Though his first love is music, Jim Lambie is celebrated for his
mixed-media sculptures and installations, into which he incorporates the
detritus of popular culture and neon-bright colors to create
hallucinatory, site-specific meditations on industry, art-making, and
contemporary life. Claiming that he wants to set up “intense
psychological spaces,” Lambie transforms various sites, including
Scotland’s inaugural pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, while staying
true to their architecture. In his “Zobops” works (begun 1999), which
launched his career, he covers floors with multicolored strips of tape
in patterns that simultaneously dissolve and follow architectural
features. His practice is underpinned by his interest in Colour theory
and music, the psychological resonance of space, and utopian artistic
movements. Like rock-n-roll, Lambie’s work is edgy and exuberant, and
surrounds viewers with a mashed-up vision of the world in which we live.