The Four Horses

This sculpture was selected for exhibition at VENICE BIENNIAL 2021

Booth has invested time into exploring future technology and how he can use it to expand his practice. 3D-scanning and 3D-printing will allow him to capitalise on bringing his ideas from proposal to reality, enabling exploration of scale and project costing. Booth exploits the placement of a work, knowing that this can imbue the work with extra layers so that the encounter will carry expressive meaning and resonate. His art performs a kind of phenomenology that reveals something in such a way that the viewer understands it more perspicuously than they did before. Booths transformative use of process and manipulation of material, in his work, references reinvention and encourages new ways to look.

The Four Horses is his response to TIME, SPACE, EXISTENCE. Taking inspiration first from The Horses of Saint Mark, a sculpture that has existed in different places over time and found its place in Venice; Originally part of a monument depicting a four horse chariot, the classical roman sculptures were placed on the facade, above the porch, of St. Marks Basilica in Venice after the sack of Constantinople in 1204. They remained there until looted by Napoleon in 1797 but were returned to Venice in 1815. The sculptures are now inside of St Marks for conservation purposes, with replicas in their position on the loggia.
His second inspiration is the live chess festival of Marostica that is based on what may be a fabricated legend where the game of chess requires keen intelligence, memory and strategic skills and was played instead of using weapons.

He combined this research to create a work that referenced the battle of chess and the fight to preserve history using the 4 knights in a chess game but rearing as those of St Marks.

In this TIME of climate change the battle is for Venice and its EXISTENCE.