Featuring an interview with Sina Najafi, an essay by Martin Herbert, and designed by Dominique Clausen, this is the first major monograph on the British-born, New York-based artist Oliver Clegg. An eclectic, polyphonic, and multidisciplinary artist, Clegg’s oeuvre stretches from painting, drawing, and printmaking to sculpture, installation, site-specific art, participatory projects, and beyond. Indeed, his practice is in many ways a shining example of ‘post-medium’ creativity today, pursuing the essence of art itself beyond any specific medium or artform. The irony is, he’s pretty damn good with each artform too.
With his erudite, surprising, and striking repertoire, and his diverse materials and methods (from glass, wood, and steel to neon, resin, and concrete, weaving and casting to engraving and industrial manufacture), Clegg offers the viewer a complex, sometimes playful, other times moving journey into existential and ontological notions of objecthood and matter, images and signs, language and communication, creation and being. From the studio and gallery walls to the streets of London and New York, from Freud’s house to the Joshua Tree National Park, from foosball tables to state asylums, Clegg turns up to do remarkable things with the fabric of spacetime.
And yes, it’s an emotional rollercoaster of a ride – in fact, Clegg’s oeuvre spans a significant proportion of the spectrum of human emotion, his unique trans-Atlantic blend of humor, sarcasm, and wit coming face to face with the much more serious matters of memory, psychology, truth, belief, meaning, love, life, and death. Nostalgia, childhood, games, play, and sentimentality career headlong into the realms of kitsch, Pop, and the history of the avant-garde, resulting in a delightful yet challenging range of responses from the viewer, whether amusement, camaraderie, joy, bemusement, outrage, disillusionment, or a call to arms. Clegg is an artist with great energy, incredible spirit, and one of the most engaging, curious, cryptic, and entertaining oeuvres currently making waves in the world of art.
In many ways an exploration of the id, ego, and superego, Clegg’s practice plays out the struggle between our basic desires, our rational minds, and the underlying mores that keep us in check. Not unlike Freudian notions of the psyche, Clegg’s practice articulates the battle that takes place inside us all on a daily basis, spilling into the outside world in myriad ways. It is a fight, yes, but it is play too.
Martin Herbert is a writer and critic based in Berlin. He writes regularly for Artforum, frieze, and Art Monthly, among others, and is Associate Editor of ArtReview. His essays have been published in catalogues for institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, the Hayward Gallery, and the Serpentine Gallery. He has lectured in art schools internationally, and currently serves on the acquisitions committee for Arts Council England. His monograph on Mark Wallinger was published by Thames & Hudson in 2011; a book of essays, ‘The Uncertainty Principle’, was published by Sternberg Press in 2014.
Matt Price is a London-based arts publisher, editor, and writer. He has published approaching fifty books and catalogues under his Anomie imprints, and edited publications for other publishers including Phaidon, Rizzoli, Thames & Hudson, and Hatje Cantz. He has compiled and written two volumes of The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting.
Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine and the editorial director of Cabinet Books. He has curated or co-curated a number of exhibitions and projects, including for the Sharjah Biennial, for The Canadian Centre for Architecture, for Manifesta 7, and for Documenta 12. Together with Jeffrey Kastner, he commissioned and edited the 24 essays in the catalogue accompanying the 2013 Venice Biennale exhibition ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’. He has taught at Cooper Union, Yale University, and the Rhode Island School of Design, and holds degrees in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University.
