There is something tonally refreshing about George Henry Longly’s exhibition at Jonathan Viner, as the illuminated space delivers the forensic setting for these unusual sculptural configurations.

Like well fashioned curiosities encased in glass, these works constitute carefully selected readymade objects, manipulated steel and fractured marble, that are drawn together in associated visual vessels. And as troubling as the title of the show is, it makes for an absorbing body of works that have you wondering why such clinical configurations work so well together. When regarding the detail there is something of Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, 1915 -1923, in Longly’s Madame T, 2014, in which an encased steel frame appears to rise and recline in equal measure.

George Henry Longly, Madame T, 2014 Glass, steel, YSL Touche Eclat, plastic foliage 160 x 110 x 55 cm, Courtesy  Jonathan Viner, London, MyTemplArt Magazine

George Henry Longly, Madame T, 2014 Glass, steel, YSL Touche Eclat, plastic foliage 160 x 110 x 55 cm, Courtesy Jonathan Viner, London

And like British sculptor Anthony Caro, Longly appears to have a rewarding sensitively for materials, dense and delicate; that gives his inclusion of plastic foliage as much credence as his want of glass and steel. Madame T’s upstanding vitrine genuinely succeeds in holding ones attention for its unusual beauty. Take it, it’s yours, 2014, appears as a wooden container attached to the gallery wall; resembling a shaving cupboard in its scale and use of glass, George Henry Longly has clearly laboured over the compositional arrangement of a whole series of objects, that without his touch may well have failed to correspond. A heating lamp, plastic water bottles, and copper plated head armour, are elegantly positioned on a glass and wooden shelves. And like an archaeological find, this post-modern relic proves just as intriguing.

George Henry Longly, Bodys (detail), 2014, Wood, glass, marble, Issey Miyake garment, cast plaster, whipped cream charger, 55 x 110 x 160 cm,  Courtesy, Jonathan Viner, London, MyTemplArt Magazine

George Henry Longly, Bodys (detail), 2014, Wood, glass, marble, Issey Miyake garment, cast plaster, whipped cream charger, 55 x 110 x 160 cm, Courtesy, Jonathan Viner, London

Bodys, 2014 is another contained work on the floor of the gallery, in what appears as a mislaid crate from the British Museum that has been prized open and left to this curative atmosphere under false pretences. A work in which George Henry Longly again successfully manages to draw together disparate objects and materials, including an Issey Miyake dress and a fragmented marble figure, as a settled carcass of contemporary culture.

 

http://www.jonathanvinergallery.com/exhibitions/hair_care