Roger Hiorns, Untitled, 2022, Royal Academy of Arts, London

© Roger Hiorns. Photo Royal Academy of Arts, London (David Parry)

For the 2022 Summer Exhibition, Roger Hiorns presents Untitled as part of his 1999-ongoing series Youth. Untitled, 2022 features a naked young man, performed by Kieram Corrin Mitchell, posing on a jet engine for 27 performances between 22 June - 17 August, lasting between 8-15 minutes.

Since first showing this work in the late 90s in Deptford, London, Hiorns’ interest was solely in presenting the human against apparatus. The series presents the artificial surfaces within the world and looks at how we behave in relationship to them. The aircraft machinery was selected for its explicit position within the distinction of worldly power and was taken from a serving military vehicle. In other iterations, some objects are simply benign and easily overlooked.

Roger Hiorns makes works of art whose particular aesthetic lies somewhere between the representational and non-representational, and so disrupts our expectations of the boundaries between them. His sculptures have a seemingly straightforward, functional material presence, but this is always combined with an element which provides a sense of the imaginary, the poetic or the esoteric. The tension between these two aspects is a vital part of Hiorns’ work.