Liane Lang

 

Lang works in sculpture, photography and film, frequently combining media in one work or installation. Her work examines the animacy and atmosphere of monuments, statuary and buildings and the biographies and histories they narrate. Lang uses life-like dolls, made in the studio in a life casting process, but also works in clay and bronze. Her practice combines studio based work in a variety of materials as well as creating works on location. The ongoing Monumental Misconceptions project includes both sculptural and photographic work. In 2014 Lang produced a new series of photos with marble statues at Zitadelle Spandau in Berlin, that had been buried underground for forty years to be exhibited later this year.

Lang's key interest is in the formal and aesthetic qualities of intervention, interference and destruction. The nature of materials often presides over the means of damage. The Revolutions series concentrated on statues that were utterly destroyed, from melting, crushing, and breaking to burial in the ground. The new sculpture Horse and Riders friezes a more ephemeral act of iconoclasm, a naked man climbing an equestrian statue, creating a lasting image of an act of aesthetic symbolism and protest.

 

Liane Lang lives and works in London.  Born in Germany she studied at NCAD in Dublin and completed a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College followed by a Postgraduate Diploma at the Royal Academy, where she graduated in 2006.  She has exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad with shows at the Musee de Beaux Arts in Calais (2014); Folkstone Triennial Fringe (2014); Kansas City Art Institute (2013). Recent Solo shows include Verey Gallery, Eton College (2015); Kaleid Editions, Amnesiac Patina Lang's sculptural photo book which won the Birgit Skiold Award at the Artist Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery (2014); The House of St Barnabas, Marcelle Joseph Projects, London (2014), Art First Projects (2013).  Group exhibitions include Sigmund Freud curated by Joseph Kosuth, Vienna (2014); The Presence of Absence  curated by Paul Carey-Kent, Berloni, London (2015).  Projects have included residencies in Italy, Hungary and Latvia, where the artist used photography and animation to stage interventions with monuments from the Socialist era. Her work is held in a number of notable collections including the Royal Academy of Arts, the Saatchi Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum and MOMA, New York.