Mark Handforth’s sculptures imbue the almost-invisible features of our lives – street lamps, road signs, fluorescent lights and fire hydrants – with formal properties that make them strange, larger than life, enigmatic and off-kilter. They are meticulously crafted, but deliberately imperfect, often containing wry humour and poetry in their references and arrangement. Seemingly strong and durable materials like metal and resin are mangled and deformed, becoming surreal objects. These sculptures are often deposited on their sides like the detritus of fallen worlds, having buckled under invisible pressures. As such, Handforth translates the bewildering scale and vertical imperative of the cityscape into dynamic compositions that register the momentum and implicit violence of their referents: an early sculpture of a Vespa is covered in burning candles and becomes an altar; a streetlamp is twisted into the shape of a five-pointed star, and a piece of driftwood is cast in concrete and juxtaposed with fluorescent lights. But while his works have a sense of distortion and manipulation of features of the urban environment, they also retain an archaic and poetic sensibility. His use of enlargements might recall the legacies of Pop art, but Handforth shifts his aesthetic position towards a post-punk paradigm through his incorporation of burning candles, aerosol paints and a general atmosphere of disarray and chaos. Handforth has undertaken several large-scale sculptural commissions in public spaces such as Central Park and Governors Island in New York City, Porte de Bagnolet in Paris, and the plaza of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Mark Handforth was born in Hong Kong in 1969 and grew up in London. He lives and works in Miami. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at San Carlo, Cremona (2022); Modern Art, London (2019); ICA Miami (2017); and Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa (2016). He has participated in recent group shows at Modern Art, London (2021); the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach (2020); MOCAD, Detroit (2017); Weserburg | Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen (2016); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015). Handforth’s works are held in collections including Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; Le Consortium, Dijon; MOCA, Los Angeles; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.