Keith Farquhar and Sara MacKillop present works exploring ennui and confinement at Office Baroque

From February 13 to March 13, 2021, Office Baroque in Antwerp hosted an exhibition featuring British artists Keith Farquhar and Sara MacKillop. Their collaborative presentation, titled 'Barbecue 2', was staged within the gallery's apartment setting in a residential district. MacKillop created small sculptural houses using file holders for walls and 2021 wall calendars for roofs, with pastel-hued calendars displaying kitsch images of puppies and kittens. One calendar bore the phrase 'We didn't realise we were making memories, we were just having fun'. Farquhar presented figurative sculptures made from found clothing mounted on misshapen boards, including a child's cowboy costume stapled upside-down to a jagged panel in 'Falling and Laughing' (2021). Three additional sculptures titled 'Barbecue' (2020) featured doors with cursorily constructed bows. The exhibition was produced through dialogue between the artists, using immediately available quotidian components created over the past year. While containing no explicit pandemic references, the works inevitably evoked themes of ennui, physical confinement, and psychological privations. Farquhar's clothing-based sculptures have been synonymous with his practice since the early 2000s. MacKillop's works appeared spontaneous and haphazard, as if built to stave off boredom. The domestic atmosphere of Office Baroque provided an apposite backdrop for these explorations of suburban dreams and improvised hardware.