American-born artist Nancy Fouts is best known for her distinctive sculptural works, which reconfigure commonplace objects and materials with a characteristically playful and provocative humour. Combining Surrealism, Dada and Pop Art, her work brings together seemingly disconnected objects and ideas to revel in the inherent strangeness of the everyday.
The exhibition addresses the recurring themes throughout Fouts’ work, such as time, nature, and religious iconography, and includes key pieces from the past decade, alongside new works on view for the first time.
Fouts describes her approach to gleaning ideas as “beachcombing”, rediscovering the familiar with a perspective that she likens to childhood naivety. For Fouts, the childlike viewpoint establishes found objects as playgrounds for invention, (in some cases incorporated as elements of a game such as Skittles Madonnas), unpicking the layers of meaning attributed to the common motifs of daily life and providing a sharp-witted, satirical view of the systems through which symbolic meanings and values are assigned.
Nancy Fouts: Down the Rabbit Hole, Flowers Gallery, London, until 12 May.
