Galeria Leme, São Paulo
Opens on 17 May 2025
Kingsgate Project Space 16:9, London
11 - 28 April 2025
PV: Thursday 10 April 6 - 9pm
We're excited to be launching a new 16:9 billboard by Henry Krokatsis. Alongside the 16:9 billboard, we will also be screening the artist’s Prost* films in the gallery entrance.
‘On my studio wall I keep an evolving list of words – pairs of corresponding forces like:
Chaos / Order
Intuition / Superstition
Nihilism / Faith
Truth / Illusion
These are metaphysical forces, hidden determinants that have a powerful influence, whether we're conscious of them or not. The sway of Chaos over Order in your life for example, will have a profound effect on you whether you actively contemplate it or not.
I’ve taken these words and embroidered them onto socks.
It’s a way to remind myself that these ideas aren't just esoteric fancies we might consider in a philosophical moment, to remember that they're embedded in the everyday, in the fabric of the mundane and that the extraordinary exists within the ordinary.
What changes when we properly pay attention to this idea, when we look at how these contestable, ethereal forces are integrated into our ordinary lives?
What happens if we consciously change the balance in our lives between say Chaos and Order or Nihilism and Faith?
We might invite more Chaos in as a cure for boredom perhaps or more Order to feel safe, or we may come to terms with the idea that they can't exist without each other.
Ostensibly I've made a functional, common object with a pair of words embroidered on it, but potentially it's a way to broaden our metaphysical peripheral vision.
I've given pairs of these socks to a dozen elite physical performers (including Dana Fouras former principal dancer of the Royal Ballet, Harris Bell, current rising star of the Royal Ballet and Tatiana Ozhigonova, the aerial gymnast from Moscow State Circus) and we’ve created a movement wearing them, based on their feet, ankles and calves.
I wanted a way of making something collectively that invigorates the power that lies in the simplest things, to encourage us to recognise that the things we see and use everyday, the things we take for granted, looked at from another angle shifted by only a few degrees, can hold the esoteric, the divine.'
Vigo Gallery and English Heritage present:
PROST* Henry Krokatsis at Wellington Arch, Hyde Park Corner, London W1
Until May 2025
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.