Richard Wilson 20:50, 1987 (installation view)
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" - but oh, Kitty! Now we come to the passeage . You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking Glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing room wide open: and its very like our passage as far as you can see, although you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it somehow, Kitty. Lets pretent the galss has got soft like gauze, so that we can get through.
Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll20 : 50, RICHARD WILSON's new piece at MATT'S GALLERY, turns the gallery itself into a mould into which 200 gallons of used sump oil have been poured. The liquid forms a dark, horizontal reflective plane, whose stillness and depth contrasts with the frozen tension of a block of ice on the adjacent wall to suggest different ways of stopping time. The piece explores formal sculptural ideas of darkness, light and translucency, and the process of transformation through which both substances came to exist.
Each of RICHARD WILSON's pieces is temporary and influenced in part by its setting. All his work has a monumentality of scale, and takes on the architectual space in which it is made. 20 : 50 is WILSON's second show at MATT 'S GALLERY and his first major exhibition since his inclusion in "Aperto" at the 1986 Venice Biennale and his one man show at the Ikon Gallery in March 1986.