The CAS acquires a pair of characteristic lozenges by Lucy Skaer for Aberdeen Art Gallery

A recent acquisition of Lucy Skaer’s series Me, Me, Me, Me, (2012) has been donated to Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum by the Contemporary Art Society. Skaer’s work, which focuses on the agency of material and the plasticity of its meaning, is fully realised in this series – this piece consists of material that has been re-purposed three times since it was created for a piece called Film for an Abandoned Projector in 2011.

Skaer went on to remove the centre of each frame from Film for an Abandoned Projector, showing the resulting film as Margins of July in 2012. The subsequent cut-outs were then cast in resin lozenges — a recurrent motif of hers — to produce Me, Me, Me, Me. In this work she has brought together time-based media and sculpture through a process which renders the film no longer viewable, raising intriguing questions on how we actively perceive art.

Skaer’s practice is diverse, drawing inspiration from literature and history of art, memory and found objects. With a large arsenal of material, Skaer works across film, printmaking, and sculpture to explore traditional categorisations of art operating in play.

The Sculpture Court in the Aberdeen Art Gallery has historically engaged with classicism and the acquisition will be shown in this newly redeveloped place alongside plaster casts of sculptures from antiquity and contemporary works. An ‘antiquity after Antiquity’ is created through interrogating traditional classifications of sculpture and by investigating the sculptural capabilities of alternative media. Skaer’s work is complex and the thoughtful use of unconventional materials helps to bring Aberdeen’s collection up to date in tandem with museum refurbishment.

Lucy Skaer (b.1975, Cambridge, UK) lives and works in Glasgow and London. Graduating in 1997 from Glasgow School of Art’s Environmental Art department, Skaer has built an international career with, among others, solo shows at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); Witte de With Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2016) and Kunsthalle Vienna (2012). She has represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale (2007) and was a Turner prize nominee in 2009. In 2016 she was a recipient of the Award for Artists from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Her work has been shown at numerous venues, including Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury (2016); Tramway, Glasgow (2013); Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute (2013); and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2008).