About the Artwork

Please note this artwork is no longer on display.

 

The Spectacle is an ambitious site-specific installation comprised of seating, lighting and sculpture. Situated in a busy thoroughfare for pedestrians, these striking visual devices perform collectively as a meeting place, or somewhere to pause. Highly stylized colours and motifs are borrowed from the language of foodstuffs and confectionary. Glossy, synthetic ‘skins’ of paint give the work a colourful pop status, a chameleon appearance and an almost edible quality.  The work is a coming together of natural forms and saccharine colours, generating a dynamic physical presence in the urban landscape.

Year: 2019

Copyright the artist, Photo: © Nick Turpin

Material

Marble, granite, limestone, basalt, powder-coated steel, stainless steel, bronze, cast iron, concrete, reinforced plastics, glass, pigments, nylon, light fittings

Dimensions

Dimensions variable

Artist Biography

Jonathan Trayte

Jonathan Trayte (b. 1980, Huddersfield) received a BFA from University of the Creative Arts Canterbury in 2004 and a postgraduate diploma in Fine Art from Royal Academy Schools in 2010. Recent exhibitions include New Sculptural Presence, Nilufar, Milan (2019); Fruiting Habits, Friedman Benda, New York (2018); The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Dream Works, Kate MacGarry, London (2018); SCHUSSBOOMER, Castor Projects, London (2017-18); Tropicana, Christies, London (2017), Identify your Limitations, Vitrine Basel, Switzerland (2017); Milk, Christies, London (2016), Polyculture, The Tetley, Leeds, UK (2016); Experiments in Consuming, The Kings School, Canterbury, UK (2016); The Shoppers Guide, Converse X Dazed at Royal Academy of Arts, London (2015). In 2016, he was awarded the Fashion Arts Foundation Award by the British Fashion Council and was the recipient of Time Out Istanbul Residency in Turkey in 2014. Trayte’s approach to making sculpture and installation is informed by our global language of consumption and the manipulation of consumer decision-making. Using a wide range of materials, methods and processes, his work reinterprets modern consumer behaviour and explores the psychology of desire through surface, material, light and colour. The work is a coming together of natural forms and saccharine colours.