DISCOVERY
ALEX CHINNECK
HE TWISTS MAILBOXES, melts buildings and turns automobiles on their heads – British sculptor Alex Chinneck's art is the kind that upends your senses with its sheer ingenuity. Hailing from Bedfordshire, just outside London, the artist fell in love with painting as a child before honing his sculptural practice at the Chelsea College of Arts, where he started using materials typically associated with architecture, such as bricks. “That experience opened my eyes,” says Alex. “Familiarity and repetition can become a cage to creative freedom. I work very hard to maintain flexibility, and allow new materials and processes to give birth to new ways of working.” This ethos has spurred Alex’s extraordinary portfolio of surrealist sculptures that defy reality, from A Sprinkle of Night and a Spoonful of Light – which debuted at this year’s Milan Design Week, depicting the front of a 17-metre-wide building being torn off – to his favourite, Telling the Truth Through False Teeth, which involves 312 identically cracked windows using 1,248 pieces of glass. //
他扭曲郵箱、融化建築物、轉動汽車車身——英國雕塑家Alex Chinneck的純粹風格能顛覆你的感官體驗。他來自離倫敦不遠的貝德福德郡，自小熱愛繪畫，後來入讀Chelsea College of Arts接觸到雕塑後便沉醉其中，開始運用跟建築有關的物料，例如磚瓦。「那時的經驗令我大開眼界。」Alex說:「熟悉感和重覆的設計可能會限制了創意。我努力保持靈活思維，嘗試新物料和過程來製造前所未見的製作方式。」這種理念刺激他創作出多個令人意想不到的超現實雕塑作品，包括在今年米蘭設計周登場的《A Sprinkle of Night and a Spoonful of Light》，是一座被撕下牆面、闊17米的建築，還有他的得意之作《Telling the Truth Through False Teeth》，利用1,248塊玻璃製成312道損毀了的窗子。//