Artists - Part 40

 Roger Hiorns

Roger Hiorns, born in 1975, is a British artist based in London.

His art is extremely varied.  Above, Seizure, 2008, was created by taking an apartment from a condemned building, physically removing the apartment, and filling it with boiling copper sulfate solution, which gradually cooled, depositing crystals of copper sulfate.  People can now walk through it and see the crystals on every surface.

In 2016, he buried a jet plane.  The act of burying the plane was the art.

His Youth series is also performance art.  It consists of naked youths interacting with man-made objects.  The series has been shown in cities around the world.  This is Andrew McAulay, an English art student, watching a flame that mysteriously erupts at one end of a park bench.  Andrew was one of three students who participated naked in the London exhibition.

In 2014 the Youth series came to New York.  This is a youth sitting on a flat-screen TV.  Although you can't see it in these photos, the public was free to wander around these exhibits, looking at the man-made objects and the naked youths. 

Here's the same youth resting against a cast-stone object.

This is the Youth series at the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, in 2015.  Two youths are visible, and we see the bench with the flame again.

The installation at the Feana Arts Center in Buenos Aires in 2018 involved several naked youths interacting with the man-made objects both outside ...

and inside.

We end with Five Light Bulbs, a 2010 work that was called mixed-media, because it consists of five light bulbs smeared with the artist's semen.  It sold at auction in 2021 for £350 (about $465).  Well, you know the rule:  if the artist says it's art, then it's art.