Conrad Shawcross: After the Explosion, Before the Collapse

An exhibition of new works by Conrad Shawcross features new Fracture sculptures and two new mechanical works, in addition to a sequence of unique photographic prints created by firing a laser through a series of faults in fragments of glass. United by an aesthetic akin to that of scientific models, the abstract works on view continue to deal with notions of time, entropy and disappearance.

The exhibition marks a significant development of Conrad Shawcross’s celebrated Paradigm sculptures. The Paradigms are an ongoing exploration of the tetrahedron – geometrically a four-sided non-tessellating form and conceptually the symbol of an indivisible unit of matter. As a building block, the tetrahedron behaves as an irrational number, creating sequences that in theory, extend into infinity without repetition. Major examples include Paradigm, 2016, a permanent installation commissioned by the Francis Crick Institute in King’s Cross, which is one of the tallest public sculptures in central London. The title of the works refers to the notion of the paradigm shift – a leap of imagination that jolts scientific enquiry forwards and collapses pre-existing notions of what is true – identified by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996).