Ceal Floyer tests, teases and skirts around the boundaries of what art can or should be in her first exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Milan, which coincides with a major presentation of her works at Museion in nearby Bolzano (1 February – 4 May, 2014). Floyer’s 2008 work, Taking a Line for a Walk, in which a machine that creates the white lines on sports fields is driven around until it runs out of paint, takes its title from Paul Klee’s assertion in the introduction to his Pedagogical Sketchbook of 1923 that a drawing should be: “An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for walk’s sake” Floyer’s own meandering line through space – a performance and a sculpture, as much as a drawing or painting – will be recreated throughout the galleries, drawing visitors downstairs and outside. A strip of grass in the courtyard, entitled Greener Grass (2014), will indeed – as the old saying goes – seem brighter than its counterpart in nature and more vivid than real life, but only when viewed from the other side (one aspect having been painted a brighter shade of green than the other).

Another genre-defying sculptural work, Press (2014), is a single sheet of creased newsprint with the sole impression of a hot iron placed at its centre, presumably an attempt to iron out the imperfections in the paper. A new photographic piece and a another new sculpture will also question what we are seeing and hearing, with a child’s spinning top having been stopped in its tracks through the process of transferring it from film to still image, while an audio piece will reiterate and echo a song concerned chiefly with the visual medium of video. Floyer’s survey of recent work at Museion, also in northern Italy, features ten installations from the past two decades of her output, including Scale (2007), an assemblage of speakers resembling a flight of stairs leading up to a ceiling that plays the sound of what could be ascending steps; Drop (2013), a film that waits for beads of water to drip and Exit (2006) that removes the drawing of a door from the sign for an emergency exit, thus creating another exit entirely.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery