Simon Starling
b. 1967
Simon Starling was born in 1967 in Epsom, England. He attended the Maidstone College of Art from 1986 to 1987, Nottingham Trent University from 1987 to 1990, and the Glasgow School of Art from 1990 to 1992. Starling’s works point to connections between the history of Modernism and contemporary globalization. For Le Jardin Suspendu (1998), he crafted a radio-controlled airplane from balsa wood, cut from a tree in Ecuador, and flew it above a Modernist villa in Melbourne, Australia. In Inverted Retrograde Theme, USA (House for a Songbird) (2002), the artist made models of buildings based on housing projects in Puerto Rico designed by the architect Simon Schmiderer in the early 1960s, adapting Schmiderer’s designs according to Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone notational system for Modernist music. Bird in Space (2004), an enormous slab of Romanian steel supported by helium-filled rubber jacks, refers both to the recent history of international steel trade tariffs and to Constantin Brancusi’s 1926 sculpture of the same name, which upon reaching the United States for an exhibition in 1927 sparked a landmark court case on what could be legally defined as art. Starling’s recent works po…
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