REMA HORT MANN FOUNDATION

Nevine Mahmoud

“Sculpture” for me is a lineage of gestures that extend the human subject into another three-dimensional form. The scenarios I create aim to redefine how we identify sculptures and ignite another kind of sensual relationship to the object. Both the fabrication and installation of my work attempts to stage a confrontation between the rendered surface of the form and its material load, between the idea-image of the works origins and the reality-object it becomes.

The forms I choose to work with are objects of play, of utilitarian pleasure. I set out with a few critical questions; what could contemporary figurative sculpture look like, how can something around the body (architecture) also mirror the body, and how can viewing sculpture be an active experience. The playground slide, in its alluring form and reference to childhood and sex, became an object of fixation in my studio, generating more shapes and ideas to occupy its environment.

Balls and cubes, knotted chunks of metal and slices of stone, these gesturing objects create a dialogue through the space constructed between them. Color plays a vital role in emphasizing tactile qualities and provides an evacuated visual context for these shapes to rest within. Burn-out aluminum castings of acoustic foam refer directly to an inverted softness of material, both accentuated and undermined by the properties of solid metal. With cloudy white alabaster too, renderings in fruit and impossibly fleshy body parts speak to that genre of sculpture both recognizable and yet strange, resurrected now out of joint.