Past exhibition
Tania Blanco
Sometimes you´ve gotta break the rules
September 8 - November , 2022
Press release

Sometimes you´ve gotta break the rules is a site-specific project developed at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. It is a clandestine site-specific ceramics project exploring issues around the perception of the object of art, the RA´s history, the symbols of academic art education and the inherent capitalist structures that model and define the world of art and market.

The core of this project is a collection of ceramic works whose volumes interpret and translate negative volumes from fragments of the casts populating the LDR, the cast corridor and the vaulted corridor. The title of the project, Sometimes you`ve gotta break the rules, comes from a 1980s popular slogan from a well-known burger chain.

The titles of these ceramic pieces (Royal Burgers) play with the dual idea of grilling/cooking and modelling/carving. The resulting abstract objects have no connection with traditional pottery logic (none of them can retain liquids or be of any functional or domestic use) however, they become negative semi amorphous fragments of the Royal Academy School´s history (past and present). These casts, from historic emblematic sculptures, with all their heavy religious and mithological weight, don´t play anymore the rol they used to play in art education. These ceramics solidify and materialize amorphous fragments of the air and void constantly in contact with each of the casts and that temporality and contemporary concepts on art making and representation have transformed.