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Factum Arte worked closely with Shirazeh Houshiary over a period of six months to materialise the new body of work for the artist's first solo exhibition in China. 'Rhizome' opened at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai from March 6th until May 7th 2023.
Nine architectonic aluminium sculptures formed the site-specific installation Maelstrom. The glass brick tower Pneuma and the two twin sculptures Just So were also on display.
Factum Arte's ongoing collaboration with photographer Bernd Nicolaisen involves experimenting with materials and new ways of transforming the complex subjects of his work into visual form. Since 2018, Bernd has come to Factum with a number of challenges that required creative printing solutions. We have solved these by bringing surface and form to frozen water in glaciers, meteors in deep space, rocks that are over two billion years old and now an ancient Bristlecone pine that is over 4800 years old.
At Factum Arte, the negatives of a series of photographs taken between 2005 and 2009 in Sierra Nevada were printed in layers onto gesso panels or transformed into depth maps that were CNC-milled in alabaster.
Victoria Miro just opened a solo exhibition showing a selection of tapestries by Grayson Perry. 'Posh Cloths' (February 3 - March 25) features nine textiles woven on Jacquard looms, made in collaboration with Factum Arte.
Works made in the last eight years are displayed alongside new productions such as Credit Card, A13, Van Eyck, Microprocessor (2022) and Sacred Tribal Artifacts (2023).
More on Factum Arte's work with Grayson Perry
Farah Behbehani has created a new body of work with the elevated printing system for a solo exhibition at Athr Gallery in Jeddah (January 23 - April 15, 2023). And Make Me Light! focuses on a series of embroidered designs made by the artist, which explore Kufic calligraphy and verse composition.
Over forty different designs were digitised using the Selene Photometric Stereo System in order to capture the subtle depth and artisanal qualities of the embroideries. The different verses were combined into twelve distinct compositions that were printed in relief at Factum Arte using the elevated printer. To the naked eye, the resulting print retains the detail of the stitches and beads.
Factum Arte has been working with Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi to transform a drawing into a 10m tapestry for the exhibition 'Painting Poetry' at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (December 15, 2022 - June 11, 2023). The display is the artist's first major solo exhibition in the UK.
Mosul: Panorama of Destruction started as a black-and-white drawing on paper produced in 2017, inspired by the tragic events in Iraq during the rise of the Islamic State and the conflict that followed. The qualities of al-Azzawi's penmanship were one of the features that Factum was able to rematerialise using woven threads of different tones and character.
Jan Hendrix just opened two new exhibitions in Mexico. His tapestry production plays a major role in both displays. The new Burton series of tapestries, woven at Flanders Tapestries on a Jacquard loom, faces a series of silkscreen prints of fractured landscapes. The four new tapestries are on display as part of the solo exhibition 'Atlas' organised at Casa de Cultura Citibanamex – Museo Casa Montejo in Mérida (until May 28, 2023).
The Mythological Landscapes of Yagul series was also on show at 'Seamus Heaney & Jan Hendrix en Yagul' at the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín (CaSa) in Oaxaca (December 26, 2022 - April 16, 2023).
Factum Arte has worked with award-winning filmmaker, writer and artist Martha Fiennes for her new display of Yugen at Volte Art Projects (November 11 - December 12, 2022). Yugen is an AI-driven moving-image artwork that uses cutting-edge coding to create a continuous, self-selective and perpetually self-generating display.
Factum's 3D team collaborated with producer Peter Muggleston to generate a printable 3D file of one of the elements featured in the artwork: a spaceship, inspired by the mythological Indian vimanas. The 80cm-tall object is finished in holographic paint and displayed floating inside a Perspex case.
Works of elegant observational realism are focused on light and form – a constructivist aesthetic that Savelev credits to his 'methodical, scientific background'. These views of the artist’s hometown, Czernowitz in Ukraine, dating back to the 1980s, feel particularly poignant now.
- Michael Hoppen
The Ukrainian artist Boris Savelev is now a refugee in Spain. A new portfolio contains images selected by Boris that cover his creative life from 1971 until 2021, and was recently on display at Michael Hoppen Gallery's booth at Paris Photo 2022.
If you wish to purchase a portfolio, please write to: factum@factum-arte.com
As part of Avant Arte's public art programme, artist Tschabalala Self collaborated with Factum Arte on the creation of her first public work, installed at Coal Drops Yard, London, on October 5, 2022. The 2,40m-tall bronze sculpture started from a drawing by the artist, who closely worked with Factum Arte's 3D sculptor Irene Gaumé to rematerialise it as a three-dimensional piece, cast at Fademesa Foundry in Madrid.
Two other sculptures are also on display as part of the solo exhibition 'Home Body' (October 6 - December 17, 2022) at Pilar Corrias Gallery, London.
More on the project
© Lucy Emms
Shezad Dawood worked with Factum Arte to create his largest sculpture to date. HMS Alice Liddell was unveiled on September 29th 2022 hanging at St Pancras station in London.
HMS Alice Liddell is a 5m-wide sculpture of an elaborate, Gothic revival-inspired spaceship that plays around the station's 19th-century design, blending it with a futuristic and steampunk fiction aesthetic.
Marina Abramović worked with Factum Arte on new site-specific performance-based works for her solo exhibition 'Gates and Portals' (24 September 2022 - 5 March 2023) at Modern Art Oxford, following her research residency at the Pitt Rivers Museum during the summer of 2021.
The concept behind Portal stems from the idea of physical and spiritual transition, which translated into a 297cm-tall portal adorned with 190 selenite crystals jutting from its inner sides. A custom circuit of LED panels, designed by Factum Arte's engineering team, powers the light diffused through the minerals behind the black-painted steel cladding. More on the project
Photography by Thierry Bal. © Modern Art Oxford
Factum Arte worked with Christian Andersson to create Primer for his solo exhibition 'What has yet to take shape will protect me' (22 September - 29 October, 2022) at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art in Lisbon.
Primer started with creating a 3D model of a commercial all-in-one printer, which was scanned using a white light scanner in Factum Arte's studio. The 3D model was then rematerialised as a positive cast in terracotta, which the artist physically manipulated, ripping out its internal workings with his hands. After recording this mutilated clay doppelgänger using photogrammetry, the 3D model was then digitally ‘refined’ before 3D printing and painting.
The Museo Reina Sofía collaborated with Factum Arte to create the weavings included in Leonor Serrano Rivas´ solo exhibition 'Natural Magic', scheduled in the museum from 21 September 2022 to 27 February 2023. Tablas de la Luna is a textile installation that takes its name from the Tables of the Motion of the Moon by Ernest W. Brown (1919), who tried to synthesise the movements and rotations of the moon on mathematical tables.
The series of tapestries was conceived by the artist when observing the similarity between the punched cards once used in music (especially pianola playing) and old Jacquard looms.
After the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, Grayson Perry's Covid Bell was on show at the Founder's Hall of the Worshipful Company of Founders, during their annual Open House on September 10th and 11th.
The Founder's Company, with its first records documented in 1365, is one of the oldest craftsmen guilds in London and still has a very active fellowship. Today it runs three charities which have been successful in supporting a variety of people, many of whom are in the start of their career as either material scientists, or artists who work with metal.
Throughout history, bells have commemorated the dead and also celebrated the living. The Covid Bell continues and updates this tradition, also celebrating the artistic and technical skills of the metalworking industry. The bell was fabricated by Factum Arte and Factum Foundation, cast by Pangolin Foundry, Gloucestershire and tuned by Nigel Taylor working with Nicholson Engineering in Dorset, and was kindly donated by Grayson Perry to revitalise bell making in the UK following the highly publicised closure of Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
"The London Bell Foundry was formed to demonstrate that casting bells has a bright future, and Grayson’s generosity has made this possible. The next two artist bells will be made by Paula Crown and Conrad Shawcross." – Adam Lowe, Director of Factum Arte
Part of the series Fallen Sky, conceived by Sarah Sze in 2021 and made in collaboration with Factum Arte, Wider than the Sky was on display for the solo exhibition 'Sarah Sze' at Gagosian Athens (8 September - 20 October, 2022).
The individual pieces composing the sculpture were cast in stainless steel at Fademesa Foundry from the 3D-printed models created at Factum Arte, paying special attention to the top of the piece: the perfectly-polished surface was achieved by welding a custom-bent curve sheet of metal on top of the cast base, seamlessly joining the two surfaces together.
Grayson Perry's series A Vanity of Small Differences, created in 2012 working with Factum Arte and Flanders Tapestries, was exhibited in Salisbury Cathedral, London (29 June - 25 September, 2022). Comprised of six tapestries, the series tells the tale of Tim Rakewell's rise and fall (based on the main character of A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth, 1732-33), with each work marking a point in the ‘class journey’ of the protagonist.
© Photo by Finnbarr Wester
For the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale, Factum Arte worked with Muhannad Shono on the site-specific installation for the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia. The work was on show until November 27, 2022.
The Teaching Tree is a 260-square-meter sculptural work made of dried palm leaves, blackened and applied over a metallic structure animated by a pneumatic machine. The work expands and contracts inside the space both visually and mechanically, giving it the impression of calm and steady breathing.
Factum Arte and Factum Foundation worked on two facsimiles of anatomy-themed paintings: Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman, from the Amsterdam Museum and Bosch's The Extraction of the Stone of Madness from the Museo del Prado.
'Human Brains: It Begins with an Idea' (23 April - 27 November, 2022) brought together documents, drawings, paintings, prints and books challenged by the words of fiction writers and a collection of interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, neurolinguists and philosophers from all over the world.
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