Must See Art at 180 The Strand

Great art exists to help us see life through a new lens, and to experience fresh, sometimes mind-altering, perspectives on subjects familiar to us. At 180 The Strand this week, where our offices are based, two exhibitions open which offer both.

Universal Everything is a digital media art and design collective that creates compelling hyper-real digital characters, plants and abstract lifeforms that mirror and shift with time.

Their new show, Lifeforms, is their largest UK solo show to date, and the artworks inhabiting the vast subterranean spaces of the building are interactive meaning no visitor will see the same show twice.

The incredible forms, covered in colourful undulating fur, blooming with hundreds of flowers, morphing as they move, are made using subverted cinematic CGI, real-time gaming graphics and augmented reality. They are utterly mesmerising, and deserve to be seen on a large scale, offering viewers an escape into a virtual world.

While Universal Everything shows us what is possible with digital art, award-winning Irish artist Richard Mosse’s video installation Broken Spectre lays bare the environmental impact of deforestation on remote parts of the Brazilian Amazon from multiple perspectives. 

The immersive video installation on show is the result of three years of careful documentation of environmental crimes. Using compelling scientific imaging technology which takes us into microscopic close up of damaged flora and fauna, and skywards to view wide-ranging devastation from above, Mosse makes the ugly truth poetic, beautiful, and quietly devastating. 

"The scale of this catastrophe frequently unfolds in ways that are too vast to comprehend, too minute to perceive, and too normalized to see," says Richard Mosse. "I utilize scalar shifts to move between different temporalities of seeing - from the piercing vision of satellite cameras to the vibrant matter of
interdependent rainforest biome seen by an insect or microorganism." 

A selection of the artist’s photographs from the project will be displayed alongside the installation, including large-scale photographs that have not been exhibited in the UK before. 

Universal Everything: Lifeforms is presented and commissioned by 180 Studios.

Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre is presented by 180 Studios and co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, VIA Art Fund, the Westridge Foundation and by the Serpentine Galleries. A book, Broken Spectre, is also available. 

Exhibitions: 12 October – 18 December 2022 11am – 7pm, Wednesday– Sunday  180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA