Phyllida Barlow (b. 1944)

Phyllida Barlow, Britain’s representative at the 2017 Venice Biennale, is well-known for her large-scale, site-specific installations, using everyday materials to create grand, deconstructed objects that seem derived from reality, yet play with space in strange and wonderful ways. Chairs (2005) are two outstanding independent components of a larger installation, untitled: demo, which took place at studio 1.1 in East London in 2005. Applying patches of cement to the chairs before painting over them with gloss paint, Barlow confuses our sense of the object by locating it in a space somewhere between the domestic and something more industrial or architectural. untitled: demo consisted of a series of rooms: the first full of chairs like these, the second containing apparently abandoned placards, and the third a collection of tables, with each object painted in a similar way. The haunting sense of a political demonstration (whence the title) abandoned or suppressed suggests dystopian political undercurrents, but the artist avoids clear conclusions. Barlow has identified her work with a tradition of anti-monumentalism, her sculptures existing not as individuated expressions, references or symbols but as objects that attempt to actively engage the space around them – and in Chairs Barlow’s use of paint prevents the viewer from reading the chair only in terms of its functionality or symbolic quality, encouraging an engagement with its formal and spatial qualities that further complicates our sense of the work’s ambiguous symbolism.