2017-02-22

Anna Schwartz Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works entitled Icelandic Puffins by Emily Floyd from 8 until 29 April 2017. The exhibition marks the artist’s tenth solo show with the gallery.

With Icelandic Puffins Floyd creates a landscape populated by hand-carved bird sculptures, each unique, and crafted in the artist’s distinct sculptural vernacular. Icelandic text is paired alongside each of the puffins, listing corporate protagonists prosecuted by the State of Iceland following the collapse of all three of the country’s major banks: Glitnir, Landsbanki and Kaupthing. Icelandic Puffins creates a dialogue between the seductive power of design, here in typical Scandinavian style, with the dark veneer of global financial and political crisis.

Emily Floyd (b. 1972, Melbourne) works in sculpture, printmaking and public installation. Curator and poet Ranjit Hoskote notes “her work takes shape at the intersections where sculpture meets public space and design collides with social crisis. Floyd renegotiates the possibility of public address, critically engaging in increasingly diverse and unpredictable viewership in debate, her work gestures toward new forms of sociality, for which the artwork can serve both as provocation and as venue.”

Recent and forthcoming group projects include Kesh Alphabet, inaugural commission by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, CCB and Atelier Benefactor Groups, for The National, Curated by Anneke Jaspers and Wayne Tunnicliffe (2017); ‘A Working Model of the World’, curated by Lizzie Muller and Holly Williams, Parsons School of Design, New York (2017); ‘The Language of Ornament’, NGV International, Melbourne (2017); ‘Telling Tales: Excursions in Narrative Form’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2016); ‘All the World’s Futures’, 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015); ‘Art as a Verb’, Artspace, Sydney (2015); ‘Below Another Sky’, Glasgow Print Studio, Scotland (2014); ‘There will be New Rules Next Week’, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2013); ;Sleep on the Left Side’, Seven Art Limited, New Delhi (2012); ‘Kindness/Udarta’, Habitat Center New Delhi (2012).

Selected solo exhibitions: ‘Field Libraries’, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne (2015); ‘Emily Floyd: The Dawn’, National Gallery of Victoria, (2014); ‘Far Rainbow’, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2014); ‘This Place Will Always Be Open’, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2012); ‘Here Small Gestures Make Complex Structures’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, (2012); and ‘New Graphic Sculpture’, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney (2012).

Emily Floyd is Senior lecturer in the School of Fine Art at Monash University: Art, Design and Architecture. She is a 2017 Sydney Myer Creative Fellow.

The exhibition Icelandic Puffins will be on view from 8 April until 29 April 2017 at Anna Schwartz Gallery, 185 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, Australia.

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