Than Hussein Clark

Waves (Das Glückliche Rothschild) . 2013

+ Mathew

Constructed as both a hyperbolic critique of Edmund De Waal’s "The Hare with the Amber Eyes" (2010), in which the British ceramicist tells the story of his family's collection of Japanese Netsuke (17th-century miniature sculptures), the only remaining elements of his family's fortune -at one point rivaling the Rothschilds- that was lost in the Second World War and as a souvenir of the revival performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which marked the opening of the Vienna Staatsoper in 1869, the exhibition continues the artist’s interest in the queer affinities between registers of design, mechanisms of display and autonomous politics.
Cutting through the center of the gallery, "Konnigratz/Hamichuri/Konnigratz/Hamichuri" (All works 2013), Clark's handtufted carpet produced with Dovecot Studios (Edinburgh, UK) crosses the artist's research in the decorative schemes of historic civic architecture and the interiors of early twentieth-century Vienna in order to articulate the first in a series of spatial and functional reversals which mark the exhibition.
Mathew