Moun Room: walking circles around Thomas Houseago’s new installation at Hauser & Wirth

If you're expecting the sculptor Thomas Houseago at his most menacing, you'll be in for a different sort of adventure this winter at Hauser & Wirth. The tribal masks are gone; the lunging, glaring figures have sauntered off. Houseago has flipped his world around to explore the negative space around his plaster beasts. 'Moun Room', Houseago's series of ever-larger spaces assembled at Hauser & Wirth's gallery in Chelsea, New York, is an invitation to explore it along with him, with the viewer playing the figure.
The environment is an immersive 11m by 14m, with 3.5m-high plaster walls - dimensions that are rare in Manhattan, even by real estate standards. But far from brick and mortar, it takes on the crude, rough-hewn plaster quality for which Houseago is famous, with visible iron rebar studs resembling protruding ribs, a corporeal quirk that gives it an anthropomorphic quality. The artist has cut out crescents and circles from the plastered-clay walls, then layered them back on in other places to create a geometric bas-relief. Wandering the 'visual maze' and contemplating these voids and cracked textures is like inhabiting the head of one of Houseago's hollow-eyed bodies.
'Moun Room' refers to the surfaces and shapes in the walls, like phases of the moon. You could also argue that the foreignness of the route is like a moon walk. Yet it also nods to Muna El Fituri, Houseago's post-divorce relationship. The relationship is a departure for the artist, as is the art itself. Houseago has gone to a less aggressive, more successful new place - a place we're more than happy to join him.
'Moun Room' is a reference to the moon-like landscape - and to his new girlfriend, Muna El Fituri. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The environment is an immersive 11m by 14m, with 3.5m-high walls that show the iron rebar studs like protruding ribs. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The walls take on the crude, rough-hewn plaster quality for which Houseago is famous. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Houseago cut out crescents and circles from the plastered-clay walls, then layered them back on in other places to create a geometric bas-relief. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Wandering the 'visual maze' and contemplating these voids and cracked textures is like inhabiting the head of one of Houseago's hollow-eyed bodies. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
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Based in London, Ellen Himelfarb travels widely for her reports on architecture and design. Her words appear in The Times, The Telegraph, The World of Interiors, and The Globe and Mail in her native Canada. She has worked with Wallpaper* since 2006.
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