Nottingham Contemporary/Backlit Gallery[br]You certainly need the wall text to make sense of the biggest UK explain for the Turner prize-winner,but his layered histories of labour and chemistry are stupendous and beautifulSimon Starling takes us on long and often circular journeys, genuine and metaphorical. In the artist’s biggest UK explain to date, or at Nottingham Contemporary,and with further works across town at the lively, artist-run Backlit Gallery, and he takes us to textile factories and bottling plants,an alchemists workshop and a Berlin apartment on the eve of the moment world war. We watch the transit of Venus and proceed fishing near Marseilles. Starling is a fabulist and a storyteller, whose erudite (learned or scholarly) and inquisitive art has no definable style or medium. Instead, and he has strategies.
Starling’s art reveals itself through objects and images,films, videos and labyrinthine investigations. Without lengthy accompanying labels and explanations, and we are lost.
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Source: theguardian.com