Skip to main content

Anya Gallacciogallaccio

Professor

agallaccio@ucsd.edu

Biography
Anya Gallaccio emerged in the late '80s as part of the group of young British artists from Goldsmiths College in London. Since her first appearance in the historic 1988 Freeze exhibition, she has become established internationally, having exhibited at the Sculpture Centre, New York and Palazzo Delle Papesse, Sienna, and completed major commissions, including 'Motherlode' where she collaborated with vintner Zelma Long to make six zinfandel wines in Sonoma Valley. She has exhibited widely in the UK including Camden Art Centre, ICA, and Serpentine in London; the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and Bluecoat, Liverpool. Gallaccio was nominated for the Turner Prize and received the prestigious Sculpture Commission for the Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain in 2003. In 2009 she prepared a major new work for 'Radical Nature' at the Barbican, London. Gallaccio’s works are held in a variety of public collections including Tate; the Arts Council; The British Council Collection; South London Gallery; Victoria and Albert Museum; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Gallaccio is known for her early projects employing natural materials, including a room painted with chocolate (1994), an enormous ice block which melted over the duration of the exhibition in the Wapping Pumping Station (1996) to her intricate lawn design at Compton Verney, (2000). Gallaccio’s work paradoxically shifts between minimal approaches to form and a highly intuitive process. Often using the strategies of minimalism, the grid and modular units, and overturning them through the perishable organic materials she sources, such as fruit, trees, flowers, ice and sugar. The elemental quality of these materials results in natural processes of transformation and decay, often with unpredictable results which are dialogue with land artists 60's including Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria and their interest in entropy.