Faggionato Fine Arts is proud to present the first London exhibition of the late Romanian-born American artist Serge Spitzer. Long regarded as one of the most significant artists of his generation the last exhibition in the UK was a survey, Serge Spitzer / Index 1972-1992, at the Henry Moore institute in Leeds in 1994.

A Forty Year Perspective is a selection of works in Spitzer’s career that reflected his development as an important pioneer of post-Minimalist and site-specific art, and convey his enduring concerns with the complexity of meaning, the implications of ambiguity and stereotype for social, historical and metaphysical understanding.

In 1991 Harald Szeemann described Spitzer as “a master at installing this new sculptural quality that makes us so uneasy, that so shocks our perceptual habits... Everything has his own particular signature of commingling – sophistication in the guise of banality, circumspection and innovation brought back into the everyday language of elements screwed together.”

Objects and materials saturated with prosaic content – legal paper, industrial metal, recycled glass, wood, rubber – are re-contextualised in the space they inhabit, displacing and subverting their meaning. Formally precise, witty and direct, works such as Deadload/Deadlock, 1985, foreground the processes and problematic economies of industrial production in their use of milled aluminium and rubber, while simultaneously engaging with their architectural context – About Sculpture, 1984-87, is held by shock absorbers against the walls, while Corridor (Berlin), 1984, transects the gallery space and impedes the flow of viewers through the exhibition. Conversely, works using fused thread on legal paper, all Untitled (Law Blanks), 1994, challenge the conventions of perceptual representation by compelling us to read both the recto and verso at the same time, as the thread lines disappear through and reemerge visible through the thin printed paper.