Goodnight!

Goodnight! is a new work made exclusively for the South London Gallery by internationally acclaimed artist, Helen Marten. Marten works across sculpture, painting, video and writing to create work that questions the stability of the material world and our place within it. Alluding to ideas, systems and experiences, her work sets out to articulate complex ideas about the way in which we exist in and understand the world around us.

Goodnight! is a multi-layered work, incorporating two- and three-dimensional elements housed within a bespoke frame. The central image is created by the artist from a drawing of women dancing in checked pyjamas, retranslated in blend of coloured pigment, watercolour, acrylic and graphite powder. The figures are blurred with movement and overlapping. Around this depiction of joy and comfort are further motifs of daily preoccupations: trees, beds, tables, notepaper, a cocktail.  

The artist says: “Goodnight! is a mode of optimism, a work with countless permutations of visual and linguistic knotting. The perplexing sense remains that of abstract breach and delirious play – cookie cutters to excise and reform one’s material reality – beneath the forthcoming darkness and dizzying stars of night. Goodnight! offers the anticipatory elegies of candles and flowers: pleasure and ferocity hovering with equally weighted potential.”

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