10–29 July, 2018
Piccadilly Circus
Underground Station

For his first solo exhibition, Behold a figure, Serpentine, London-based artist Louis Morlet presents five clay and latex sculptures, a new video work and an accompanying sound piece. All the materials used to build his sculptures, as well as the instruments with which his eerie sonic accompaniment to the show is recorded, come from clay unearthed during nightly jaunts into London parks. These covert missions to essentially steal surplus material allow the artist to confront his woes with capitalist society in as banal a way as possible.

Representing attempts to understand the psycho-geography of his surrounding city, for Morlet, the sculptures seek an essence of place by ontologically describing landscape through material. Abstracting this landscape and transforming it into something new feels Frankenstein-esque: these sculptures constitute morphed, manipulated and surreal interpretations of place. Whether skin-like, latex light-boxes or a slender and useless clay spear or spade, Morlet’s sculptures exacerbate futility, perverting our associations of what might be expected from a reliable piece of weaponry by using clay, a material associated with fragility. Furthermore, digging up “new relics” posits the artist’s notion of “instant
archaeology” while simultaneously formulating an affront to the passage of time as we understand it.

Louis Morlet (b. 1992) is a British artist living and working in London, UK. Since finishing his BA in Design at Manchester School of Art (2011–2014), Morlet has exhibited widely in group exhibitions in London. Selected exhibitions include 28 December 1980 at Asylum Studios (Suffolk, June 2018), Bring a Cup at Queens Crescent Space (London, March 2018), The Hot Wax at Deptford Space (London, February 2018), The Belly and the Members at Cob Gallery (London, September 2017), Slightly More Cream at Kings X Space (London, July 2017) and Winter Warmers at Swaynes Lane (London, November 2016).