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Phyllida Barlow’s show of 2019 at the Royal Academy took the breath away from the moment of entering.  Within the classic eighteenth century monumental architecture of Burlington House, incongruous monumental sculptural pieces tower above the heads of the viewer.  A space ship, a giant African market stall or vast sails of dazzling canvas filled the three rooms alongside staggering Grecian pillars, water tanks of gigantic size and tall wonky scaffolds.  Yet these fantasies originate in the exhibition’s own kind of chaos, banged together like those early adventure playgrounds, built by their young users.

 

Imagining great weights invading the space above the heads of mere humans we learn that the work was built of airy materials such as polystyrene and cardboard, and others commonly seen on building sites,  recycled and firmly nailed together, such as wood, cement and plaster. The work was built in situ, creating out of august Burlington House a construction site or an enormous craft workshop.

 

Barlow has her own way of making apparent chaos wonderful, and believable.  Balanced objects, dwarfing the viewer, appeared about to crash to the ground, but somehow we felt completely safe in this stunning environment.  Alongside, perhaps because of,  this precarious existence the whole exhibition was imbued with humour.  Through its mix of swinging ropes, circles that were not round, squares that were not square, and what seemed like extra pieces, kind of humanoid, rather fantastical, that overlooked the whole thing from the sidelines.

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