Days of plenty: autumn brings blessed relief from the sluggish summer art season. I spent this weekend trawling the still-sunny streets of London for exciting new stuff. And found it. The greatest thrill is finding a new artist who’s doing something amazing. On Saturday, bumbling gently down Cork Street, I popped into Beaux Arts and couldn’t believe my eyes.
Marilene Oliver has had herself MRI scanned, many times: horizontal sections of her body once every couple of inches in fact, internal organs and all. Each scan has been printed onto glass, and these glass plates are stacked vertically.
The results are fantastic. You find yourself standing in front of an image of a human being, life-size and floating inches from the floor, precise and indistinct. On close inspection, it disappears. You find yourself seeing the spaces between the plates or straining to see the detail of the scans, each of which is obscured by the next. These pieces, a previously unimaginable mid-point between Damien Hirst and Donald Judd: oddly affecting in their distance and (sometimes at least) their coldness.
One of these pieces is called ‘I Know You Inside Out’ and of course you don’t, the forms are elusive and spectral. We’re all used to looking at pictures of people but it’s absurdly rare to find a portrait of a kind you’ve never seen before, never thought of seeing before.
If that weren’t enough, there’s ‘Text Me‘, which is a cute twist on Gormley: a matt black, life-size sculpture of the artist is punctuated hundreds of times by copper-coloured spines. St. Sebastian? A protective shell? You’re left wondering by the realisation that each spine is etched with a text message as sent to the artist. It would take you hours to read each one, and I felt strangely queasy about doing so.
Sometimes it feels like the decent thing to avoid all the intimate details, no matter how much fun they might turn out to be’