Houseago takes me on a tour of the dozens of giant sculptures he's made over the past year: redwood owls he carved with a chain saw, an eight-foot-tall plaster-and-wood Minotaur, some kind of Goya-inspired child-eating Cyclops... There are also some pleasant domestic still lifes: a sunflower, a coffee pot.
He grew up poor in Leeds, England... There are tales of drunkenness and drug use, bankruptcy and despair, in his history. He tried to work it all out in his art.
It takes up three floors of the Lévy Gorvy Dayan Mansion off Madison Avenue... This exhibition was originally supposed to appear at Gagosian, but when Houseago visited the 24th Street gallery, the space filled him with dread.
'Walk into Gagosian or Zwirner and tell me, Is that a warm environment? See the people at the desks? You see the terror in their eyes,' he says.
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