Photography: Thierry Bal
If we can count on anyone to wow us with spectacle it's British artist Alex Hartley. From the Arctic to outer space, it seems he has created everything, everywhere; testing the parameters of what gallerists, art and his body can do. By Elly Parsons
For Hypothermia (2012) a three-hour looped single-channel video records Hartley's core body temperature dropping below 35℃. His Nowhereland project (also 2012) paraded an iceberg around London for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, before smashing it into pieces and sending bits into orbit. In 2003, Hartley scrambled over Los Angeles architecture for his LA Climbs book, risking life and limb to describe aerial routes of the city.
For Hypothermia (2012) a three-hour looped single-channel video records Hartley's core body temperature dropping below 35℃. His Nowhereland project (also 2012) paraded an iceberg around London for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, before smashing it into pieces and sending bits into orbit. In 2003, Hartley scrambled over Los Angeles architecture for his LA Climbs book, risking life and limb to describe aerial routes of the city.
With the rest of his oeuvre in mind, creating a Bauhaus-inspired ruin outside Victoria Miro's central London gallery is just another day in the office for Hartley. But for visitors, there's no denying the new installation's drama. Hartley firmly believes that there's beauty in decay – after exploring this collapsed modernist folly we're converts to the cause of decadence.
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November 22 2016
