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Keir Smith |
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The Vault of the Scalzi,
60 x terracotta pigmented polymer plaster 'bricks'
each L500 x W90 x H60 mm
overall dimensions approx diameter 300 cms
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'The Vault of the Scalzi is, at first glance, a field of rubble. On closer inspection the battered house bricks which make up the sculpture appear to be undergoing a partial transformation into small utilitarian huts, they waver, uncomfortably, between building blocks and architecture itself. Let into the sides of each of the "brick dwellings" are closed doors, shutters and bricked up windows; they invite but resist penetration. The sculpture takes its name from a fresco, painted in 1745, by Giambattista Tiepolo on the vault of the Venetian church of the Scalzi. The fresco depicted a rare subject derived from popular tradition relating how the Santa Casa (where the Archangel Gabriel announced the birth of Christ to the Virgin Mary) was transported by angels from Nazareth to Loreto in Italy. Tiepolo's fresco was destroyed by an Austrian incendiary bomb in October 1915. Photographs taken of the vault before this catastrophic event reveal that the artist imagined the Virgin holding the Christ Child in her arms as she stood on the roof of the house while a host of angels bear the weight of the rude hut on their shoulders. The flight of the Santa Casa does not appear effortless. The Vault of the Scalzi, perhaps, represents the ghost of Tiepolo's fresco imprisoned in the debris on the floor of the Scalzi after the bombardment. The theme of the destruction of culture through of warfare insinuates itself into virtually everything I produce.' |
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From the catalogue Vault of the Scalzi, sculpture and drawings by Keir Smith, 3rd October - 4th November 2005, The County Gallery, Sessions House, County Hall, Maidstone, Kent. |
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"Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Keir Smith´s work is the extent to which it fuses research and scholarship with creativity in a way that is comprehensive, systematic and inevitable, without any sense of strain or over-reaching." - Rod Mengham, Reader in Modern English Literature, Jesus College, Cambridge. |
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Keir Smith (1950 -2007) was a sculptor and draughtsman with many works sited in public places and in private collections. Keir studied at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1969-73) and Chelsea School of Art (1973-75). He was Junior Fellow at Cardiff College of Art (1975-76), Sculptor-in-Residence at Grizdale Forest, Cumberland (1979) and won the Royal Society of Arts Art for Architecture Award (1992) for his commissioned frieze ' From the Dark Cave' , Henrietta House, Henrietta Place, London W1.. During 2005-06 he was Artist in Residence at the National Maritime Museum, London, in association with Wimbledon College of Art, where he was a Reader in sculpture and Principal lecturer,from 1990-2007 . Since 1976, he exhibited widely in the UK. Recent public sculptures include 'Stefano' , Sculpture at Goodwood (1997) A Flower in Flower at Ironbridge Museum of Steel Sculpture (2001); Iron Band that Binds Green Heart and Coastal Path , at Jesus College Cambridge (2005); Recent solo exhibitions include Ognissanti at the Concourse Gallery, Barbican Centre, London (1998); A Lily Among Thorns at Sixchapelrow Contemporary Art, Bath (2000); Enclosed Garden in the Cloisters of Lincoln Cathedral (2001); Landscape with Carlo and Elena at One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London (2003); Carlo's Nail Revisited at Wingfield Arts, Suffolk (2004); Shadows and Whispers , The Drawing Gallery London and The Vault of the Scalzi ; County Galleries Maidstone (2005). |
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