Conrad Shawcross: The Primary Conditions
As part of its 90-year anniversary celebrations, Glyndebourne partnered with one of Britain’s leading artists, Conrad Shawcross RA, to produce an ambitious presentation across our site.
Installed as part of Conrad Shawcross’ solo show Expansion Fields presented over Festival 2024, this series of nine outdoor sculptures will remain at Glyndebourne until Autumn 2025.
Shown for the first time together in front of the ha-ha in a site-responsive arrangement, the installation The Primary Conditions (2019 – 2024), are a selection of Shawcross’ best-known designs, including a new ninth sculpture, Paradigm Vex – Slender (Structural) (2024).
Conrad Shawcross, The Primary Conditions, 2024. Photographer: Graham Carlow.
Resonating with ideas around states of scientific change, each work emerges from the ground, their shapes formed through connecting tetrahedra, creating a totemic, modular design that defies precarity. Each sculpture has a different growth rate that increases by 5% or 10% per tetrahedron. Shawcross uses tetrahedra due to their relationship to the ancient Greek study of philosophy, the shapes once used as the indivisible unit and symbol of the atom.
Overlooking the South Downs, they offer Festival-goers the opportunity to walk and picnic between them, experiencing them as an array and not in isolation. Returning guests will be able to observe the changing features of the works. Changes in light will play with their shadows and visualise the passage of time, whilst their materiality will adapt to the weather. Produced in weathering steel, a unique material that has been selected for its intention to slowly alter the work’s surface during its lifetime, the works will become more distressed in appearance over their time outside.
Expansion Fields was a solo exhibition by British artist Conrad Shawcross RA and is presented across three sites at Glyndebourne: the Archive Gallery, courtyard lawn and Old Green Room during Festival 2024.
Conrad Shawcross, The Primary Conditions, 2024. Photographer: Jonathan Bassett.
Conrad Shawcross RA (b. London, UK 1977) is represented by Victoria Miro (London/Venice) and was made a Royal Academician in 2014. He has studied at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, UK; Slade School of Art, University College, London, UK and Chelsea School of Art, London, UK. He has exhibited at leading institutions in the UK, including The Royal Academy of Arts, London; Saatchi Gallery, London; Barbican, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Grundy, Blackpool; Hayward, London; Turner Contemporary, Margate. He has exhibited internationally at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR; 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, IT; Kunsthal Rotterdam, NL; ArtScience Museum, Singapore; Auckland Art Gallery, NZ; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, IE; Sharjah Art Foundation; UAE; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, AU.