Anya Gallaccio

Amazon.co.uk Widgets

Anya Gallaccio was born in 1963 Paisley, Scotland. She studied at Kingston Polytechnic, London, 1984 - 1985, and Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1985 - 1988. Early in her career she participated in two seminal London group exhibitions, Freeze in 1988 and the East Country Yard Show in 1990.

Gallaccio's work is concerned with constant change and the effects of time. Using a wide range of materials such as cut flowers, fruit, chocolate, ice, burning candles and salt, there is an inevitable impermanence about her work. Her approach most commonly involves setting up an installation which then evolves through the process of decay and disintegration.

For one of her most dramatic works, Intensities and Surfaces, staged at Wapping Pump Station, London in 1996, she built a thirty-two ton stack of ice which melted over a period of three months. More recently she has begun to use more traditional materials for her sculpture and has cast a whole apple tree in bronze. When exhibited, the tree is festooned with real apples which rot over the period of showing and fill the gallery with the scent of the decayed fruit.

Although the short life of much of her work has meant that her installations now live on in memory and through photographic records, over the last decade and a half she has created a major body of work which has given her an important and unique place in British art. Works can be repeated, as has been the case with her pieces using cut flowers and for which she is perhaps best known. Red on Green incorporating 10,000 red roses is such a work. Originally made for her first solo showing in a public gallery, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1992, it was recreated ten years later for the exhibition Blast to Freeze: British Art in the 20th Century mounted by Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2002 - 2003, which then toured to Les Abattoirs, Toulouse. More recently, Red on Green was recreated for the British Council exhibition Turning Points: 20th Century British Sculpture in 2004, the first major exhibition of contemporary art for ten years at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, Iran.

One of the things that has always separated Anya Gallaccio from her Brit-pack contemporaries is her celebration of organic processes. Painting walls with chocolate, decorating galleries with flower carpets, constructing a salt tower to be eaten away by the tide, installing a 34-ton block of ice in a pumping station--these monuments to ephemerality were meant to disintegrate, melt or rot, leaving behind only a memory. Whereas Damien Hirst's fish preserved in formaldehyde and Marc Quinn's blood frozen in refrigerated tanks arrest the processes of decay, Gallaccio's works, like memento mori, remind viewers that death is part of life.

Her latest show, "Blessed," continued to explore such ideas; however, it also represented a major departure for Gallaccio. She produced, for the first time, works that are "haveable" (to use her term), and the new pieces that resulted from this surrender to market realities differ both conceptually and formally from her previous work.

Many of the sculptural objects in the show embodied a Pop sensibility. In one corner, leaning against a wall, was a tiny bronze cast of a twig with berries; nearby, on the floor, were several life-size bronze casts of lima beans and their shells; in the back room were several cast-bronze potatoes, replete with sprouts. An earlier Gallaccio would have presented real potatoes and beans, leaving them to rot over the course of the exhibition. But now, these organic objects are suspended in time. They are secondary, solid objects based on quotidian originals, like Jasper Johns's ale can.

The most astounding piece on exhibit was a bronze apple tree with truncated limbs to which were affixed 400 real, rotting apples, which attracted fruit flies.

The object provoked a slew of associations. Not only does one detect a nod to Cezanne and to New York's nickname but, given Gallaccio's reverence for Arte Povera, a reference as well to Giuseppe Penone, who has exhibited bronze trees with cast leaves since 1999. In Gallaccio's tree, the inanimate meets the animate, creating an uncanny quality that will unfortunately disappear upon purchase, when the real apples are to be replaced by ceramic ones. The overall strength of the exhibition (as is the case with most Gallaccio shows) was the experience of having one's olfactory, aural and visual senses stimulated all at once. In addition to the lingering odour of the scorched plywood floors (the artist's decision), the pungent scent of rotting apples and the buzz of fruit flies were notable. Like most artists working with impermanent materials, Gallaccio has decided to produce unsalable objects. But one is left wondering if her innovative, signature style has been compromised in the process.

AS the British artist Anya Gallaccio concedes, her work is "not exactly art-fair friendly." She once arranged the leaves and petals of 10,000 red roses into a fragrant, Rothko-like Colour Field abstraction that gradually shriveled into potpourri on the gallery floor. She installed a 32-ton block of ice in the boiler room of a disused London pumping station, leaving it to melt away over the course of two months.

At the Sculpture Centre in New York this year, she presented an enormous felled tree, bolted together and held in place with cables, briefly bringing it new life as an artwork. Though she has made what she calls "haveable" or collectible objects — cast bronze trees, for example, hung with red porcelain apples — she is happiest when engaged in "an event, a process — kind of being present in a moment in time."

Her current project, under way in Sonoma County in California, adroitly combines her love of process with an actual physical object. "After the Gold Rush," a collaboration with the winemaker Zelma Long, will culminate sometime next summer in 400 half-cases of six different types of zinfandel.

In many ways the project seems even more conceptual than Ms. Gallaccio's previous endeavours. By making zinfandel, which is pressed from grapes that are particularly sensitive to the precise locale where they are grown, she is aiming to create a portrait of a region, the geologically diverse hills and valleys of Sonoma County. Along the way she is documenting the practicalities and subtleties of the process of making wine, a practice that turns out to have a surprising amount in common with making art.

Ms. Gallaccio's project is part of a larger public art endeavour, "Terrain Terroir," in which artists are being commissioned to make work in response to Sonoma's landscape. Conceived and organized by Sandra Percival, the director of New Langton Arts, a San Francisco nonprofit space, it is partly inspired by the writings of M. F. K. Fisher, whose essays used food as a metaphor for the art of living and who lived on a Sonoma ranch. (She died in 1992.) Another inspiration is landscape art, which in Sonoma County has included Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 1976 project "Running Fence."

Ms. Gallaccio, 43, was invited to participate in 2002, when she was a resident at the San Francisco Art Institute. Initially she considered working with apples, another important Sonora crop. In 2001 she had produced 21 bottles of apple eau de vie to commemorate a project in Switzerland that involved planting heritage apple trees on a remote mountainside. So "I already had an interest in alcohol," she noted.

"Wine tied in quite nicely with a lot of the ideas I had around art making and the art world," she said. "In terms of connoisseurship, there seemed to be a lot of overlap in attitudes and aspirations, plus there's a small collector overlap." Ms. Gallaccio was also fascinated that wine, like art, "is a living thing, and it's unpredictable," she said. "You have to take a risk when you open a bottle."

Ms. Percival put her in touch with Ms. Long, a pioneering California winemaker and consultant. Over the next two years they hammered out the concept, and Ms. Gallaccio, by then back in London, made occasional visits to the site. Early on, Ms. Gallaccio set her heart on making zinfandel, a California wine that is known — rather like Abstract Expressionism — for having no obvious European antecedents. Part of its appeal was that "there's this suspicion around the wine," she said. "People either love it or hate it."

And technically, it can be quite challenging to make, largely because the grapes don't ripen evenly on the vine, "which to me was really exciting," she said.

Initially Ms. Long wasn't wild about the idea. "I didn't realize quite what a difficult thing I was asking her to do," Ms. Gallaccio said. But working with zinfandel seemed a smart way to examine the nature of terroir — "a French term that essentially means the whole environment that the vine finds itself in," Ms. Long explained — because the grape is so especially responsive.

Young British Artists or YBAs also Brit artists and Britart a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

Anya Gallaccio

Top 10 tips for investing in Art

When attending an auction house for the first time go to observe ONLY, without buying first - it's a good way of getting used to the atmosphere of the sale.

· Look out for the condition of the art piece - make sure, as far as possible, that paint isn't flaking, colours haven't faded and that, to the naked eye at least, it is in good order.

· Turn the painting over for any clues to dates signatures or markings to find out where it has come from, if you cannot tell from the front.

· Check for the artist's signature, can it be authenticated?

· With paintings, try to keep the original frame. Where this isn't possible, try to get hold of a period frame. Even the very best modern reproduction could lower the value of the painting. You can repair a damaged frame with silicone and plaster available at craft and art shops online.

· Ensure painting is kept out of direct sunlight, or is properly protected in storage.

· Read up on the artist in Artists who dictionary available at your local Library or online search that name.
· Make a note in the Auction catalogue out how much other works have reached in this sale and recent sales to gauge how much you should be prepared to pay

· Don't just buy because you think the value will go up - there's every chance it won't unless you have heard of the Artist and have knowledge about the artist--Age!!

· Do trust your own taste. Buy a piece of art because you love it. Then if you do decide to sell, the chances are someone else will fall for its charms and give you the price you want. Important Don’t forget to include it in your home insurance, be wise not sorry!