The Anya Gallaccio exhibition you see at Turner Contemporary will not be the same as the Anya Gallaccio exhibition I saw. In the brief interval between my visiting Preserve, and the publication of this review, certain objects will have diminished and others flourished. As with sensitive entities of the natural realm, each artwork in this exhibition has its own intrinsic seasonality.
La Dolce Vita, first staged in 1994, is a bank of candles melting into freeform waxy puddles on a huge sheet of foil. The candles are replaced as they melt. By show’s end they will flicker atop a wavy mass having constructed their own sculpture with only the barest intervention. To visit during its earliest phases of growth is to encounter the work before it accrues charisma.
