Crash, bang and bloody wallop: American artist Nancy Rubins’s vertiginously and worryingly balanced art looks like an explosion in a garden centre. They’re ludicrous, really: huge assemblages of animal sculptures, somehow tethered together into ornate shapes. Silver alligators and stags are strapped to golden giraffes and tigers, forming a sort of zoo-tree mash-up. There are flamingos and turtles, horses and pigs, too, all held together by networks of criss-crossing wires, looking like they’ve been chucked from a height and frozen at the moment of impacting the ground.
There’s a palpable sense of tension here, of precariousness, of things barely held together. Two big wall works of crumpled steel sheeting reinforce a brutish, just-smashed aggression that seems to pervade the whole show.
With these huge, mangled animal sculptures, Rubins shows that she’s a bold, angry, impressive artist, but she’d be a terrible Noah.
@eddyfrankel
