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A Room Full of Lovers - Site specific installation

In the site-specific installation A Room Full of Lovers, Wentworth develops his ongoing investigation into the readymade, draping industrial steel chains across the gallery walls and entangling spatial awareness with support structures. Wentworth’s meticulous attention to points of contact between an object and its environment focuses the architectural dimension of the readymade; these structural intersections form a multilayered exploration of the way objects are assigned meaning.

The use of steel chains and their narrative structuring in A Room Full of Lovers was first explored in Wenthworth’s earlier sculpture ‘Heiroglyph’ (2010); one of thirteen new works for his solo exhibition at Peter Freeman Gallery, New York. Critic Barbara A. MacAdam’s review in Art News describes the sculptures as “poetry translated into images”, a direct response to Wentworth’s claim that objects are ‘read’. He has continually stretched the conditions of the ready-made to incorporate architectonic, social and cultural readings. In relationship to his solo exhibition at Nelson-Freeman, Paris in 2011, Donatien Grau writes in Flash Art that Wentworth’s “sculpture isn’t a readymade in the provocative sense; it is an artwork that reflects the complexity of an artistic reality”.

An earlier exploration of the function and meaning of everyday objects is evident in Wentworth’s year long inaugural Cabinet of Curiosities commission for the Research and Education Center at the Whitechapel Gallery. Titled a ‘Confiscation of String’ (2009), Wentworth reconsidered the function and meaning of an everyday object, namely string, through his compilation of a collective material archive and a focus on the emotional resonances that everyday objects trigger. Wentworth organized a series of related events with participants including Andrew Jaffe, astrophysicist, Imperial College London, Mark Miodownik, materials engineer, King’s College London and Priyesh Mistry, Founder, The Knit Crowd, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University.