EMΣT and NEON are pleased to present RIG: untitled; blocks the major, monumental installation by Phyllida Barlow (1944–2023), from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, making it the first presentation of the artist’s work in Greece.

The installation is part of the fourth and final part of What If Women Ruled the World?, a cycle of exhibitions exclusively dedicated to the work of women artists or artists who identify as female. The opening of Part IV is unprecedented, as it represents the moment when EMΣT is taken over by exhibitions of work by women artists – a first of its kind for a national museum anywhere in the world.

Inspired by her urban surroundings, in the late 1960s, Barlow began to incorporate into her sculptural idiom a wide range of ordinary yet unorthodox materials such as cardboard, concrete, plywood, plaster and fabric. Assembled into large-scale, three-dimensional “sculptural collages”, these attest to a deployment of diverse strategies, including accumulation, compounding, juxtaposition, reuse and destruction. The diverse, low-end materials, often complemented by a palette of vivid colours, bear the visible marks of the creative process. They have been cut up and punctured and warped; they have been piled together and suspended from above in the context of a practice that systematically seems to push the boundaries of how sculpture is traditionally produced and viewed, as well as to how it relates to architecture and the notion of space.

Barlow belongs to a generation of British artists that came of age during the Cold War in Britain and she would often recall visiting London’s East End as a child, an area which had been razed to the ground in the bombing raids of WWII. Her sculptural practice thus engaged in dialogue with shifts in the urban fabric: through, as she would say, “a particular archaeology which absorbs present, past, and future: damage, reparation, renewal, reconstruction — these are in an ever-evolving lifecycle which mirrors the decay and renewal of the natural environment.” Seen in this light, her large-scale installations, seemingly precarious and more often than not incomplete, attempt to rethink the boundary between the monumental and the anti-monumental.

RIG: untitled; blocks (2011), on loan to EMΣT from the D.Daskalopoulos Collection, forms part of a broader series of works titled RIG, created in 2011 and presented in the artist’s homonymous exhibition of the same year. As Barlow herself explains, “RIG as both a verb and a noun is an ambiguous term, suggesting a fleeting gesture of improvised repair or the result thereof: ‘Rigging something up’ implies a kind of temporary gesture. I think the verb ‘to rig’ is both to fix something slightly fraudulent but also to improvise with a way of fixing something.”

The installation RIG: untitled; blocks occupies the Museum’s largest exhibition space. An imposing, densely populated assemblage of colourful sculptural objects, almost ten metres high, it unfolds across the room interrupting the routes of viewing and redefining the terms by which the exhibition space and its particular parameters – its height and volume – are perceived and experienced. The installation’s equivocal (non)monumentality plays out in sharp counterpoint to the mundane, often playful quality of the materials, whose specific blend of the buoyant and the sturdy, as much as their precariousness and exaggerated scale, seem to undermine the very laws of gravity, balance and symmetry.