ALICE ANDERSON: YEARS AFTER YEARS

Friday 4 November – Sunday 11 December 2011
PREVIEW: Thursday 3 November 7-9pm

CoExist are proud to host Alice Anderson’s new solo exhibition, Years After Years, in which the artist presents a new body of work made especially for the gallery. 

Following her recent exhibition, Alice Andersonʼs Childhood Rituals at the Freud Museum, Anderson has marked a rupture with the figurative and engaged with geometry, which opens new directions in her work.

In this exhibition, Anderson gives shape to an autobiographical timescale, counting days, recalling body changes and organising a series of protective elements.

365 DAYS, shown above, is a sculpture consisting of 365 vertical bars of copper and dolls hair. Stretching from floor to ceiling, the bars divide the whole of the gallery’s space, whilst still allowing the visitor to navigate the area inside. Each bar marks a day of the year Anderson spent in Algeria at the age of eleven. The series of bars suggest a calendar and show a given time and space becoming a ritual space by reactivating physical and psychological states.

TOISE is a sculpture made of 11 plates of copper. Every rectangle corresponds to a year of Anderson’s life, and recalls how her grandparents used to measure her physical growth, marking the wall year after year.

Questioning time, and particularly the passage of time and its ineluctability, Anderson’s dolls hair retains her memories and refers to the rituals completed with her own hair and threads during her childhood.  

In this exhibition Anderson has pushed the material of dolls hair to new boundaries with the series of works skin sculptures by repeating an action of dividing and separating the material itself. This “untraditional” material forms a skin-like surface consisting of many layers. In the Winch Room, these sculptures upon the wall are representing WINDOWS, an escape as well as protection.



Alice Anderson uses her life as a starting point of her work to explore time and memory. For her, the act of remembering is a creative process in which memory is constantly reinventing itself. She creates performances recalling gestures of rituals that she was doing as a child. Taking cues from the post- minimalist movement (heritage of Joseph Beuys), Anderson's new sculptures, open new grounds where neurosciences and Art are confronted.

Born in London, Anderson grew up in Algeria and France. Alice Anderson studied with Christian Boltanski  at L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and completed an MA fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London,  in 2004. 

Recently her work has been shown at Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Riso Art Museum, Sicily; National Taiwan Museum, Taipei; Fondation agnès b, Paris; Riflemaker, London; Busan Biennale, South Korea; Cinémathèque Française, Paris; Fondation Cartier, Paris; All Visual Arts, London; the Freud Museum London and Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Germany.  She is based in London.



CoExist Gallery
C/o TAP (The Old Waterworks) 
North Road 
Southend-on-Sea Essex SS0 7AB
open: Fri: 10am - 4pm; Sat & Sun : 12-5pm (or by appointment)

t: +44(0)7970401541 
e: gallery@coexist.org.uk
w: http://www.coexist.org.uk; www.alice-anderson.org