Eva Rothschild. Photograph: Gautier Deblonde/PA
Eva Rothschild has been named the sixth artist to take on the Duveens Commission at London's Tate Britain. Rothschild will follow in the footsteps of former Turner Prize-winner, Martin Creed, whose installation last year featured runners dashing through the Duveen galleries at 30-second intervals. The Dublin-born sculptor, 36, will be the first artist to design a single work that will stretch the full 70m length of the Duveen Galleries. Rothschild says she hopes "to create something that will agitate the architecture of the Duveen Galleries, tangling with your perception of space". An exhibition of Rothschild's work was held at Tate Britain last year. She works with steel, "seedy sex-shop leatherette", strips of rubber, Plexiglas and more, infusing what have been called her "venomous" sculptures with pop-culture allusions. Eva Rothschild's sculptures derive from the abstraction of different visual codes and imagery, rich in iconography that is informed by contemporary culture – music, film, literature – and by religion. She is particularly interested in the way objects have a power over us, especially in relation to religious thought and superstition. This is reflected in her fascination with sacred or lucky symbols, ranging from spheres and pyramids to new age charms. In this way, competing influences are combined to create hybrid forms that explore how meaning is ascribed to things. Her art explores the relationships between volume and mass, surface and structure and how sculpture lightly yet effectively occupies the space and references the art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Minimalism. Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, praised Rothschild for "creating works that beguile with their subtlety and illusion". The Duveens Commission, which aims to highlight contemporary sculpture, has been made an annual event with the financial support of Sotheby's auction house. Rothschild's installation will be unveiled on June 29th at the galleries in Millbank, London, and displayed until November 29, 2009.
