Explore Francis Upritchard's 'In die Hoehle' Exhibition: Challenging Sculptural Installations and Cultural Narratives

This exhibition features Francis Upritchard's unique sculptural installations, which present colorful figures in worlds adapted to found objects and custom furniture. The work challenges viewers' perceptions and prejudices by questioning value judgments of materials and contexts.

Francis Upritchard creates sculptural installations inhabited by brightly painted human figures amidst a carefully curated selection of found objects and custom-made or found furniture. The presentation and artistic craftsmanship are as central to her work as the figures themselves, with the exhibition space playing a crucial role in the artwork's meaning. Upritchard subverts conventional hierarchies of materials and contexts; her figures, whose identities and backgrounds remain ambiguous, prompt viewers to question their own value judgments and prejudices. These arrangements construct artificial worlds where figures embody the diversity of human existence, exhibiting introspection, joy, distress, or discomfort. Upritchard cleverly recontextualizes everyday Western cultural items into artifacts of fictional archaic cultures, transforming objects like badminton rackets into scepters and mass-produced Victorian vase imitations into urns. For the Secession, Upritchard developed a new installation titled 'In die Höhle,' exploring themes of the institution's exhibition history and countercultures like the Hippies and New Age movements. The installation questions established cultural attitudes towards the 'exotic' and the distinction between 'critical' and 'decorative' art, examining the idea of popular art through a juxtaposition of mundane cultural concepts with those that are excluded or rejected. The figures, illuminated by chandeliers inspired by the Wiener Werkstätte, are detached from their original contexts (such as Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze or Sol LeWitt's wall drawings) and recontextualized to tell new stories.

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