Nick Hornby & Sinta Tantra: Collaborative Works

Lobby, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London - 14 January – 15 March 2013

The first exhibition of 2013 in Canary Wharf’s Sculpture at Work series in the Lobby of One Canada Square shows new collaborative sculptures and installation works by rising stars Nick Hornby and Sinta Tantra. For the first time they are making pieces together, a radical development in their practice as artists.

For them the collaboration has been an adventure in negotiation, discovering more about their own ways of working and even more about one another’s practice and skills. They met at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, where both graduated in 2003. They have since pursued their individual career paths, maintaining their friendship forged as students.

Exhibition Curator Ann Elliott had been following the development of Hornby’s work and in 2007 Sinta Tantra’s work was included in an exhibition of graduate students from the Royal Academy Schools as part of the Sculpture at Work programme at Canary Wharf. The idea for the collaboration came from Hornby and Tantra themselves – making this the first occasion on which Canary Wharf has embarked on an exhibition of this kind.

In his recent work, Hornby has favoured the inherent colour of the materials he uses, in the main the white of marble resin. Tantra is a colourist, layering environments with flat colour in abstract spreads and linear motifs. Occasionally her Balinese origins come through in the shape of exotic plants that she merges with more ambiguous imagery.

Curator Ann Elliott explains: “For this exhibition Hornby and Tantra have devised a series of three-dimensional and related two-dimensional works. These include the colouring of Hornby’s white sculptures by Tantra, and maquettes for larger sculptures that draw on Tantra’s colour compositions created by Hornby in partnership with architect Patrick Tantra. Both artists have worked on a striking photographic intervention in the fabric of the Lobby in a further collaboration with photographer Sylvain Deleu.”

A video of animated line drawings by Nick Hornby, An Arch Never Sleeps, which he made in 2011, shows how his sculptures are morphed from the work of architects and modernist masters. Sinta Tantra has made a colour installation Le Bonheur II 2013 for one of the windows in the Lobby of One Canada Square, which relates to a commission she completed in 2012 A Beautiful Sunset Mistaken for a Dawn on the DLR bridge that spans Middle Dock at Canary Wharf.