Intensities and surfaces anya gallaccio biography

Melting
By: Jennifer Mundy

In the 1990s British artist Anya Gallaccio became known for creating artworks that made evident the processes of change and were themselves impermanent.

File Note 33: Anya Gallaccio - Camden Art Centre

So central was transience to her practice that in 1999 curator Ralph Rugoff noted, ‘after over a decade of creating installations, Gallaccio has virtually nothing to show for it. Her many installations and evanescent sculptures have ended up not in the permanent collections of museums and art connoisseurs but in the skip.

Only a few traces and snapshots remain as proof that she has produced anything at all, and these are inadequate as evidence. So, in the end, her work lives on only in the idiosyncratic museum of our memories.’

intensities and surfaces was a striking example of Gallaccio’s exploration of the transient. Sited in a nineteenth-century water pumping station in East London and made simply from slabs of ice stacked around an inner core of rock salt, the sculpt Anya Gallaccio - Thomas Dane Gallery HYQE