Quayola is a visual artist based in London. He investigates dialogues and the unpredictable collisions, tensions and equilibriums between the real and artificial, the figurative and abstract, the old and new. His work explores photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations and performances.

However, for The Sculpture Factory, which he is developing especially for MU, he is entering the realm of sculpture. The basic material is provided by none other than his great example Michelangelo: the unfinished series of four ‘Prigioni’, or ‘Captives’, made between 1513– 1534. Quayola was introduced to these images when, as a boy, he visited the Academia in Florence with his mother. By using these sculptures specifically as his inspiration, he is paying homage to one of the greatest sculptors in art history. But what is even more important to him is his focus on the process in which the material is shaped. In this creative cycle, the hand of the master has been largely replaced by the computer. But the artist is still at the controls.

For Quayola, the subject of The Sculpture Factory is not the final sculpture, but the material. A material which is constantly mutating into endless geometrical shapes, to set eventually as a series of sculptures. From simplicity to complexity, from sharp to smooth, from abstract to figurative. The Sculpture Factory as a metaphor for the complexity of life.