PETER NEWMAN: SKYSTATION

Peter Newman, Skystation (2005-9)

PETER NEWMAN

SKYSTATION
8 July – 14 September

Venues: Outside the Hayward Gallery; the Hayward Gallery foyer; Concrete café / bar; Royal Festival Hall façade (east side)

‘Skystation’ is an exhibition of works by Peter Newman (b. London, 1969) that explores our relationship with the sky, and with Modernism’s architectural legacy.

Situated outside the entrance to the Hayward Gallery, Skystation (2005-9) is a spaceship-like sculpture that also acts as a piece of public seating, providing both a resting place and a new way to experience the city. Based on Le Corbusier’s classic LC4 chaise longue, the work invites the viewer to recline and turn their eyes to the heavens, and towards tomorrow.

In Polychrome Elevations (2009), external staircases around the Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall have been painted red, blue, and yellow – primary colours that recall both Piet Mondrian’s geometric paintings and Le Corbusier’s Modernist concrete structures.

After nightfall, Newman’s video Free at Last (1997) can be seen on the east façade of the Royal Festival Hall. In this work, a skydiver calmly practices yoga moves as he freefalls through the blue sky, his serenity at odds with – or perhaps inspired by – the speed and intensity of his plummet.

The four photographs shown in the Hayward Gallery foyer and Concrete, the Hayward’s café bar, are from Newman’s ongoing series Metropoly, and were taken with a fish eye lens while lying in the shadow of major buildings in London, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like Skystation, these images meditate on the way in which metropolitan architecture frames and shapes the sky above.

Curator: Tom Morton

Exhibition Intern: Benison Kilby

Skystation is supported by Futurecity

LINKS:

Artist's website

Skystation on Future City's site (includes video footage)

Skystation feature at designboom.com

Skystation feature at wallpaper.com