New Sculpture

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is delighted to present New Sculpture, an exhibition of recent works by James Angus. Conceived and fabricated over a period of three years, these painted steel sculptures put the legacy of modernist sculpture back into dialogue with engineering, architecture and popular culture in the twenty-first century. Like most of his work, the explicit materiality of each object is key to understanding its meaning. They are part of an ongoing exploration of urban design and building construction that the artist has previously described as “psychedelic and theoretical”.^[1]  

“The new sculptures I’ve been making are all appropriated from a particular branch of geometry that academics would describe as ‘triply periodic minimal surfaces.’ They are forms that could be conjoined infinitely without any obvious seams. I’ve selected chunks of these forms and cast them in steel […] as if they were severed from a larger structure with an oxy-acetylene torch”.

“I decided to borrow from popular music for the titles of these new sculptures and put language into play, in a way that I haven’t really done before […] They have dual surfaces, painted and unpainted, and are incredibly sculptural, and therefore, very difficult to photograph. I like the way that something that is so material can also be so hard to describe”. – James Angus, 2022 ^[2]

New Sculpture is James Angus’s eighth solo exhibition with Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.

[1]James Angus, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, 2016, Exhibition catalogue.
[2]Inga Walton, ‘James Angus: Re-joining the World’, Artist Profile, Issue 60, pp. 86-92

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James Angus received a Master of Fine Arts (Sculpture) from Yale University School of Art in 1998 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Curtin University in 1990. He currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.

His work is held in major public and private collections in Australia and overseas, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He has completed thirteen large-scale permanent public commissions in Australia, the United States, France and South Korea. In 2015, Angus was commissioned by the Monash University of Art, Victoria to produce Built Unbuilt Unbuildable outside the Green Chemical Futures building in Clayton. Other major public commissions include Mobile at the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital, Brisbane (2014), Day In Day Out at 1 Bligh Street, Sydney (2011), Grow Your Own at Forrest Place, Perth (2011), Geo Face Distributor at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2009) and Ellipsoidal Freeway Sculpture on the Connect-East Freeway, Victoria (2008).

In 2006 his work was the subject of a major survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, curated by Rachel Kent, which toured in 2007 to the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria; and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. Angus was selected for the 19th Biennale of Sydney, You Imagine What You Desire (2014), curated by Juliana Engberg. The 13th Biennale of Sydney, (the world may be) fantastic (2002), featured his monumental work Shangri-La: a full-sized hot-air balloon suspended upside down inside the Sydney Opera House. Works by Angus were also included in The Lightness of Being, organised by The Public Art Fund in New York (2013); the Changwong Sculpture Biennale, South Korea (2012); The Age of Influence, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2000); and Unfinished History, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (1998).

James Angus has been represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery since 1993.