Mark Handforth: Zig-Zag City

For his first solo exhibition at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Mark Handforth presents Zig-Zag City – featuring new sculptural works that hang, twist, sprawl out or illuminate, together forming a dynamic landscape that responds to the site of the gallery. Handforth continually uses motifs drawn from the fabric of the urban environment – its fixtures that are so ubiquitous as to be both clearly legible and almost unnoticeable. Playfully recontextualized, rescaled, or reconfigured, familiar elements take on new life in works composed of brass, industrial LED tubes, a motorbike. The utilitarian aspects of the objects that occupy or structure our shared surroundings become part of the material of the works. An unexpected beauty is elicited from their inherent clunkiness, their destruction, or their uncannily human traits. Moving between sculpture and everyday object, along the intersection of city streets outside and gallery space inside, a twisting path takes shape here – tracing recognizable rhythms and reflections through an enigmatic set of relations.