Hepworth Prize for Sculpture - The Hepworth Wakefield (until 20 January 2019)

Cerith Wyn Evans, Composition for 37 Flutes (detail)

The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, 2018 is at the Hepworth Wakefield until 20 January 2019
The 2nd biennial Hepworth Prize for Sculpture was awarded to Cerith Wyn Evans on 15 November,
 2018.
The other shortlisted artists are Michael Dean, Mona Hatoum, Phillip Lai and Magali Reus. (Watch short videos about each artist, here.)
Reviews
Adrian Searle (The Guardian)
Mark Hudson (The Telegraph)
Hettie Judah (Frieze)
Cerith Wyn Evans
Cerith Wyn Evans’s work on display at The Hepworth Wakefield combines thirty-seven crystal glass flutes in two overlapping arcs. The organ pumps that breathe life into the flutes are unflinchingly mechanical – the artist makes little attempt to hide their internal workings – and yet the work engages the body of the listener. As we stand before the work, our breath cycles through the pumps and sounds through the flutes. It is as if we hear the sound of our own presence. (Source: Hepworth Wakefield)

Cerith Wyn Evans, Composition for 37 Flutes (detail)

Cerith Wyn Evans, Forms in Space ... by Light (in Time), Tate Britain, 2017

Michael Dean

Dean’s new work for The Hepworth Wakefield recreates a street in concrete tongues, along which we are invited to walk. The tongues – which could also be torsos – are cast using the artist’s own body. The figures are ‘three crying LOLs’ which take the dimensions of the artist and his two sons. ‘LOL’ and the ‘laugh-out-loud-to-the-point-of-laughing-crying emoji’ are often repeated in Dean’s works, appearing alongside padlocks and coins – which he sees as forms of utterance in themselves – to contain emotion in a gesture. (Source: Hepworth Wakefield)

Michael Dean, installation

Michael Dean, installation

Michael Dean, Having you on, 2018 (Installation at Baltic)

Mona Hatoum
Mona Hatoum is showing two new sculptures alongside significant earlier works, revealing the breadth of her explorations of contradictions and conflicts. Hatoum’s sculptural projects use reduced physical means and shifts of scale and materials to destabilise our perceptions. In the new work Orbital 2018, the artist transforms reinforcement steel into a globe encrusted with meteor-like clumps of rubble, resulting in a work reminiscent of demolished buildings. Hot Spot (stand) 2018 is a new reimagining of Hatoum’s iconic neon globe, where the whole world pulses with conflict. (Source: Artlyst)

Mona Hatoum, Orbital, 2018

Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot (stand), 2018 (detail)

Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot (stand), 2018 (detail)

Phillip Lai
Phillip Lai debuts a group of new sculptures alongside his 2016 work Guest loves host in a way like no other. Using existing mass-produced objects as well as his own precisely fabricated forms, Lai’s surprising and poetic arrangements investigate ideas of production, consumption and hospitality. A major new work consisting of a series of stacked cast polyurethane basins will unfold across one long wall of the gallery space. Lai describes these objects as images of an ‘absurd expenditure of labour’, their accumulation invoking both the protracted processes of the artist and the construction activity implied by their cement-marked surfaces. (Source: Artlyst)

Phillip Lai, Untitled, 2017

Phillip Lai, Untitled, 2017

Phillip Lai, Guest loves host in a way like no other, 2016 (detail)

Magali Reus
Magali Reus presents an installation of new sculptures alongside an architectural intervention in the gallery space. Reus’ works hint at functionality but present a material reality detached from any specific purpose. New works from Reus’ series Sentinel combine references to woven fire hoses and nozzles with more amorphous elements cast in fibreglass with metal appendages. Reus will also present four works from a new series, Dearest, which incorporate re-imagined ladders, hats and bottles in sculptural configurations that cast them as protagonists in the delivery of a romantic serenade. (Source: Artlyst)

Magali Reus, Sentinel (Watermelon), 2018

Magali Reus, Arbroath Smokie, 2016

Magali Reus, Hwael (The Flat), 2017