Suit, Shot with Small Change
1995
The work is displayed as part of the permanent exhibition
Sculpture/ 3D object
Men's suit
173 × 46 cm
Presented as part of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift
Investigating the transformations of matter through the adoption of unorthodox practices lies at the core of British artist Cornelia Parker’s (1956, Cheshire, England) creative method. One of the most prominent artists of her generation, she has become known for her large-scale, often in-situ installations in which she reuses and transforms everyday objects. Employing practices of collecting, destroying, and recomposing objects, the artist elicits their latent stories, often in an ironic and playful mood, in order to shed light on their multiple meanings and origins.
The two works, Suit Shot by Small Change (1995) and Dress Shot by Pearl Necklace (1995), comprise the literal representation of the titles they bear. Using the pearls of a necklace and coins as bullets, the artist shot a woman’s velvet dress and a man’s suit, respectively. The “corpses” of these sumptuous yet now destroyed garments serve as the spectral presences of the protagonists in a fictional narrative, partially alluding to the ironic and subversive use of gender stereotypes.
The Avoided Object (1995) installation is an assembly of objects collected by the artist from the subsoil of Dusseldorf using a metal detector. Through this gesture, Parker symbolically “rummaged” through her past, the trauma of the World War II, and particularly the silence engulfed around it on the part of her German mother. Among the remnants of an archaeological excavation and the waste of the urban environment, the objects on display are suspended from the floor at a height equal to the depth from which they were extracted. The work’s title references the broader body of work entitled Avoided Objects, launched by the artist in the 1990s, in which she experimented with the exploration of our material culture and the “after-life” of objects following the ceasing of their original use. Whether in literal or symbolic terms, the condition of suspension remains crucial in Parker's works, as it suggests a fluid and mutable state of commonplace objects, especially when considered in relation to the notions of static and monumentality inherent in traditional sculpture. As the artist notes, “[My work] is constantly unstable [...] hovering, or so fragile it might collapse. Perhaps that’s what I feel, about my own relationship to the world. It is a universal condition, that of vulnerability. We don’t have solid, fixed lives; we’re consistently dealing with what life throws at us.”
Cornelia Parker was born in Cheshire, England, in 1956. She lives and works in London. Her first major solo exhibition, Thirty Pieces of Silver, was held at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 1988. She has held solo exhibitions in various spaces (selection): Tate Britain, London (2022); Cristea Roberts Gallery, London (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2019); The Palace of Westminster, London (2018); Hayward touring exhibition, UK (2018/19); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016); Whitworth Gallery, Manchester (2015); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2014). In 1997, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. In 2010 she was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and in 2022 she was promoted to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Her works can be found in notable museum and institution collections such as Tate, London; British Council, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fundación la Caixa, Barcelona; MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), New York; and Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut.