who was trained by Mirek Smíšek. For her 2016 exhibition Dark Resters at Ivan Anthony Gallery in Auckland and the Ilam Campus Gallery at Canterbury University Brandon made ceramic works and glazes that formed part of Upritchard's installations, with textiles and her signature figures.

Survey show: Jealous Saboteurs

In February 2016 a survey show of the first 20 years' of Upritchard's work, Francis Upritchard: Jealous Saboteurs, opened at MUMA (the Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne). The exhibition was co-curated by MUMA director Charlotte Day and City Gallery Wellington chief curator Robert Leonard. The exhibition opened at City Gallery Wellington in May 2016.

Public art

Upritchard's only piece of public art to date is installed in inner-city Auckland on Symonds Street. Titled Loafers, the work consists of three bowl-shaped concrete plinths topped with Upritchard's idiosyncratic human figures, and several snake forms, cast from bronze. Upritchard has said of these works:

The Loafers plinths reference important ceramic artist Lucie Rie. Rie pioneered domestic-ware in Britain, and her small works were developed at the same time as huge outdoor bronzes and in my mind, share a sort of 1950’s aesthetic.

Publications

In 2004, Nieves published a small artist book of Upritchard's 'Heads of Yesteryear' which consisted of 19 drawings of Pakeha severed heads in black and white photocopy, which had a British flag as a cover. The edition was 100 copies.

Human Problems, designed by James Goggin (Practice) was co-published by Kate Macgarry and Veenmen. It included a short piece of commissioned fiction by Hari Kunzru about an anthropologist who becomes increasingly deranged in an unspecified village.

Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed was designed by James Goggin (Practice) and was published by Artspace. The booklet includes an essay 'Seventeen reduced Propositions For Francis Upritchard' by JJ King and Mathew Hyland and accompanied Upritchard's solo show at Artspace, Auckland in 2005.

Dent-de-Leone is a small independent publishing house based in London which Upritchard joined in 2008 when she collaborated with Abake on her artist's book Every Colour By Itself. After editing the book Bart Wells Institute with Luke Gottelier, she joined the publishers as a member. Two titles are solely credited to her, and a further two are collaborative works.

The book Save Yourself was published in 2009 to coincide with Upritchard's participation in the Venice Biennale. It includes essays by Heather Galbraith, Francesco Manacorda, and Melanie Oliver. It was designed by Kalee Jackson and published by the Govett Brewster.

In 2010, the 70 copy first edition of the In die Höhle (into the Cave) was co-published with Secession. This artist's edition includes images of Upritchard's sculptures from her solo show at the Vienna Secession, and a specially commissioned short story of a man who journeys to a strange island by David Mitchell (author). The second edition was co-published between Secession and Koenig Books and included a reworked version of the first edition with additional photos of the Secession Installation.

Public gallery exhibitions

2016 Francis Upritchard: Jealous Saboteurs, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne and City Gallery Wellington; Dark Resters, Ilam Campus Gallery, University of Canterbury and Ivan Anthony Gallery Auckland

2014 Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard, Hammer Museum Los Angeles; Whitechapel Gallery Children's Art Commission, Whitechapel Gallery

2013 Potato Poem, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (MIMOCA), Kargawa, Japan

2012 Francis Upritchard: A Long Wait, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; A Hand of Cards, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham

2011 Echo, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoor, the Netherlands; Gesamtkunsthandwerk with Martino Gamper and Karl Fritsch

2010 IN DIE HÖHLE, Wiener Secession, Vienna

2010 Save Yourself, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

2009 Save Yourself, New Zealand representation at the 53rd Venice Biennale,

2008 Rainwob I, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; Rainwob II, Artspace, Auckland and Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne

2006 The Walters Prize, Auckland Art Gallery

2005 Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed, Artspace, Auckland

2004 Artist in Residence, Camden Arts Centre

2003 Boxing Arms, Dunedin Public Art Gallery

External links

Francis Upritchard – Anton Kern Gallery

Francis Upritchard – Kate Macgarry

Francis Upritchard – Ivan Anthony Gallery

References

Source:

Skip to main content

Museum admission is free

galleries open today until 6PM

Main navigation Art & Ideas

Toggle Art & Ideas section

Art & Ideas Exhibitions Public Programs Collections Artist Initiatives Explore Online Academic Programs K-12 & Families Visit Toggle Visit section Visit Plan Your Visit Restaurant Store Support Toggle Support section Support Donate Membership Patron Groups Corporate Partnerships Hammer Editions Fundraising Events Museum Transformation Hammer Channel

Toggle Hammer Channel section

Watch 1,000+ talks, performances, artist profiles, and more.

Go to Hammer Channel

Search Submit search Menu Secondary navigation Art & Ideas Exhibitions Public Programs Collections Artist Initiatives Explore Online Academic Programs K-12 & Families Visit Plan Your Visit Restaurant Store Support Donate Membership Patron Groups Corporate Partnerships Hammer Editions Fundraising Events Museum Transformation Hammer Channel About Us Employment Press Privacy Policy Terms of use

The Hammer will be closed to the public on

Saturday, May 4

for a private event.

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard

Oct 25, 2014 – Mar 1, 2015

This is a past exhibition

Image Gallery Related Programs

Born in New Plymouth, New Zealand and based in London,

Francis Upritchard

creates sculptural installations featuring archetypal figures—the psychic, the African, the nincompoop—hovering in a state of uncertainty. Modeled in polymer clay, the curious figures are rendered in a slightly unnerving scale, not quite human but large enough to look you in the eye with their only partially opened eyes and blank stares. The skin is painted monochromatically or with distinct gridded patterns, the tones ranging from sickly yellow to mossy green to calming blue, as if from an otherworldly tribe. Yet their handmade and hand-dyed garb suggest they might be characters from a range of past eras, from medieval knights and jesters to meditating hippies in the 1960s. For a recent exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Upritchard experimented with both form and material, creating a group of dinosaurs out of papier-mâché or an earthy matter drawn from rubber trees in Brazil called balata and displaying them on simple yet elegant fold-out tables produced by the Italian company Olivetti on customized steel bases. For her Hammer Project, Upritchard will bring together the figures and the dinosaurs for the first time. Inhabiting the space like strange bedfellows from different times and places, the characters are not so much actors in a legible narrative or drama as they are complexly enigmatic, strangely absorbed in their own thoughts. Equally drawn to the history of figurative sculpture as to a wide range of craft and artisan traditions around the world—from ceramic techniques to glass blowing, enameling to welding—Upritchard pushes these practices in new directions, bringing them together to create a striking and original visual language of her own. This will be Upritchard’s first solo exhibition on the west coast.

The exhibition is organized by Hammer senior curator Anne Ellegood with MacKenzie Stevens, curatorial assistant.

Francis Upritchard, War Dance , 2013 Francis Upritchard, Echo Cabinet , 2011 Francis Upritchard, Mandrake , 2013 Francis Upritchard, Music Teacher , 2013 Francis Upritchard, Nincompoop , 2011 Francis Upritchard,

Yellow Head, Long Snout Dinosaur

, 2014 Francis Upritchard, Piled Flipper Dinosaurs , 2014 Francis Upritchard, Step Off , 2014 Francis Upritchard, Half Half , 2014 Francis Upritchard, Whizz , 2014

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard

Hammer
Projects: Francis Upritchard

Francis Upritchard, War Dance , 2013

Installation view, Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

Francis Upritchard, Echo Cabinet , 2011

Veneer and Italian oak, brass fittings, modelling material, wire, and paint. 39 1/8 x 74 7/8 x 25 ½ in. (99.5 x 190 x 65 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Kate MacGarry, London.

Francis Upritchard, Mandrake , 2013

Modelling material, foil, wire, paint, and cloth. 49 ¼ x 36 5/8 x 13 ¾ in. (125 x 88 x 35 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Kate MacGarry, London.

Francis Upritchard, Music Teacher , 2013

Modelling material, fabric, steel and wire armature, human hair, and paint. 20 1/8 x 22 x 16 1/8 in. (51.1 x 56 x 41 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Kate MacGarry, London.

Francis Upritchard, Nincompoop , 2011

Modelling material, foil, wire, paint, and cloth. 39 x 22 7/8 x 9 7/16 in. (99 x 58 x 24 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Kate MacGarry, London.

Francis Upritchard,

Yellow Head, Long Snout Dinosaur

, 2014

Balata. 11 x 37 7/16 x 11 7/16 in. (28 x 95 x 29 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; and Kate MacGarry, London.

Francis Upritchard, Piled Flipper Dinosaurs , 2014

Balata. 17 11/16 x 17 5/16 x 7 15/16 in. (45 x 44 x 20 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; and Kate MacGarry, London.

Francis Upritchard, Step Off , 2014

Modelling material, fabric, wood, paint, and steel. 39 11/16 x 11 13/16 x 13 3/8 in. (101 x 30 x 34 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; and Kate MacGarry, London.

Francis Upritchard, Half Half , 2014

Modelling material, hair, paint, fabric, steel, and wire. 54 x 18 1/2 x 13 in. (137 x 47 x 33 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; and Kate MacGarry, London.

Francis Upritchard, Whizz , 2014

Modelling material, hair, paint, fabric, steel, and wire. 55 1/2 x 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in. (141 x 50 x 50 cm). Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; and Kate MacGarry, London.

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard

Installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo by Brian Forrest.

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard

Installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo by Brian Forrest.

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard

Installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo by Brian Forrest.

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard

Installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo by Brian Forrest.

Hammer Projects: Francis Upritchard

Installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo by Brian Forrest.

Biography

Born in 1976 in New Plymouth, New Zealand, Francis Upritchard graduated from Canterbury University of Fine Arts in New Zealand in 1998. She has recently had solo exhibitions at The Whitechapel and Kate McGarry, London (2014), The Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin (2013), Anton Kern Gallery in New York (2013), Nottingham Contemporary (2012), and MIMOCA in Kagawa, Japan (2013) and Secession, Vienna (2011). Her only other solo museum exhibition in the United States,

A Long Wait

, took place in 2012 at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. In 2009, she represented New Zealand at the 53rd Venice Bienniale with her exhibition

Save Yourself.

Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including

Freedom Farmers

at the Auckland City Gallery in New Zealand (2013),

Lilliput

at the New York High Line (2012),

Contact

at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany (2012)

Bush of Ghosts: Nathan Mabry, Djordie Ozbolt and Francis Upritchard

at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles (2012), and many others. Upritchard currently lives and works in London.

Essay

Ideally, the present will always contribute to the building of the future.

And this future is not the future of the cosmos but rather the future of my century, my country, my existence.

— Frantz Fanon ,

Black Skin, White Masks

In the work of Francis Upritchard, time is an anomaly. The past, present, and future are all inscribed in her strange and idiosyncratically alluring figures but not in a neatly linear way so that the references to the past naturally portend the future portrayed. Indeed, there is no sense of a harmonious coexistence of temporalities here. Rather, her cast of characters are from different moments in time—some recognizable archetypes or ethnically specific, others far more ambiguous and amalgamated—and appear gathered together as if by some inexplicable episode. Collectively they form a peculiar band of misfits, as compelling as they are off-putting, as familiar as they are irresistibly eccentric. Despite Upritchard’s deliberately anachronistic combinations of referents, she understands that the present plays a crucial role in the unfolding of the future, just as Fanon asserts in the epigraph to this essay.

Fanon proclaims that the future of which he speaks is not a distant place blissfully floating out of reach but rather is always situated in our immediate surroundings and, perhaps most importantly, is imminent. This sense of the future—one that is at once unknowable and surprising and yet so entwined with the past and present as to be remarkably foreseeable, predictably and perpetually pending—is at the core of Upritchard’s endeavor. Whatever patina of otherworldliness her figures have acquired, they are distinctly grounded in our daily experiences, in our “existences,” to borrow Fanon’s term. In other words, Upritchard’s figures are mirrors held up, at times more opaque than reflective but nonetheless capable of revealing much about our past, our present, and even our future.

Upritchard has been making figurative sculptures—primarily using wire frames covered with a polymer modeling material that is then baked and painted—since 2006. Some hail from long-ago eras—protagonists of medieval mythology like the knight, the harlequin, the jester—while others are from the more recent past—beatniks, hippies, and other nonconformists. Various figures are identified by their vocation—music teacher, potato seller, psychic—or distilled to a primary, and often less than laudatory, characteristic, such as “liar,” “misanthrope,” “ninny,” or “nincompoop.” Upritchard is drawn to a variety of arts, crafts, and design from around the world produced over the past several centuries, and an array of objects and techniques have informed her work: the fifteenth-century German sculptor Erasmus Grasser’s wooden figures; the Bayeux Tapestry, made in the eleventh century, with its scenes of the Norman conquest of England; the use of canopic jars in Egyptian mummification; the bronze figures of the Chola dynasty in India; and the blank expressions of the masks used in Japanese Noh theater. And while visual nods to these precedents serve to root the work in the past, the figures are decidedly contemporary. Part of this stems from Upritchard’s flair for saturated colors and embrace of pattern for her figures’ attire—which is often made from unique hand-dyed silks, monochromatic cottons, or vibrant plaid wools—along with the custom steel bases on which her figures are positioned (created in collaboration with her husband, the designer Martino Gamper), which feature bold geometric shapes and clean lines.

Upritchard’s proclivity for painting her characters’ skin in tones such as jaundiced yellow, mossy green, or calming lavender— sometimes in two tones or even a rainbow of hues—or having the patterns of their clothing continue onto their faces and hands, as if they have evolved to be able to camouflage themselves within their immediate surroundings, suggests that these creatures may signify a future race. But the combination of recognizable referents that appear to leave her figures nearly paralyzed—their partially opened eyes in a continuous state of rueful pondering— is what the viewer will recognize as disconcertingly familiar, a state of mind that syncs up perfectly with the contemporary moment. In their attempts to both honor and critique the past while searching for a path forward, these figures seem to have given up on the promises of collective action and chosen to go it alone. Even when grouped together in a tableau—as in the tabletop configurations in her poignantly titled exhibition

Save Yourself

at the 2009 Venice Biennale or in the field of figures titled

War Dance,

included in her recent exhibitions at Anton Kern Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary—Upritchard’s characters are remarkably, almost pathologically absorbed in their own thoughts. Disillusioned by the failures of the past and the overwhelming complexities of the present, they possess an interiority that reflects a desperate search for meaning.

Over time, the scale of Upritchard’s figures has gradually grown, shifting from the domain of decorative figurines, collectibles, and dolls to larger bodies that are more imposing and uncanny. Modeled to be approximately two-thirds life-size and then placed on individual pedestals, the figures confront the viewer at eye level. Each of the four figures included in her exhibition at the Hammer Museum—

Nincompoop , Whizz , Half Half , and Step Off

(the first from 2011 and the other three dated 2014 and made specifically for the show)—has distinctive characteristics. Whereas in her previous works the racial or ethnic identities of the characters remained largely ambiguous, these figures are more clearly associated with specific groups.

Whizz

wears a fez and caftan like the men of North Africa, and

Nincompoop

sports a traditional Middle Eastern keffiyeh draped across her shoulders. Both figures might represent what Upritchard has described as “poor yogis, half-baked lefties,” but the other two figures in the gallery embody not so much a failure of self-actualization as the vulnerabilities of those marginalized by the inequality and oppression still so prevalent in our societies. Wrapped in a blanket and with long dark hair held in place by a woven headband,

Half Half

is a Native American whose two-toned face suggests someone being pulled in opposite directions, struggling to bring different worlds into harmony. The first African figure in Upritchard’s growing ensemble,

Step Off

is a woman apparently ravaged and disfigured by circumstance, her expression both stoic and remorseful. Perhaps more than any of her sculptures to date, these figures urge us to ponder the precise aspects of their backgrounds and life experiences. Yet, as with all Upritchard’s work, despite the failures and hardships that have taken a toll on her characters, a shared humanity shines through, a hopefulness rooted in the possibility that self-reflection might result in the desire for connection.

Upritchard recently began making a group of dinosaur sculptures—using either papier-mâché or balata, a brown rubber drawn from trees in Brazil. For her Hammer Project, the artist has placed her figures alongside the dinosaurs for the first time. On the surface, these bodies of work seem to have little in common. There is a playfulness embedded in the dinosaurs that at first feels distinct from the gravity of the figures, as the toy-size scale and papier-mâché are reminiscent of children’s arts and crafts classes and the balata requires the artist to work quickly and intuitively to create the forms, which results in a raw, handmade quality. Yet the longer one looks, affinities between the dinosaurs and the figures begin to reveal themselves. Some of Upritchard’s characters seem as extinct as the dinosaurs, frozen in time like the fossils of these other relics. But it is her choice of the balata in particular that creates a link between the human figures and the dinosaurs. The economic boom resulting from the extraction of rubber by European colonizers in the Amazon basin—primarily in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru—was a catalyst for horrific and appalling abuses of indigenous peoples, many of whom became slaves to the rubber barons. The commodification of natural resources is at the center of oppressive working conditions around the world, situations in which human life is deemed less valuable than currency. Alongside the dinosaurs, creatures whose extinction is their most notorious characteristic, figures like

Step Off

—whose seemingly decorative bands at the neck, knee, and ankle take on the suggestion of shackles—can be understood both as contemporary and as incarnations of centuries of human rights abuses. We are reminded that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a major atmospheric event—Upritchard’s enameled

Meteorite Hanging

(2014) is a direct reference to this—while human life is often destroyed at the hands of those who should protect it.

Upritchard has a distinctive knack for combining disparate referents and practices, underscoring how the often overwhelming sense of the vastness of time and space can be tempered by returning to the specificity of objects. Remarkably she manages to take us from the Jurassic period (more than two hundred million years ago) to the future tense, from outer space with

Meteorite Hanging

to the rootedness of the earth’s plant life with her brass and glass lichen wall reliefs (2012), accomplishing this with levity and a profound sense of awe. Upritchard’s lively curiosity and willingness to experiment with techniques and materials permeate her work, and a contagious energy pulls us into her idiosyncratic worlds filled with figures at once alluring and discomfiting, where we are likely to become as rapt as her characters appear to be.

Anne Ellegood

Hammer Projects is a series of exhibitions focusing primarily on the work of emerging artists.

Hammer Projects is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, Hope Warschaw and John Law, and Maurice Marciano.

Additional support is provided by Good Works Foundation and Laura Donnelley, the Decade Fund, and the David Teiger Curatorial Travel Fund.

Image Gallery Related Programs

Curator Talk on Francis Upritchard, November 2014

Wednesday Nov 5, 2014 12:30 PM

– 12:45 PM

This is a past program

Close Encounters: Dino Laboratory

Sunday Jan 11, 2015 11:00 AM

– 1:00 PM

This is a past program

Curator Talk on Francis Upritchard, January 2015

Wednesday Jan 14, 2015 12:30 PM

– 12:45 PM

This is a past program

Join Us.

Hammer membership gives you special access to public programs, opening parties, and puts you in the mix of L.A.’s vibrant art scene.

Free for everyone, more for you.

Learn more about Hammer membership

HAMMER MUSEUM Free for good 10899 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90024 (310) 443-7000 info@hammer.ucla.edu Gallery Hours Monday: Closed Tuesday–Thursday: 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Friday: 11 a.m.–8 p.m. Saturday–Sunday: 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Restaurant Hours Monday: Closed Tuesday–Thursday: 11:30 a.m.–8:30 p.m. Friday: 11:30 a.m.–9 p.m. Saturday: 11 a.m.–9 p.m. Sunday: 11 a.m.–6p.m. Art & Ideas Visit Support About Us Employment Press Privacy Policy Terms of Use Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube

Sign up for email

Subscribe

© Hammer Museum 2024