Anna-Wili Highfield | Spirit Faces

ANNA-WILI HIGHFIELD SPIRIT FACES Opening Reception: February 9, 6–8pm Exhibition: February 6 – March 6, 2018

Olsen Gruin is pleased to present Spirit Faces, an installational exhibition of new sculptures by Australian artist Anna-Wili Highfield, on view from February 6 to March 6, 2018, at 30 Orchard Street.

Highfield’s first fully conceived body of work in a decade, Spirit Faces gathers a celebratory mélange of animals, body parts, and self-portraits. Virtuosic and playful, Highfield’s mixed media sculptures reach new heights of exuberance and material imagination.

Highfield rejoices in the rough treatment of luxury objects. Constructing forms rather than using molds, Highfield combines cut brass with natural materials, including freshwater pearls, shell, feathers, onyx, and coral, and with fabrics like velvet, linen, and felt. Spray painted, her glamorous sculptures appear dirty and sharp, and elicit a desire to touch. Such a sense of urge persists throughout the work explicitly, as in Transmission and Reception, two gleeful representations of ejaculation, and implicitly, in the animal instincts evoked.

Nonetheless Highfield’s sculptures are aesthetically refined, longing and empathetic. The works seek solace in the affinities we share with animals. Bursting with this natural spirit, each piece manifests the intuitive elegance of her making. For Highfield, the animal sculptures are more than totemic friends or talismans; they bear her identity. In the works of Spirit Faces, Highfield entwines universal resonance and personal feeling, raucous materiality and gentle sensitivity.

Anna-Wili Highfield (b. 1980, Sydney) lives and works in Sydney. She studied painting at the National Art School, Sydney, and worked as a scenic artist for Opera Australia before forging an independent art practice working by private commission for over 10 years. Large scale installational projects include Animals, Carriageworks, Australia, and several works for Hermes Australia. This is Anna-Wili Highfield’s first commercial gallery exhibition.

For further information please contact the gallery at info@olsengruin.com or at +1.646.525.6213. All images are subject to copyright. Gallery approval must be granted prior to reproduction.

Anna-Wili Highfield Reception, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, freshwater pearls, bohemian crystal, ink, spray paint 39 3/8 x 19 5/8 x 15 3/4 " (100 x 50 x 40 cm) 54068 $16,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Horse, 2018 Spirit Faces Brass, velvet ribbon, feathers, robe, canvas, spray paint 22 x 9 x 13 " (55.9 x 22.9 x 33 cm) 54088 $10,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Wren, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, cotton rag, fur, watercolor, spray paint 5 7/8 x 11 3/4 x 7 7/8 " (15 x 30 x 20 cm) 54058 $4,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Goat, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, velvet, shell, canvas, human hair, string, ink, spray paint 35 3/8 x 23 5/8 x 15 3/4 " (90 x 60 x 40 cm) 54064 $15,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Felt 2, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, fur, velvet, shells 23 5/8 x 27 1/2 x 9 7/8 " (60 x 70 x 25 cm) 54075 $4,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Self as Astronomer, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, freshwater pearls, spray paint, ink 27 1/2 x 27 1/2 x 35 3/8 " (70 x 70 x 90 cm) 54072 $14,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Self as Unicorn, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, shells, velvet ribbon, feathers, spray paint 27 1/2 x 9 7/8 x 9 7/8 " (70 x 25 x 25 cm) 54062 $10,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Felt 1, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, fur, shell, coral, velvet, feathers, freshwater pearls 15 3/4 x 25 5/8 x 9 7/8 " (40 x 65 x 25 cm) 54076 $8,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Self as Naturalist, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, stone, shells, cotton rag, watercolors, spray paint, freshwater pearls 39 3/8 x 23 5/8 x 19 5/8 " (100 x 60 x 50 cm) 54071 $16,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Lion, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, feathers, rope, wool, shells, plaster, freshwater pearls, ink, spray paint 51 1/8 x 35 3/8 x 19 5/8 " (130 x 90 x 50 cm) 54063 $18,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Raven, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, velvet, ink, onyx, freshwater pearls 23 5/8 x 27 1/2 x 11 3/4 " (60 x 70 x 30 cm) 54070 $8,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Transmission 2, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, shell, freshwater pearls, ink, spray paint 19 5/8 x 15 3/4 x 7 7/8 " (50 x 40 x 20 cm) 54060 $4,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Parrot, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, shells, velvet, freshwater pearls, spray paint 27 1/2 x 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 " (70 x 40 x 40 cm) 54069 $8,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Transmission, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, shell, wool, freshwater pearls, ink, spray paint 29 1/2 x 15 3/4 x 11 3/4 " (75 x 40 x 30 cm) 54065 $10,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Reception 2, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, freshwater pearls, ink, spray paint, wool 23 5/8 x 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 " (60 x 30 x 30 cm) 54066 $10,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Cat, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, velvet, linen, bohemian crystals, ink 27 1/2 x 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 " (70 x 40 x 40 cm) 54059 $6,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Felt 4, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, felt, spray paint 9 x 8 5/8 x 7 7/8 " (23 x 22 x 20 cm) 54073 $4,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Falcon, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, velvet, onyx, freshwater pearls, ink, spray paint 27 1/2 x 23 5/8 x 19 5/8 " (70 x 60 x 50 cm) 54067 $15,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Monkey, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, shells, velvet, linen, faux fur, velvet ribbon, ink, spray paint 27 1/2 x 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 " (70 x 30 x 30 cm) 54061 $6,000

Anna-Wili Highfield Felt 3, 2017 Spirit Faces brass, spray paint, velvet, ink 11 3/4 x 10 1/4 x 7 7/8 " (30 x 26 x 20 cm) 54074 $4,000

Once after dinner Anna-Wili Highfield took up her napkin and, in a few practiced gestures, laid a linen horse’s head tenderly on the table. All of her work has this ease and friendliness, like tokens of goodwill between her and the viewer. Highfield is an animalier, she has for some time created an exceedingly well observed and realistic paper menagerie. Taking this everyday, commonplace material, with a few studied tears and cuts, and sewn together often with thin tendrils of cotton thread, sometimes painted with watercolour, the animals are fragile yet strongly present. They reach out to the viewer like magical totem animals, finding some sort of sympathy through shared vulnerability.

In this body of work there is a sustained move towards more traditional sculptural materials: brass, pearl, wood.

However the works still resist the heroic and the permanent. The work is not shy, but doesn’t exclaim, it wants you to come closer to it and explore in a collaborative effort; the works remain playful and open ended. In Transmission 2 for example a breast is conjured quickly through a curved piece of brass, painted white and pink, conjoined with a similarly curved found shell. In a joyful move, a squirt of milk, like some baroque Madonna Lactans, is represented by a pearl atop a whitened brass rod.

Even with these more permanent materials, with their hard edges, Highfield manages to retain the feeling that the work comes in to being easily and could equally fall apart. It feels in a way underdone like a dream. In the shift from scissors to tin snips, Highfield has had to innovate a language which makes brass seem soft and malleable.

One strategy used in Transmission 2 is a spray of white paint, with a pink blush, that on one hand fades out the brass, dematerialising it, and at the same time unifies everything (while not wholly coalescing). The wire armature also shows the workings of the structure never letting it become too complete. Highfield’s work always has the immediacy of the maquette.

The other big change in the work is the more obvious presence of the human body and gesture as a subject.

Perhaps Falcon is the intermediary work, with the gauntleted hand of the falconer calling for the falcon to land.

Highfield’s animals seem always in the end to be deeply connected to her. They are if not self portraits at least some sort of stand-in. The image represents something of her own spiritual life or for others maybe her psychological state. In this exhibition though Highfield has confronted the portrait head-on, not through proxy. Her work Self-portrait as Naturalist, depicts the artist as a beast conjurer and mad scholar, in some sort of steam punk mash up of Disney’s Snow White and a post-human Beatrix Potter. The sculptural material demands to be seen as beautiful and tangible (the ebony and shell eyes for example) but something here is worrying and odd.

Highfield seems unable to hold on to the image of herself in this bust, usually the most stolid of genres. It depicts her instead as fragile and humbled, as she falls apart and flits away like a bird.

The airiness of the works suggests the dreamlike quality of the Symbolists and their more famous legacy, the Surrealists. Odilon Redon is full of strange animal/men, Camille Claudel is full of feminine longing and sexuality, and perhaps most famously Edvard Munch created images that were in between the real and the fantastical. It was the Symbolists who allowed the material (or words in poetry) to speak and resonate for themselves beyond the common and rational syntax of things. In Highfields work the pearl or the ebony resonates beyond the work itself. The shell has its own history, its own story that pushes laterally, though still connected, to the image it represents. So for example in Goat, the human hair is an amazing analogue for the goats fur but it is also a voodoo charm, or memento. All of Highfields materials from paper to gold demand to be seen for themselves; they seem to resist their sculptural use.

The Symbolists also began primarily from the abstract, the spiritual and psychological and then sought out an image or a poem that could conjure that feeling in their viewer. I feel Highfield’s work, especially in this exhibition, functions in that way; her animals are emotional states, affirmations of power and resilience, of seduction and vulnerability, that we can all relate to.

As sculptural works this show is characterised by a contemporary hybridity. Highfield has been very interested in the anthropology of objects and various fetishes and totems from different periods. She likes the magic in objects and although in a gallery setting her works lead as sculptures they also allude to different forms, from religious icons to mourning jewellery, from portrait busts to kitsch souvenirs. For example Lion, with its pink finger between its teeth, and its feather boa halo, is confusingly part baroque reliquary, part rocker chic. In most of Highfields sculpture it is life size, as if her work becomes an effigy, a second body, or voodoo doll of thing she represents. I note that there is not much above life size, the size of authority and power; here everything is in direct conversation with the viewer as an equal.

There is something magical about watching Highfield work in her studio, there is almost something of the coven about it. As she takes shells, and drills eye holes and places her own daughters’ hair on an image of a goat, you feel like she is in the work of conjuring. Part modern constructivism, part futurism, part steam punk and surreal, it is very hard to pin down Highfield’s approach. We seem to be at the aftermath of a party with spattered paint, and streamers, feather boas draped over furniture and stained sheets. Although a modernist cliché, it is clear these works are genuinely deeply connected to Highfield’s life, but psychological and material. Although based in her identity, there is however, a lot of poetry for the audience to find. – Oliver Watts, PhD