Last chance to see... Room at Sadie Coles HQ

Fifteen artists re-imagine the domestic space in Room currently showing at Sadie Coles HQ until Saturday 18 Feb 2017. Featuring a mixture of installations, sculpture and photography, this show challenges the notion of a room as a domestic haven of safety and shelter. In one of the most terrifying installations, The Teenage Room, Klara Liden has built a savage interior, accessed either by the axe weighted door, or the hatch at the bottom of a wall. In the room is a bunk bed structure spray painted black. There’s a sense of tension, intrigue, escape, kidnap and horror in this room, even in the banality of the dirty, sticky beige carpet.

Klara Lidén, Teenage Room 2009 (installation at Boros Collection, Berlin)
© NOSHE, Copyright the artist and the Boros Collection, Berlin

The theme of escape is explored in the surreal photo montages of Penny Slinger. Windows, doorways, corridors offer a way out, but to what and where we don’t know. In some works, the escape route is psychical as in an exorcism or an escape into the private world of reading. In another, physical, the protagonist is trapped between the shadows (Between Light and Dark), like the butterflies and the women pinned to the display in Butterfly Collection.

Penny Slinger, Bookworm (An Exorcism)
1977. Photo collage. 34.29 x 50.80 cm / 13 ½ x 20 in. Copyright the artist, courtesy BROADWAY 1602 UPTOWN & HARLEM

Heidi Bücher creates a floating skeleton of a house with a series of screens. This is a house that seems to be made from human skin as it wafts in the breeze.

Heidi Bucher, Untitled (Herrenzimmer)
1979. Latex, cotton. Dimensions variable
Installation view, Heidi Bucher, Swiss Institute, New York, 19 February – 11 May 2014. Copyright the Estate of Heidi Bucher & Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich; courtesy the Swiss Institute, New York, courtesy Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris

In many of these works, the rooms are pictured without the actor present. Nan Goldin’s Empty Rooms and My Bed document the rooms after the actors have left, we are left to imagine the activity which has taken place, who the inhabitants were. Sarah Lucas’s Chuffing Away to Oblivion 1996 the interior of a shed is covered in tabloid wallpaper – pages from the tabloids in the nineties are pasted over all the interior. Full of criminal bankers, missing children and topless women meld together in a tabloid world of smut and shame, the occupant has left the building.

On show are also rarely exhibited photos by Francesca Woodman, Cell XVII by Louise Bourgeois and Beverly Buchanan’s architectural buildings from reclaimed materials, all worth a trip in themselves.

Rachel Feinstein, The Shack, 2001.
Wood, cedar shingles, wire, plaster, nylon fabric, mirror, gold leaf and enamel paint. 318 x 231 x 188 cm / 125 x 91 x 74 in, unique. Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Marianne Vitale, Double Decker Outhouse, 2011. Wood. 365.8 x 91.4 x 91.4 cm / 144 x 36 x 36 in
Copyright the artist, Courtesy the Artist / Photography Bill Orcutt

Francesca Woodman, My House, Providence, Rhode Island 1976.
Gelatin silver estate print, 25.4 x 20.3 cm / 10 x 8 in. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman, and Victoria Miro, London. © The Estate of Francesca Woodman

Room will tour to the Mead Gallery, University of Warick, Saturday 6 May to Saturday 24 June 2017.

Artists in Room include Louise Bourgeois, Beverly Buchanan, Heidi Bucher, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Rachel Feinstein, Nan Goldin, Klara Liden, Hilary Lloyd, Sarah Lucas, Joanna Piotrowska, Penny Slinger, Andra Ursula, Marianne Vitale, Francesca Woodman and Andrea Zittel. Room is curated by Laura Lord.

Sadie Coles HQ

62 Kingly Street, London W1B 5QN

T: 020 7493 8611