Brian Eno extends his ambient realms with these environment-altering sculptures

The acclaimed British musician, producer and multimedia artist Brian Eno has always had a fascination with the physical presentation of sound (see his Wallpaper Design Award-winning turntable). Eno’s new show at Paul Stolper’s gallery in London centres around one of his recent sculptural sound pieces, Filopendula (2021), a one-off composition of speakers arranged like flowers in a ceramic vase.

‘Brian Eno / Dan Flavin’ at Paul Stolper, London

Named for the genus of rangy flowering plants that includes queen-of-the-forest and queen-of-the-prairie, Eno’s object references his fascination with electronics of all stripes. ‘I’ve always loved loudspeakers, just as things,’ he told gallerist Paul Stolper, ‘Before I joined Roxy Music and when I was in the band in the beginning, I used to buy up old loudspeakers and make new cabinets out of them. I loved seeing how I could change the sound by making the cabinet a different shape. I thought why don’t we make speakers like a little event, they’re like flowers.’

This one-off sculpture not only has a biological appearance, but the way it treats sound seems to open up space. ‘I had Filopendula sitting in the corner at my studio, and I would sit here and work on my own at night. It seemed to open up the room to the outside world, it gives that feeling that you’re no longer in a box separated from everything else,’ Eno continues.  

Accompanying Filopendula are a number of lightbox works by Eno, the Soft Sharp / Sharp Soft series, as well as Ovation and Still, two vertical neon sculptures. All created in 2023, each is a unique piece that references the composer’s pioneering work in the genre he effectively created, Ambient. ‘It was really an attempt to make music that was more like painting,’ he once wrote, ‘a kind of music that pretty much stayed in one place and didn’t tell you a story: it was a kind of atmosphere or condition that you could enter and leave when you wanted.’ The pieces reflect and evoke these shifting environmental conditions. 

Eno’s pieces are paired with work by pioneering American artist Dan Flavin (1933-1996). Flavin’s use of fluorescent tubes continues to fascinate, thanks to the subtle shimmering of the light quality, their eerie colour palette and the soft glow they cast on their surroundings. The gallery is showing three of Flavin’s editions, Untitled (to Barbara Nüsse), 1971, Untitled (for Ad Reinhardt) 2e, 1990, and Untitled (for Eric Zetterquist) 1, 1990, and they make a perfect pairing with Eno’s subtle environmentally-altering works.  

‘Brian Eno/Dan Flavin’ is at Paul Stolper, 31 Museum Street London WC1A 1LH, until 25 August 2023, PaulStolper.com