Angela Bulloch | Heavy Metal Stack of Six: Trichrome Blue | 2016

Photography: Kevin J. Miyazaki / Sculpture Milwaukee 

Berlin-based British artist Angela Bulloch creates elegant, quirky sculptures, installations and videos that are rooted in the minimalism of science and math but with a maximalist expression. She plays with the geometries of technology—lights, iPads, computer screens--and brings them alive in ways that suggest night club rather than math club. Her series of “drawing machines” used the grid as its baseline for creation, but the machines were triggered by the erratic behavior of humans. In her work Bulloch embraces this tension between the microcosm of nature and how it is manifest in the elegant, if irregular, beauty of everyday life.

Bulloch’s columns and totems refer to the work of early 20th century pioneering Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), whose “endless column” freed sculpture from the confines of a pedestal. While Bulloch’s modular works reference 1960s Minimalist artists, like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, hers is a 21st century expression relevant to her generation of artists. 

Bulloch’s exuberant palette and irregularly faceted diamond building blocks speak as much to children’s toys and DIY projects as it does the rigidity of Euclidean geometry. Hers is a more fluid integration of the world of science and its’ expression in the world of handmade objects.