PROST*                                                                      

*prost: common, every day, mundane, but within which lies the divine      

The British artist Henry Krokatsis’ year-long installation transforms the interior space of Wellington Arch, creating a functional yet subversive replacement for the existing floor.

Although based on the Waterloo Gallery’s intricate border parquet pattern in Wellington’s former residence Apsley House, in place of fine hard woods his obsessive handcrafted replacement uses discarded materials - 2 tonnes of rejected wooden off cuts, abandoned wardrobes and broken kitchen units foraged from skips, dismantled and painstakingly cut into 4,400 pieces, chamfered and laid individually.

As well as referencing work as seemingly diverse as Carl Andre's minimalist floor works and the schizophrenic architecture of Karl Junker, his off kilter remake also consciously resonates with Joseph Boehm’s statue of Wellington (located next to the arch), made from abandoned French cannons, melted down and recast.

Recycling and remaking both material and its history, Krokatsis’ work ‘oscillates between the destitute and the divine’ testing our assumptions about function, value and status.