Untitled (Personages Series) 1953

Bourgeois created the Personages sculptures to represent people that she had left behind in France when she moved to America in 1938. Living in New York with her husband and three small children, the sculptures became a tangible link to the past. Some of the Personages were later cast in bronze, but initially they were all carved in wood so as to be lightweight and portable. The sculptures’ size relates directly to Bourgeois’ own body, and they are deliberately designed to evoke a human presence. The Personages are portable surrogates for much-missed loved ones (or in one case, a much-despised acquaintance), and are intrinsically linked to the issues of loss and guilt that Bourgeois and many other émigrés experienced after leaving Europe

*This sculpture will be on display until 6 June 2021.

Boîte-en-valise 1935-41
Box in a Suitcase
Facsimile of the series G edition
1968

Duchamp initially had twenty ‘luxury editions’ of these sets fabricated during the late 1930s as it became apparent that he would have to leave Paris. The cases fold out to reveal small-scale reproductions of Duchamp’s work, including Fountain, Nude Descending a Staircase and The Large Glass, along with tiny versions of his readymades to form a miniature museum of his work.

Further editions were authorised in later years, including this one from 1968. Although these objects complicate the idea of original versus reproduction, Duchamp viewed them as original artworks in their own right. That Duchamp felt the need to have these cases made is highly suggestive of the geopolitical circumstances that required Duchamp and so many others to leave Europe.

La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même (Boîte verte)
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box)
1934

Duchamp’s The Green Box was the first of his miniature museums, and was originally intended to provide a reconstitution of his thought processes during the creation of one of his most famous works: The Large Glass (or The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, to give it its full title), made between 1915-23.

The box contains ninety-two sheets of Duchamp’s notes, along with a small reproduction of the artwork, creating a portable archive of what is arguably one of his most mysterious and impenetrable works.

Untitled (B81051) 1981
S-B-7 (B81057) 1981
Untitled (B79002) 1979

Hannelore Baron’s box constructions, made from scraps of wood, fabric and found materials, stem from the artist’s traumatic childhood in Germany. Born in 1926, she fled Germany in 1939, ending up in New York in 1941. With no formal fine art training and no knowledge of developments in the art world, she began making collages and boxes, which became increasingly politically engaged throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The materials are damaged and the forms are enigmatic and secretive – analogous to the artist and her experience of the world.

Clown (Laughing Stock)
2020

Ashley’s inflatable artworks sit somewhere between painting and sculpture. Parenthood was a key factor in the development of her working methods. Initially inspired by her children’s toys, and also by the necessity to store work easily, Ashley developed her hybrid painted inflatable sculptures.

Working in this way allowed her to make very large sculptures in a comparatively small space, and to pack the objects away easily when not working on them. A second key factor is that the sculptures also allow her, as a female artist, to literally take up space with her work, in a subversion of the scale and flatness of traditional abstract expressionist painting.

Valley Suitcase
2002

Hewlings usually makes very large sculptures, which engage with their surrounding architecture to manipulate and activate space. In this instance, Hewlings works on a much smaller scale to produce a mobile work, which can be packed down for transportation and storage.

The perennial logistical problems of making and keeping huge, heavy objects are surmounted by allowing the sculpture to ‘grow’ almost organically from its suitcase home, like a snail from a shell.

Studio Objects
2014-ongoing

James Ackerley has been making meticulously constructed flat pack sculptures for several years, in a contemporary reading of the modernist ideal of the autonomous sculptural object.

Originally made of cardboard, the sculptures are designed for swift disassembly, since Ackerley has had to move studios so many times during the last five years. They pack flat and allow the artist to store and move them at a moment’s notice – symptomatic of the difficulties faced by young sculptors who are unable to find permanent studio spaces.

Revisiting the series in 2020, Ackerley has remade the sculptures using a range of woods and building materials: the shift to more stable materials reflects his recent move to a more stable studio space.

Chicago Black
1949

Calder’s mobiles are not only mobile when installed. He designed them essentially as flat packs. The sculptures are intended to come apart, with components that could easily be sent abroad without attracting the attention of customs. The mobility of Calder’s sculptures is partly for reasons of sculptural innovation, and partly for reasons of economics.

He had always designed his sculptures to be portable: most famously, his Cirque Calder 1926 was a miniature moving circus model, which fitted into two suitcases so that Calder could transport it easily and give circus performances for his friends.

Green Zone 2019
A Refugee Nation 2015
Untitled (Munitions Case) 2018

Hafez’s intricately detailed miniature worlds depict the decimated cities, apartments and monuments of his native Syria. In the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, and later the outbreak of civil war, Hafez was unable to return home, and began to create these scenes as a way to deal with his unbearable nostalgia.

Here, the suitcase is emblematic of the experience of the refugee, and becomes a powerful illustration of Edward Said’s description of the life of the exile: forever trying to create a new world that somewhat resembles the old.

It is easy to despair in the face of suffering and destruction, but Hafez includes particular phrases from the Quran which remind us that there is always hope.

A-Z Escape Vehicle, owned and customised by Bob Shiffler
1996

Zittel’s Escape Vehicles are based on the idea of a mobile home, and can be hooked up to cars and trucks. However, Zittel envisaged them being equally useful in a garden or even inside a house, providing a space of escape specifically customised for a single individual.

While Zittel has been influenced by the Bauhaus ideal of uniting art and life, many of her sculptures speak to a profound sense of atomisation, geared towards the individual as a single social unit, rather than the collective ethos of the historical avant-garde.

Hub, Wielandstr. 18, 12159 Berlin
2015

Do Ho Suh’s fabric sculptures reproduce architectural features and sometimes entire buildings from memory. These are places in which the artist has lived in the past, and which now travel as translucent replicas.

The delicate, floating structures reflect on the idea that home is a memory, rather than a physical location. Making the sculptures from fabric and wire enabled him to easily transport them in a suitcase, and thus the sculptures have become symbolic of his peripatetic existence.

Convexity / Concavity
2015

Liz Ensz’s work consists of large-scale silkscreen prints of images from Google Earth showing the impact of human activity, which are arranged on top of piles of ‘the best local trash’ to create provisional landscapes. Ensz originally created specially designed structures for the silkscreened fabric to drape over, but found that these vastly increased the costs and complexities of exhibiting the work.

In a more sustainable approach to making sculpture, the prints are now rolled up into a rucksack and bases constructed on site from whatever can be found – the best local trash – at the exhibition’s locale. The work thus becomes both infinitely portable and completely site-specific.