FUTURE FURNISHINGS: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro

April 30 – June 4, 2011

Nature Morte Berlin is pleased to present “Future Furnishings”, an exhibition of new works by Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro. Forming the centerpiece of the installation, a tectonic, cable-bound heap of neatly stacked IKEA furniture props up the enormous fossil of a Monolophosaurus dinosaur. Accompanying the sculpture are drawings illustrating the construction of a dinosaur in the style of IKEA’s pictorial instruction manuals. The artists say of their work:

This mighty dinosaur will … highlight the contemporary disposable, mass-produced against an historical artifact: the uncertain present and future versus the known past… The work juxtaposes our keen understanding of where we fit into the past and our myopic vision of where we want to be in the future.

Conflating time, scale, and space, Healy and Cordeiro’s works are often minimalist-inflected revelations about the simple trajectory of things over time. Like archeological revisionists, they pit the transient human life against its spectral, inorganic remnants. Themes of dislocation, and the notion of home or inhabited space surface; in past works the pair have deconstructed houses, trailers and other human dwellings, and transformed them into surprisingly economic structures, or gathered the banal materials of quotidian life into awe-inspiring masses that represent symbolic periods of elapsed time.

Both born in Australia, the pair met at the New South Wales College of Fine Arts and started collaborating in the nineties. Recipients of numerous international residencies and grants including a one-year residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. They represented Australia in the 53rd Venice Biennial, have had solo shows in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne- Australia, Akiyoshidai and Teshima- Japan, Wellington, Singapore, Shanghai, Katmandu, Lyon, Berlin and Basel. They are based in Berlin and Sydney.