The exhibition of Alice Aycock is the first to be organised by the Princess Estelle Cultural Foundation, and the artist’s first solo show in Scandinavia. Alice Aycock (b. 1946) lives and works in New York. Her internationally successful career took off in the beginning of the 1970s.
Aycock has been widely recognised on the largely male-dominated art scene, and she is considered to be a pioneer in sculpture thanks to her early works in the field of Land Art. Alice Aycock has taught at leading universities, and has been on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York since 1991. Academic disciplines such as science and art history have been vital sources of inspira- tion in her artistic practice.
She has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial and participated in documenta VI and VIII in Kassel. Her oeuvre is represented in museum collections around the world, including the the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris and the Sprengel Museum in Hannover.
Aycock is also well known for her many public installations, inclu- ding the ones at fourteen different universities in the US. In 2014, a series of seven sculptures were installed on the Part Avenue Malls in New York, entitled Park Avenue Paper Chase, in collaboration with Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin.
The six sculptures featured in the exhibition at Royal Djurgården belong to the “Turbulence” series, in which Aycock attempts to visualise wind and water energy. The artist has experienced wild storms and uncontrollable tornados, and although they can be frightening, she has always been fascinated by them. Along with wind and water, she is also interested in the dynamics of human movement expressed in dance.
In 2018, she was given the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center, which acknowledges artists who are masters of sculptural processes and techniques and have devoted their careers to the advancement of the sculptural field as a whole. She also received an Academy of the Arts Achievement Award in Visual Arts from Guild Hall in March of 2019.