Waddington Custot presents two works at this year’s Frieze Sculpture

Waddington Custot is presenting two works at this year’s Frieze Sculpture, curated by Clare Lilley and taking place in The Regent's Park, London from 14 September – 13 November 2022. 

Speaker’s Corner, 2022, is a totemic piece by Argentinian-French sculptor Pablo Reinoso (b.1955, Buenos Aires, Argentina). It is composed of five individual sculptures that emerge from the verdant grass of The Regent’s Park to stand in a semicircle, facing inwards. At its base, each sculpture takes the form of a chair made from black steel bars that extend and stretch six metres upwards into the sky with increasingly free movement. Spreading vertically, the upper fronds of steel appear to flutter in the wind, giving the sculpture an organic quality in spite of the fixed nature of its steel material.

The artwork belongs to Reinoso’s celebrated ‘Garabatos’ series, in which he uses heavy steel to create counterintuitive sculptures of balance and lightness: freed from its physical constraints, the steel takes on a new life, defying the limits of the possible.

The second sculpture is an iconic work by Robert Indiana (b.1928, Indiana, USA; d.2018, Maine, USA), one of the foremost exponents of Pop Art. Indiana – a self-proclaimed ‘painter of signs’ – often converts the written word into paintings and sculptures, referring to them as ‘one-word poems’ that simultaneously celebrate and question narratives about The American Dream.

‘Love’ is a theme Indiana returned to time and again, arranging the four letters of the word into a colourful square formation. Imperial LOVE, 1966–1971 mirrors this arrangement to create a visual puzzle that the viewer walks around to read the word both forwards and in reverse. In this graphic statement, the word’s linguistic attributes melt into abstract blue and red shapes that are nevertheless imbued with emotional resonance. Conceived in 1966, the sculpture has renewed significance for twenty-first century viewers as we question the myriad constitutions of contemporary love.