OVER THE PAST THIRTY YEARS, Mike Nelson has expanded the avant-garde’s long ragpicking tradition. His dense, material work reconfigures the discarded and the obsolete to produce naturalistic installations that subtly reveal their own artifice. The artist’s famously phantasmagoric production avoids didacticism while rousing us from our own ever more dysfunctional neoliberal dreamworld. True to form, Nelson’s survey “Extinction Beckons” at the Hayward Gallery, organized by Yung Ma, was a deliberately off-kilter not-quite-retrospective that was highly self-conscious about its own position within
As the exhibition’s title—an objet trouvé taken from a sticker the artist found on a motorcycle helmet—portends, the histories it conjures are of decline and desperation. Yet the mystery and madness pervading all of Nelson’s creations give them antic and subversive power.
London is currently experiencing a panoply of some great art exhibitions; the Courtauld, Royal Academy, National Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery, et al, are putting on their best shows in years. Consistently progressive is the Hayward Gallery on the Southbank, and never more so than with 'Extinction Beckons', a reworking of key art installations by British artist, Mike Nelson. The title is taken from his first publication in 2000. The exhibition features remastered works including The Deliverance and the Patience from 2001, Triple Bluff Canyon, (2004) and Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster (2014). Since the 1990s, Nelson's body of work has made him, internationally, one of the most influential British artists of his generation, culminating in his nomination for the Turner Prize in 200 for his work 'The Coral Reef', an extraordinary installation of fifteen rooms connected by corridors which, for many, provided an introduction to his surreal, immersive sett