May 19, 2022
Cornelia Parker: Beauty from Destruction
Tate Britain's 2022 survey celebrated Cornelia Parker, the British artist who blows things up, flattens them and suspends them mid-explosion.
Few artists make destruction so poetic. Tate Britain's 2022 survey of Cornelia Parker gathered the work of an artist who has had a garden shed blown up by the army — then suspended its fragments in mid-air, frozen forever at the moment of the blast.
From silverware flattened by a steam-roller to charcoal from a lightning-struck church, Parker transforms violence and accident into objects of strange, suspended beauty.
Witty, political and quietly profound, her work finds wonder in the moment things fall apart — and one of Britain's most inventive artists got the full retrospective she deserved.
Image: “Tate Britain 2020” — Julian Herzog (Website), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.