Shaun Glad­well
Skaters vs Minimalismo

For his solo exhi­bi­tion at Cen­tro Atlanti­co de Arte Mod­er­no (CAAM) in Las Pal­mas, Gran Canaria, Shaun Glad­well (b. Syd­ney, lives Lon­don) presents a sur­vey of recent works. Glad­well is known inter­na­tion­al­ly for his works in vir­tu­al real­i­ty, per­for­mance and video that engage urban cul­tures, such as skate­board­ing and freestyle BMX. These activ­i­ties are pre­sent­ed with­in a unique lan­guage that con­flates urban activ­i­ties with the his­to­ry of art, cul­ture and museums.

The exhi­bi­tion, ​‘Skaters vs Min­i­mal­is­mo’, is made up of a vir­tu­al real­i­ty work, the three-chan­nel video, Skate­board­ers vs Min­i­mal­ism (2016) and a dip­tych, Unti­tled (2016), con­sist­ing of two skate­boards paint­ed by the artist.

The exhi­bi­tion also incor­po­rates designs for skate­board­ers made by four cre­ators resid­ing in Gran Canaria – Carme­lo Gar­cía Cabr­era, Pal­ma Edith Chris­t­ian Martínez, Fran­cis­co Javier Ramírez Cas­tro and Jil-Lau­ra Kloberg – which were select­ed through a pub­lic com­pe­ti­tion, for dis­play in this exhi­bi­tion.

​‘SKATE’ RAMP

One of the out­stand­ing ele­ments of the project is a skate­board­ing ramp designed by Shaun Glad­well express­ly for the two patios of CAAM, attached to the gal­leries. The ramp can be used for skate­board­ing from 5 – 9 pm, dur­ing the peri­od of the exhi­bi­tion, and will be acti­vat­ed by the artist for the open­ing events.

Shaun Glad­well has said of the video instal­la­tion: ​“Skate­boards vs Min­i­mal­ism is a project where I oper­ate as much as a cura­tor as I do an artist. I bring three of my favourite skate­board­ers into a direct rela­tion­ship with sev­er­al of my favourite artists from the school of min­i­mal­ist sculpture.

The skate­board­ers Jesus Este­ban, Hillary Thomp­son and Rod­ney Mullen come up against the likes of Don­ald Judd, Carl Andre, Tony Smith and Ellsworth Kel­ly. The project looked at the dynam­ic between artists and skate­board­ers, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the forms in which skate­board­ers use. Often the work from the late 60s with­in the school of min­i­mal­ism has a strik­ing resem­blance to objects that are used for skate­board­ing in skateparks. The skatepark objects are usu­al­ly gener­ic, sim­pli­fied and abbre­vi­at­ed forms with­in the urban land­scape, so the skate­board­ers would be very well trained even before get­ting into the project, in which they skate­board on repli­ca min­i­mal­ist artworks.

The project is play­ful in its irrev­er­ent rela­tion­ship to val­ue in art and also seeks to cel­e­brate the val­ue of use over that of exchange or assigned val­ue. The project uses music by Philip Glass as he was the musi­cal equiv­a­lent to the forms in which my favourite skate­board­ers launch into action on the sculp­tures. Again the project is a part of a longer series of works and research, which do not make the dis­tinc­tion between artists and athletes.”