The Palace at 4am: A Group Show curated by Kay Doble and Phoebe Corker-Marin
“This object formed little by little toward the end of summer 1932…it gradually became clearer to me, the various parts taking their exact form and their particular place in the ensemble.”
- Alberto Giacometti, Minotaure Magazine, 1932
The first exhibition at Sarabande Foundation’s new location in Tottenham takes its name from the Surrealist sculpture The Palace at 4a.m. by Alberto Giacometti. A miniature “palace of matches”, Giacometti’s sculpture embodies a fragile dynamic of construction and collapse, developed over a period of six months in a nightly ritual of dreamlike action. It is this process of gradual formation, alongside the delicate balance of the sculpture’s visual language, that provides the conceptual stimulus for the exhibition.
Spanning two floors of exhibition space, The Palace at 4am brings together the work of 17 Sarabande artists in residence. The exhibition extends this balance into works that move between seduction, desire and restraint, compression and release, emergence and withdrawal. Through diverse mediums, tightly bound form and constriction are placed in tension with more open, atmospheric states, producing a charged rhythm across the exhibition.
The show reflects a shared interest in how form is held, altered, and undone - where material and perception become sites of construction and rupture. The works traverse multiple mediums, reflecting Sarabande’s dedication to excellence in craft.
The exhibition is housed across two of the last surviving Queen Anne-style Georgian buildings on Tottenham High Road, a historic route of trade and passage, now the new location for artists in residence at the late Lee Alexander McQueen’s Foundation, Sarabande. Originally built as merchant houses, the restored Grade II* listed townhouses retain traces of their turbulent history: marble fireplaces scorched by fire and paintwork blistered by vandalism during the economic depression of post-war Britain. Now preserved amongst glass panels and contemporary interventions, these remnants reflect the exhibition’s tension between destruction, preservation, and renewal.