Maria Bartuszová @ Alison Jacques Gallery, London - 'The Butterfly Effect' Exhibition

Maria Bartuszová: The Butterfly Effect

Alison Jacques Gallery, London

14 October – 15 November 2025

Maria Bartuszová 

Untitled, 1982 

© The Archive of Maria Bartuszová, Košice

‘The subtlety of my existence and the subtlety of my strength and brevity of life, alongside the hope I have in the importance and meaning of everything (including my own existence), the way I think and what I do, and the resulting optimism of the ‘Butterfly Effect’, the meteorological discovery of Edward Lorenz whereby the flutter of a butterfly’s wings can cause a cyclone.’

– Maria Bartuszová, 1987-88

Following the critically acclaimed retrospective curated by Juliet Bingham at Tate Modern in 2022, Alison Jacques presents a solo exhibition of work by pioneering Slovak artist Maria Bartuszová (b.1936, Prague; d.1996, Košice). The title of the show, ‘The Butterfly Effect’, is taken from an entry in one of Bartuszová’s unpublished diaries in which she describes how small changes in life and nature can lead to major shifts and unpredictable consequences. Bartuszová’s work reflects how life and art are interconnected with nature’s cyclical processes, expressing how we are all part of a complex and symbiotic ecosystem. The exhibition is realised in collaboration with the Estate of Maria Bartuszová, which was established by the artist’s daughters Anna and Veronika Bartuszová, and her granddaughters Soňa and Sofia, to preserve and share the artist’s legacy. A catalogue raisonné, edited by Gabriela Garlatyová, Curator of the Archive and the Estate of Maria Bartuszová, was published in 2022.

This exhibition spans three decades of Bartuszová’s practice, presenting early works from the 1960s through to the 1980s. Many of these intimate sculptures allude to nature from a female perspective: sprouting seeds, wheat grains, raindrops, and trees in the wind. As Gabriela Garlatyová writes in the catalogue raisonné, in these works, Maria Bartuszová confronts and embraces the transient cycle of a living organism, from germination, birth and growth to disintegration and eventual decay; interconnected with her own emotional experiences. Throughout her secluded life, Maria Bartuszová was little known outside of the local Czechoslovak context, but she continually experimented to create her own unique sculptural identity. Her life was lived through World War II, isolation under totalitarianism and in a society which often overlooked women artists. Still, Maria Bartuszová took on public commissions to support herself financially, and managed her household and young family alongside her studio practice.

This exhibition tells the story of Bartuszová’s groundbreaking sculptural experimentation, including a process she referred to as ‘gravistimulation’. Inspired by an experience with her daughter Anna when playing outside with an inflatable ball, Maria Bartuszová began her radical process of casting with condoms and balloons. Filled with her own breath, Maria Bartuszová poured liquid plaster inside the inflated material, shaping it using pressure, often submerging and manipulating the rubber vessels underwater. The resulting organic and biomorphic forms, moulded through compression and sometimes by binding the hardening plaster with string, become symbols of human vulnerability and the constraints that limit the potential of living things within a finite lifespan. In other works, Bartuszová introduced organic material including tree branches, rocks and stones which she gathered on walks in the Slovak Ore Mountains and on the banks of the Hornád river, near Košice. She embedded these sculptures in her wall-based sculptural reliefs, and created forms in which the plaster is squeezed through and constricted by the weight of the found rocks. In the 1960s and 1970s, Maria Bartuszová also cast in aluminium and bronze, and later in the 1980s, she incorporated man-made materials such as Perspex, utilising its transparency as a poetic metaphor for frozen water or melting snow. In one rare sculptural relief included in the exhibition, she incorporated colour by painting the surface blue.

Bartuszová’s fascination with nature and the sensuality of organic forms extended to participatory work. Her multi-part, haptic sculptures were first introduced into workshops for blind and partially sighted children, where they could be handled and felt, taken apart and put back together. These symposiums were organised and documented by art historian and photographer Gabriel Kladek who, as Juliet Bingham wrote, ‘captured the young participants’ joyful exploration of the sculptures’. Frances Morris, then Director of Tate Modern, wrote in her catalogue text for Maria’s retrospective, she ‘understood sculpture as a sustenance for the imagination and as a stimulant to both sight and touch’.

The later works on show from the 1980s emphasise themes of fragility, fertility and motherhood, as Bartuszová wrote: ‘In the quiet of depression / in the depression of the quiet / I am waiting hidden in the shell / of an egg to be born again’. During this decade, she introduced a new process she referred to as ‘Pneumatic Casting’, often using much larger meteorological balloons, which harnessed the effects of air pressure, allowing her sculptures to transition into fragmented and hollow forms. The metaphor of the egg, a form which first emerged in her earlier work, is perforated and many of her sculptures from this period resemble empty cocoons and broken shells. Through these works, Maria Bartuszová sought to capture the precarity of life, channelling her internal feelings of personal crisis with external threats to the environment and the world around her, as she wrote ‘a tiny void full of a tiny infinite universe’.

Maria Bartuszová was born in Prague in 1936 where she studied ceramics at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. In 1963, she moved with her husband, the sculptor Juraj Bartusz, to the Slovakian industrial city of Košice. In her lifetime, she did not exhibit outside of Eastern Europe but after Bartuszová died in 1996, her work was shown in documenta 12, Kassel (2007) curated by Ruth Noack, bringing international museum interest. Subsequent exhibitions included group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010) and mumok, Vienna (2010) and inclusion in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022). In 2014, Maria Bartuszová had her first solo museum survey Provisional Forms at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (2014) followed by a major retrospective at Tate Modern (2022) which travelled to the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2023).

Bartuszová’s work has been acquired by major museums internationally including Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava; Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Vienna and the Museum Susch, Switzerland.

ALISON JACQUES

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG

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Sagarika Sundaram @ Alison Jacques, London - "Release" Exhibition

Sagarika Sundaram: Release

Alison Jacques, London

14 October – 15 November 2025

Sagarika Sundaram

Atlas (detail), 2023 

© Sagarika Sundaram

Alison Jacques presents ‘Release’, the first UK exhibition of new work by Sagarika Sundaram (b.1986, Kolkata, India; lives and works in New York). Working primarily with raw natural fibres, Sundaram’s intuitive practice of ‘painterly sculpture’ or ‘textile painting’ defies material, spatial, and linguistic boundaries. This new body of work deepens her connection to fibre and felt; nuanced in colour and complex in form, she sculpts space as well as material, incorporating felt reliefs and glass mosaics, as well as a large-scale installation. This exhibition anticipates Sundaram’s forthcoming solo show, curated by Laurence Sillars, at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2026.

‘Release’ alludes to an aliveness in Sundaram’s practice. Born out of the internal space in the body that gives rise to breath or laughter, and driven by a kind of letting go, her works take shape through embedded pockets that are cut open in a single, irreversible gesture, releasing form from within. The exhibition showcases new avenues of expression, including the exploration of glass to create wall-based sculpture. A constant across Sundaram’s experimentation is her interest in colour, as she describes: ‘there’s an alchemy to it’. This colourful ‘alchemy’ is both precise and playful, as she told Vogue India’s Radhika Iyengar, ‘a true test of a dyer is not whether you can make colour, but if you can make the same colour twice.’

A large-scale installation, suspended in the gallery’s naturally lit back space, is cut from one piece of cloth. The work transforms its environment, energising the spatial void with material encircling a central axis. Across the exhibition, works reference the mandala: a holistic concept integrating the body with itself, grounded in a flat geometric design, and structured around one central point. In its multidimensional activation through space – from wall relief to suspended sculpture – Sundaram breaks open this traditional symbol. As she observes: ‘with each new work, I develop new pathways.’ Informed by the modern dancer Chandralekha’s (1928-2006) interpretation of movement, artist Mrinalini Mukherjee’s (1949-2015) natural fibre sculptures, and Anish Kapoor’s (b.1954) large-scale investigation of matter and non-matter, Sundaram’s artwork choreographs the dynamic between the individual and the gallery space.

At age 11, while Sagarika Sundaram was a student in Andhra Pradesh, India, she experimented with textiles for the first time, specifically batik – a wax-resist technique. Two decades later, in London, Sundaram made her first felt work, cleaving it open with a knife, later describing this process as ‘cutting it open felt like discovering a secret inside’. In her studio, Sundaram transforms wool into felt through an organic process that involves a physical, embodied performance of dyeing, tearing, and compressing raw fibre. She handles material as if sketching, layering fibres like cross-hatching to make a mesh. Soaking her composition in soapy water, Sagarika Sundaram then applies pressure to fuse the fibre into its final form. ‘By the time things are humming along, the ending makes itself obvious’, she describes. ‘The work is complete when I can feel it talking to me.’

Sagarika Sundaram was born in Kolkata into a Tamil family and spent much of her childhood between India and Dubai, and now lives and works in New York. In 2020, following her studies at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Sundaram graduated with an MFA from Parsons School of Design, New York. She has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, New York; the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, Texas; British Textile Biennial, Liverpool, UK and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. In 2022 she was awarded The Hopper Prize.

Earlier this year, Alison Jacques presented Sundaram’s monumental installation, Released Form (2024), commissioned by UBS, at Art Basel Unlimited, and her forthcoming solo exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute will open in 2026.

Forthcoming Exhibition: Roy Oxlade, Preview: Tuesday 25 November, 6-8pm

ALISON JACQUES

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG

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Emma Amos @ Alison Jacques, London - Exhibition spanning a period of nearly five decades of work

Emma Amos

Alison Jacques, London

10 July – 9 August 2025

EMMA AMOS 

Dancing in the Streets, 1986 

© Emma Amos

Spanning a period of nearly five decades of work, this is the first UK solo exhibition of pioneering African American artist EMMA AMOS (b.1937, Atlanta, Georgia; d.2020, New York). In the 1950s, Emma Amos lived in London, studying at the Central School of Art and Design.

Emma Amos combines painting, textiles, and printmaking, often incorporating African fabrics, photo transfers, and vibrant colours. Her work is politically charged and addresses themes of race, gender and identity.

Though under-recognised during much of her career, Emma Amos has gained widespread attention in recent years. Her work was included in the landmark 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, which travelled to Crystal Bridges, Brooklyn Museum, The Broad, LA, and MFA Houston. In 2021, Amos’ major retrospective Emma Amos: Color Odyssey was exhibited at the Georgia Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

An original member of the Guerrilla Girls, art and activism were inseparable for Emma Amos. She was on the editorial board of the feminist publication Heresies, and was the youngest and only woman member of Spiral Group, the significant African-American collective, alongside artists and activists Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and Hale Woodruff.

Before embarking on her career in New York, Emma Amos studied at Central School of Art and Design in London, and completed a diploma in etching. Here, she experienced a cultural and artistic freedom that she was not afforded in the US. She honed her mastery in printmaking and weaving, two mediums that became essential tools in her artistic language, and discovered the pictorial possibilities of Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. ‘In London, as an art student’, Emma Amos stated, ‘I had that wonderful feeling of release’.

Born to an established family in segregated Atlanta, Georgia, Amos’ artistic talents were encouraged. She graduated with a degree in Fine Art from Antioch College, Ohio in 1958. Her development as an artist was predicated on her contention that, as a Black woman artist, putting brush to canvas was ‘a political act’.

By layering pigment, print, textiles, African wax prints, photo-transfers and applying paint to unstretched fabric, Emma Amos creates visually rich and conceptually experimental works which grapple with her nation’s complex past, and her personal stake in it. Many of the exhibited works are from Amos’ ‘Falling’ series – dynamic scenes which stage physical and social upheaval. Through such paintings, bell hooks observes, ‘freedom of expression is made more inclusive… In this free world, identities are not static but always changing. Crisscrossing and crossbreeding become mutual practices, and the power to explore and journey is extended to all.’

Emma Amos’ work is held in prominent museum collections including: Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas; The Getty, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; SFMOMA, California; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

ALISON JACQUES

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG

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Betty Parsons Exhibition @ Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Betty Parsons

Alison Jacques Gallery, London

20 March – 27 April 2024 

BETTY PARSONS 

St. Simon, 1952 

© The Betty Parsons Foundation

I’ve always been fascinated with what I call ‘the invisible presence’. The most permanent thing in this world is the invisible; you never get away from it.

– Betty Parsons, Interview reproduced in 

Judith Stein and Helène Aylon, ‘The Parsons Effect’, 

Art in America, 11 November 2013

Alison Jacques presents its second solo exhibition of the late American artist BETTY PARSONS (b.1900 New York, US; d.1982 Southold, New York, US). This exhibition showcases over thirty years of Betty Parsons’ practice, including paintings on canvas and paper and sculptures dating from 1950 to 1980, marking the first time an overview of the breadth of Parsons’ practice has been shown in London. In keeping with the ambition of Alison Jacques’ programme to showcase the works of artists that were under appreciated during their lifetime, this exhibition presents Betty Parsons first and foremost as an artist, rather than contextualising her legacy based on her position as a gallerist.

‘I knew about painting because I was a painter’, Betty Parsons once remarked of her career as one of New York’s leading gallerists.1 Parsons’ prowess as founder and director of Betty Parsons Gallery (1946-1983) has long obscured an appreciation of her own artistic endeavours. While her discerning eye helped launch the careers of many notable artists, including Agnes Martin and Jackson Pollock, Betty Parsons maintained a rigorous commitment to her own practice. ‘When I’m not at the gallery, my own art is my relaxation’, she once said. ‘That’s my greatest joy’.2 ‘I would give up my gallery in a second if the world would accept me as an artist’.3

Betty Parsons’ practice was concerned largely with the exploration of colour. Her paintings can be characterised through their large, sinuous swathes of colour that playfully interact, punctuating her saturated canvases. Much like other works included in this exhibition, the forms that feature in Summer Fire (1959) do not possess hard, defined edges, but rather stand apart from one another through drastic changes in tonality: an almost fluorescent orange glows in the centre of the canvas, the vibrancy of this inclusion amplified by the subtler greens, greys and blues that surround it. Parsons’ use of the grattage technique, etching into her painterly surface, reveals more streaks of orange even in places the colour has been painted over. For Betty Parsons, bold colour had the ability to infuse forms with a sort of kinetic energy. Her move towards abstraction was in part influenced by her experience of attending a rodeo in the mid-1940s: ‘I saw all the movement, the noise, the colour, the excitement, the passion. I thought, my God, how can you ever capture this except in an abstract sense?’4

Betty Parsons’ paintings reflect a desire to convey a sheer energy; she was particularly interested in the principles of the auratic, and what she termed the new spirit. Her instinct for colour was something cultivated during years of travel; her trips to Japan, Africa and Mexico greatly inspired her painterly practice. Parsons’ titles often hint at the subjects included in her works, which the artist’s abstract configurations alone do not communicate. Found Forms (1978), for instance, flatly renders an assortment of shapes using thick bands of individual colour that become hand-sized objects upon discovery of the title. The bullseyes that make up Circles (1967) are also surrounded by abstracted curves painted in the same tone, part and whole seen within a single frame.

Incorporated alongside paintings on canvas, this exhibition also includes a selection of Betty Parsons’ paintings and drawings on paper and newsprint. These works bring a diaristic perspective to Parsons’ corpus: Parsons was known to urgently open her sketchbook in order to document the energy she experienced in specific locations and times, abstractly capturing a moment as one might ordinarily do with a photograph. A playful immediacy is palpable in these works. Works such as Seed Pods (1968) exemplify Parsons’ experimental groupings of colour and shape; such is emphasised by the visibility of the white paper underneath and between her pen marks. A similar technique is implemented in her acrylic on paper works, where Parsons’ visible brushstrokes communicate a sense of movement and speed, leaving behind pockets of bright white that create a visual dynamism to the compositions. The intimate scale of these works offers a more personal insight into Parsons’ practice.

Betty Parsons returned to sculpture in 1965, which had been one of the artist’s first mediums. She experimented with elements of found material such as driftwood, signage, and disassembled furniture that she collected from the beach near her home. Once assembled into shapes reminiscent of buildings, toys or masks, Parsons treated these assemblages with paint in the same way she would a canvas, covering the items in blocks of pigment or using gestural lines. Such a process gave new life to these forgotten objects that now seem to carry the weight of mementos; these sculptures are indelibly connected to Parsons’ deep interest in the mysticism contained within Native American craft and artistic production.

The small scale of Betty Parsons’ sculptures has abetted a comparison to ‘domestic objects’ or ‘knick-knacks’, a disparaging dismissal of Parsons’ significance as a female artist.5 By showcasing Parsons’ entire oeuvre, this exhibition spotlights Parsons’ multimodal practice, and calls for a redress of Parsons significance in both narratives of the time period and in the contemporary. The latter is reinforced by Betty Parsons’ inclusion within recent exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023), and museum acquisitions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, among others internationally.

1. Betty Parsons cited in Edith Newhall, ‘A Portrait of the Artist… and the Dealer and the Bon Vivant’, Art Beat, 13 May 1991, p.29.

2. Betty Parsons, interview in Art in America, 1977.

3. Betty Parsons cited by Richard Tuttle in The Painted Sculpture of Betty Parsons (Naples, FL: Naples Museum of Art, 2005).

4. Betty Parsons cited in Ken Kelley, ‘Betty Parsons Taught America to Appreciate What It Once Called “Trash”’, People, February 1978.

5. David Frankel, ‘Review: Betty Parsons Spanierman Modern’, Artforum, December 2008.

ALISON JACQUES

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG

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Monica Sjöö Exhibition @ Alison Jacques, London

Monica Sjöö

Alison Jacques, London

1 February – 9 March 2024

MONICA SJÖÖ 

Nordic Symphony, 1994 

© Monica Sjöö Estate

‘Witches cast spells, not to do evil, but to promote changes of consciousness. Witches cast spells as acts of redefinition. To respell the world means to redefine the root of our being. It means to redefine us and therefore change us by returning us to our original consciousness of magical-evolutionary processes.’

Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother:

Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, 1987

Alison Jacques presents a solo exhibition by the late pioneering artist, activist and writer MONICA SJÖÖ (b.1938 Västernorrland, Sweden - d.2005 Bristol, UK). This exhibition coincides with Monica Sjöö’s first retrospective The Great Cosmic Mother on view at Modern Art Oxford until 25 February 2024; touring from Moderna Museet, Stockholm and travelling to Moderna Museet, Malmö from 23 March – 1 September 2024. The exhibition also coincides with Sjöö’s inclusion in Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain, on view until 7 April 2024. 

Monica Sjöö was a co-founder of the Goddess movement and this exhibition traces her deep commitment to gender and environmental justice. The artist, self-described as a ‘radical anarcho/eco-feminist and Goddess artist, writer and thinker involved in Earth spirituality’, and as an activist, co-founded Bristol’s Women’s Liberation. Sjöö protested against the Vietnam war and the US missile base at Greenham Common, among numerous other causes she embraced. Sjöö was also a prolific writer, her most well-known book The Great Cosmic Mother, written with Barbara Mor, was published in 1987. 

As an artist and writer, Monica Sjöö’s focus on feminism, peace activism, goddess worship and ecology was unwavering. In her work, she combined her personal symbology with archetypes, references to pre-patriarchal societies and the power of nature. A self-taught artist, she was a firm believer that creativity was a conduit to the wisdom of the past and to possibilities for the future.

This exhibition spans over 30 years of Monica Sjöö’s practice from 1976 up to 2003, showcasing both her paintings on canvas and paper. It reveals the artist’s sources of inspiration including pre-Aztec and monumental Aztec sculptures, Catholic art and the vibrant revolutionary paintings by artists including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The titles of Sjöö’s work in the exhibition – including Women Becoming (1976), Child of the Mother-tree (1984) and Priestess at Tarxien Temple on Malta (2003) – indicate the consistency and range of her concerns: feminism and spiritualism. Cornwall, Ancient Land of the Goddess (1993) depicts a landscape populated with stones and enigmatic characters amidst green fields, tempered with colours that evoke the sea and that possibly allude to the blood spilled for deeply held beliefs. In Sun Goddess at Stonehenge (1992) the famous giant stones are pictured beneath a floating mask, a gateway to a glowing, labyrinthine womb that shelters an embryo. Continuing the theme of the countryside as a place of profound mystery, Monica Sjöö explained that her chosen landscapes are ‘full of spirits and the haunt of the powerful and most ancient…’

Monica Sjöö moved to the UK in her 20s, living mainly in Bristol, where she dedicated her life ‘to creating paintings that speak of women’s lives, our history and sacredness’. Some of the work in the exhibition references Sjöö’s years spent travelling to ancient sites in Malta, Sweden, Wales and to Neolithic centres of the ancient Great Mother, pilgrimages to the sacred land in England, Ireland, Scotland and Brittany, ‘communing with the spirits and connecting with other women… involved in Earth Mysteries’. She communicated with what she called ‘the ancient sisterhood’ of pre-patriarchal Goddess societies and portrayed women as strong and life-giving. When Sjöö suffered from postnatal depression following the birth of her first child, she restored herself by drawing visionary pastels while listening to sacred Hebrew music. Many of her paintings and drawings are also evocations of grief. Having been devastated by the deaths of two of her sons in 1985 and 1987.

For Monica Sjöö, who died in 2005 aged 66, the land was never simply an arrangement of earth and sky; rather, it pulsated with memories and otherworldly beings. She immersed herself in its symbolic, as well as its life-giving properties, and it inspired both her visions and activism. By digging deep into the history of cultural communion with the natural world, she believed she could release long-repressed energies back into the ether and so begin the necessary process of human healing. Rejecting abstraction because she felt it was impossible to represent the complexities of a woman’s life ‘in stripes and triangles’, Monica Sjöö’s imagery evolved in a combination of symbols, both universal and personal, and through stories that fuse mythology and autobiography. Her palette ranges from the earthy to the psychedelic; she drew in swift, bold strokes. She loved making physically big pictures, statements that couldn’t be ignored. Despite a life scarred by poverty and personal tragedy, Monica Sjöö’s art is one of hope.

In addition to the current travelling retrospective at Modern Art Oxford, past solo exhibitions include Monica Sjöö: The Time is NOW and it is Overdue!, Beaconsfield Contemporary Art, London (2022); Blessed Be, Konstnärshuset, Stockholm, Sweden (2006); Through Space and Time the Ancient Sisterhoods Spoke to me: A Monica Sjöö Retrospective, Hotbath Gallery, Bath (2004).

Selected group exhibitions include Women in Revolt!, Tate Britain, London (2023); Radical Landscapes, Tate Liverpool (2022); A Batalla dos Xeneros, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2007); Art Feminism: An exhibition of Swedish feminist art from the 1960s until today, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg, Sweden (2006).

ALISON JACQUES

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG

alisonjacques.com

Robert Mapplethorpe @ Alison Jacques, London - "Subject Object Image" Exhibition

Robert Mapplethorpe

Subject Object Image

Alison Jacques, London

30 November 2023 – 20 January 2024

Robert Mapplethorpe 

Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1976

© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Robert Mapplethorpe 

Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1976

© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

“If you say too much, you lose some of the mystery that ends up being there. Somehow I am able to pick up the magic of the moment and work with it. That’s my rush in doing photography; you can get to a place where you can do it with a flower, with a cock, with a portrait… You’ve tapped into a space that is magic”.

— Robert Mapplethorpe in Arena, 1988, BBC documentary directed by Nigel Finch

Marking 24 years of collaboration between Alison Jacques and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the gallery presents a solo exhibition of works by iconic American artist Robert Mapplethorpe (b.1946 – d.1989). Widely acknowledged as one of the most groundbreaking photographers of the 20th century, Robert Mapplethorpe’s unapologetic and provocative exploration of objectivity in his subjects challenged societal norms and pushed the boundaries of the times. While some of his photographs remain controversial, Robert Mapplethorpe’s legacy is unquestionable, evidenced by work acquired and exhibited by major museums worldwide.

Robert Mapplethorpe lived a life of contradictions, existing in two different worlds, from the uptown glamour, fame and intelligentsia of Manhattan, to the hedonism of Studio 54, drugs and open sexual activity, and the underground BDSM subculture. His vision was a relentless pursuit of aesthetic equilibrium through meticulous attention to detail, lighting, and composition. This brought a sense of formality and precision to his subjects, often portraying them as inanimate objects. Robert Mapplethorpe stated in 1983, “I’m trying to make sculpture without having to sculpt. I’m trying to get the head in just the right spot where everything looks perfect. I’m looking for perfection in form… It’s no different from one subject to the next…”

‘SUBECT OBJECT IMAGE’, spans 13 years of Robert Mapplethorpe’s life and covers the breadth of his subject matter. The show begins in 1976 when Robert Mapplethorpe had already evolved from Polaroids and begun using a Hasselblad 500 camera. The exhibition concludes with images made in the final year of the artist’s life before his tragic death in 1989 at the age of only 42. Mapplethorpe’s own words in 1983 communicate the premise of this exhibition: “It’s a different subject, same treatment, same vision, which is what it’s all about - my eyes as opposed to someone else’s…” Regardless of who or what he chose to photograph, Mapplethorpe’s aim was to objectify his subject. In 1988 his close friend, the artist, Lynn Davis, summed this up: “He looked at it all in the face whatever it was…”

Many of the images included in the exhibition have not been widely exhibited before. These include still lifes created using everyday objects – Italian glass, antique silver and classical statuary – some of which Mapplethorpe collected together with his long-term partner, Sam Wagstaff. Mapplethorpe’s focus on the nude is evident throughout the exhibition, from the recurrent male muses – Ajitto, Derrick Cross and Ken Moody – whose portraits have become synonymous with Mapplethorpe’s photography, to female models including bodybuilder Lisa Lyon. They demand that the viewer reconsider perceptions of the human body and its beauty. Rare Dye-transfer colour photographs portraying flowers, including orchids and roses, as erotically beautiful, punctuate the otherwise monochromatic works grouped together in the exhibition.

A second space encapsulates a classic portrait gallery featuring artists and creatives from New York in the 1970s and 80s. Willem de Kooning, Richard Gere, Yoko Ono, Paloma Picasso and Andy Warhol hang alongside an oversized portrait of British musician Steve Strange, who stares out at the viewer. A grouping of four portraits of Arnold Schwarzenegger from a single shoot are shown alongside the artist’s intimate circle including his brother Edward, his lovers Milton Moore and Jack Walls, and poet and musician Patti Smith. Many of these portrait sessions were held in his fifth floor studio at 24 Bond Street, Lower Manhattan.

Accompanying some of the portraits in the show, are recollections of the subjects’ experience of being photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe:

“I had been working with Robert for just about one year when he asked if he could take my portrait. At the time, I was deep into the New York rockabilly revival scene so I was always fairly precise with my hairstyle which Robert rather enjoyed.

Having already been by his side a countless number of times when taking portraits, I was well aware of what to expect and what would be required of me that day. We set the studio lighting evenly (two strobe heads with umbrellas) and we decided a white background would be best to contrast the dark tones of my hair and coat.

Like so many others before me, I got lost in my head listening to his instructions to turn, lift and look. It was this genius of his attention to detail that has made so many of Robert’s portraits so revealing.

Now, forty years later… I see a rather cocky, self-assured young man in this picture. Isn’t it wonderful how innocent some of us can be in our youth?”

Edward Mapplethorpe (2023)

His portraits are a testament to the internal and external beauty of people – of friends, celebrities and those who pushed against the fixed conventions of their time. As Robert Mapplethorpe stated in the 1988 BBC “Arena” documentary, on one of the few occasions he spoke on film: “I captured New York of its time”.

Robert Mapplethorpe would at times incorporate mirrors into his work. One of his earliest sculptures, Mirror (1971), allows the viewer to see their own reflection through a wire mesh, inviting them to imagine how they might have been captured by the artist’s camera at an imaginary photo shoot. A self-portrait hangs nearby, one of the only portraits in the exhibition not to reveal the sitter’s face, showing instead, the back of the artist’s head and leather jacket.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s still lifes, flowers and portraits fall within the same tradition of the memento mori – they are reflections on the inevitability of death, but also celebrations of the potential abundance of life that precedes it. The fact that Robert Mapplethorpe’s legacy is so renowned is testament to his enduring belief that beauty and “perfection in form” can be found in any walk of life.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE was born in Floral Park, Queens, New York (1946). A strictly Catholic and suburban upbringing led him to leave home at age 16 and enrol at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, to study Advertising Design before transferring to Graphic Arts. His first solo exhibition, ‘Polaroids’ at Light Gallery took place in 1973, and subsequent shows followed at Holly Solomon Gallery and The Kitchen. In 1977, Robert Mapplethorpe participated in ‘Documenta 6’ in Kassel, Germany, followed later in Europe with a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1983). London’s support for Robert Mapplethorpe continued with a survey of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery (1988). The year before Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS-related complications, The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted Mapplethorpe’s first major American museum retrospective (1988). It was followed by the exhibition ‘The Perfect Moment’ in December 1989, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. This exhibition toured in the United States and created one of the fiercest episodes of America’s “Culture Wars” – joining a recurring debate about federally-funded cultural projects and support of homoerotic, sexually explicit or perceived sacrilegious art.

Robert Mapplethorpe established The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation on May 27, 1988, the year before his death, to protect his work, to advance his creative vision and to promote the causes he cared about. Serving as the first president of its board of trustees, he established two mandates: to promote photography as an art form in order to achieve its recognition and respect at the same level as painting and sculpture; and to financially support HIV/AIDS medical research. 34 years later, in keeping with Mapplethorpe’s wishes, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, stewarded by Michael Ward Stout, continues to support photography programming at major museums as well as small institutions, for exhibitions, acquisitions, and publications. The Foundation has donated millions of dollars to fund medical research to help eradicate HIV and AIDS which killed over 100,000 people during Mapplethorpe’s lifetime.

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG

www.alisonjacques.com

Jane Dickson @ Alison Jacques, London - Fist of Fury

Jane Dickson: Fist of Fury 

Alison Jacques, London 

11 May – 24 June 2023 

Jane Dickson

Weng’s Palace, 2022 

Oil stick on linen, 45.7 x 91.4 cm (18 x 36 in) 

© Jane Dickson

Alison Jacques presents ‘Fist of Fury’, Jane Dickson’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first exhibition in London in over 20 years. The exhibition follows Dickson’s critically lauded inclusion in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, and will survey both historical and new and recent paintings from her acclaimed ‘Times Square’ series, with a focus on signage from cinemas, adult entertainment establishments, hotels, liquor stores, and other late-night businesses.

Blinking advertisements, gloomy streets, naked flesh and furtive glances: Jane Dickson’s paintings and drawings evoke the nocturnal world of Times Square in the 1970s and ’80s, a place where dim stairwells are illuminated not by the moon but by neon signs and shadows are privileged over light. The New York City of 40 years ago was restless with porn cinemas, hustlers, strippers and peep shows; melancholy clubs where scantily clad women gyrated in a red haze and men gazed at them, their faces upturned, as expectant as children. Dickson captured it all.

Born in Chicago, Jane Dickson arrived in New York in 1977; in 1978, she was hired as a designer on Spectacolor the first digital animated lightboard on Times Square. Until 1993, she shot countless photographs from the window of the loft she shared with her husband overlooking Times Square. The couple were part of a brilliant group of artists, writers and filmmakers – David Hammons, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Kiki Smith, Martin Wong, David Wojnarowicz, among others – who were exploring the world and their take on it from myriad angles. Dickson translates her snapshots, which she describes as ‘notes for her paintings’, into images inflected with a punk aesthetic: instead of canvas she often uses industrial materials: plastic, garbage bags, sandpaper, AstroTurf and mirrors. Besides the important influence of her peers, Dickson found inspiration early on in the work of her ‘kindred spirits’ Pieter Breugel The Elder, William Hogarth, Hokusai, Edward Hopper and Georges Seurat, Goya, artists she describes as ‘dark observers of their society’, who ‘have real heart’, but it was important to her to be part of the contemporary conversation that ‘was taking place in the street’. She sees painting ‘as a space where you can sift through your own choices: Is this pornography? Is that bad or good? Sexy or gross? From your viewpoint or mine?’.

Times Square came alive at night, but entering the melée was fraught for a woman. Jane Dickson felt that ‘this was what I was meant to think about, observe and document’. During the pandemic, she came across a bag of negatives from the mid-1980s; she printed them up, and there it all was: a pre-gentrified New York of sleazy hotels and strip joints, Kung Fu movies and crowds of people, flocking to the city for fun, for escape. She was excited, in her words, to ‘…examine that now lost time and to think about what was then and what is now. I’m in a different place, the city’s in a different place, the world’s in a different place. It’s a set of implications that are interesting to explore’.

The result is a series of new paintings that use time travel as a springboard. As Jane Dickson explains: ‘a previous idea can have a second coming’. The artist asks herself: ‘Did I convey this as powerfully as I experienced it, and if not, is there a way I’d like to convey it today that maybe comes at it from a new angle and nails it?’. As someone who trusts her intuition, she likes to ‘make a big leap and then look where you land!’.

The shift from photography to painting allows Jane Dickson to not simply describe what she witnessed but to reflect upon her own psychology: she only works from photographs that she herself has taken. Inhabiting her images in paint allows her to move elements around, investigating the nuance of memories and the possibilities of her chosen medium. ‘Paintings’, she says ‘are a distillation of my experience’.

Selected exhibitions include ‘Somewhere Downtown’, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2022); ‘The Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); ‘Basquiat: The Artist and His New York Scene’, Schunck Museum of Art, Heerlen, the Netherlands (2019); ‘New York Underground: East Village in the 80s’, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2018); ‘Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s’, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park, Washington DC (2018); ‘Recent Acquisitions Exhibition’, The Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC (2016); ‘A Book About Colab’, Printed Matter, New York (2016).

Jane Dickson’s work has been acquired by international museum collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Bronx Museum, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Kings College, Cambridge; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art, Pennsylvania; The San Francisco Museum of Art, California; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale University, Connecticut.

ALISON JACQUES

16-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN

alisonjacques.com

Carol Rhodes @ Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Carol Rhodes

Alison Jacques Gallery, London

30 April - 29 May 2021

CAROL RHODES 

River, Roads, 2013 

Oil on board 

50 x 57 cm, 19 3/4 x 22 1/2 ins

© Carol Rhodes Estate

CAROL RHODES

Forest and Road, 1998 

Oil on board 

51 x 44 cm, 20 1/8 x 17 3/8 ins.

© Carol Rhodes Estate

Alison Jacques Gallery will present its first exhibition of work by CAROL RHODES (1959–2018). Organised in partnership with the Carol Rhodes Estate, whose curator Andrew Mummery worked closely with the artist for much of her career, the exhibition will include landmark paintings and rarely-shown drawings dating between 1995 and 2016.

Throughout her career, Carol Rhodes produced a highly individual body of paintings describing the encroachment of human activity and occupation upon ‘natural’ landscapes. Primarily adopting aerial viewpoints, Rhodes favoured what she called ‘hidden areas’ or ‘left-over land’: industrial estates, airports, motorways and reservoirs, unpeopled and existing at the margin of more defined (urban or rural) environments.

Writing on this element of Carol Rhodes’s work, the critic Tom Lubbock cited environmental theorist Marion Shoard’s identification of ‘edgelands’: “Between urban and rural stands a kind of landscape quite different […] Yet for most of us, most of the time, this mysterious no man’s land passes unnoticed: in our imaginations, as opposed to our actual lives, it barely exists.” Carol Rhodes similarly identified blind spots and occlusions in our consciousness. “Looking at things from above is detachment”, she once told curator Lynda Morris. “To have an opinion or view, you have to be outside society or your own particular group”.

CAROL RHODES 

Inlet, 1997 

Oil on board  

47.5 x 40.5 cm, 18 3/4 x 16 ins

© Carol Rhodes Estate

Rendered in minute detail yet with painterly breadth, Carol Rhodes’s paintings are fictional syntheses: composite landscapes drawn from disparate sources, including photographs taken by the artist herself or found in books on geography and geology, industrial archaeology and urban planning. Rhodes integrated these disjointed topographies through a complex, intuitive drawing and painting process. Her palette is subtle and particular, often using muted compound colours. (“I like it bland” she once said, though somewhat disingenuously.) Pictorial space can be compressed, even flattened, despite the vast distances described. Both foreground and horizon are mostly eliminated – Rhodes spoke of wanting an ‘egalitarian’ composition.

Despite (or due to) these compositional factors, an unease remains in these paintings – indeed, it intensifies. In works such as River, Roads (2013) or Forest and Road (1998), assumed infrastructural logic slowly reveals itself to be improbable and inconsistent.

In this way, Carol Rhodes’s pseudo-realistic scenes appear familiar yet unknown, mundane yet mysterious. And while the paintings can certainly be discussed in environmental, sociological or political terms, it is their restlessness and psychological charge that perhaps remains most resonant. Rhodes was known to speak of her landscapes as self-portraits.

Alongside her paintings, the exhibition will include a number of drawings. These are both rigorously pragmatic preparatory studies (‘cartoons’ in the technical sense of the word) and pictorial statements in their own right. Carol Rhodes first began exhibiting these drawings in 2006; as standalone works, they further evince her profoundly personal aesthetics and her truly unique investigation into the depiction of physical and psychological space.

CAROL RHODES was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959; she died in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2018. During her lifetime, solo museum exhibitions of Rhodes’s work were presented at venues including The MAC, Belfast (2017); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2007-08); and Tramway, Glasgow (2000). ‘See the World’, the first posthumous institutional exhibition of Rhodes’s work, is scheduled to take place in 2021 at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, as part of Glasgow International Festival. Carol Rhodes’s work has been acquired by public collections including Tate; Arts Council of England; British Council Collection; Center for British Art, Yale; City Art Centre, Edinburgh; Glasgow Museums; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Southampton City Art Gallery.

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY 

16-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN 

www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Graham Little @ Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Graham Little
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
5 June - 27 July 2019

We arrive in the midst of things, pick up clues, try and put something together. That something exists in the eternal present of the painting—a present that nevertheless unravels in time, as we see more—but it also seems to point us towards an idea of the past, a constructed phantasm different to the real past. 

Martin Herbert, 'The Beautiful Ones', Graham Little: inside the water sleep, published by Alison Jacques Gallery, 2019.

Alison Jacques Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by British artist Graham Little made between 2016 and 2019. To mark this exhibition, Alison Jacques Gallery will publish a monograph on Graham Little, including an essay by writer and author Martin Herbert and an introduction by Whitechapel Gallery Curator Laura Smith.

Graham Little’s process is time-consuming and meticulous, each work taking months to complete. This exhibition, five years in the making, brings together for the first time, male figures alongside his more familiar female figurative imagery and marks a further transition with a focus on still life. It examines Graham Little’s investigations into figurative painting, constructing interior and exterior tableaus referencing histories of visual representation from a range of archival source imagery. The paintings combine elements from the past and present to create enigmatic and ambiguous scenes woven with quiet narrative and emotion. Graham Little’s oblique nostalgic yearnings bring elements of drama, intrigue and sobriety into scenes rendered through a soft-focus lens. As Laura Smith notes ‘The stillness of these images is not serene however; rather it is complex, charged, bristling with possibility. Little’s figures possess an introspective air that resists even the most probing gaze’.(*)

Significantly for Graham Little, there is no hierarchy of objects. For example, in the diptych Untitled (Mother and Baby) (2019) the artist applies the same level of meticulous detail to ornamental carafes resting on a bathroom table as he does to a portrait of a woman gently feeding her child. The iconography of his paintings allows narrative reading through a collection of carefully composed symbols, all as important as each other.

Domesticity and leisure are key themes in Graham Little’s recent works, and in viewing each painting, one witnesses figures gardening, bathing, shopping, reading and washing. No script is immediately obvious; in Untitled (2018) a man sits absorbed in his newspaper in a mid-century furnished room, again, in Untitled (Veranda) (2016) a woman absentmindedly hangs up her washing on a sun-drenched balcony whilst in Untitled (Wood) (2019) three children sit composed in a quiet, autumnal woodland. Initial readings fragment and Little entices us to pause and stare at a rare moment of slowness, an open invitation to our perceptions in a world of accelerated information and hurried daily interaction.

Graham Little (b. Dundee, UK, 1972) studied at Goldsmiths College, London, MA (1997); Research Associate (1998) and currently lives and works in London. In 2001, Graham Little had a residency at Camden Arts Centre which resulted in an exhibition, and in 2002 was included in Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, alongside Elizabeth Peyton and John Currin among others, curated by Laura Hoptman, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002). More recent museum exhibitions include: a curated presentation in Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers, MoMA PS1, New York (2016); Less is a Bore. Reflections on Memphis, KAI 10 | Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf (2016); Manifesta 11, Zürich (2016); and I Prefer Life, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen (2016).

Museum acquisitions include: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

(*) Laura Smith, 'Introduction', in Graham Little: inside the water sleep, (London: Alison Jacques Gallery, 2019), p. 18.

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
16-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN
www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

John Wesley & Donald Judd @ Alison Jacques Gallery, London

An Unlikely Friendship: John Wesley in conversation with Donald Judd
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
15 March - 27 April 2019

Alison Jacques Gallery presents An Unlikely Friendship: John Wesley in conversation with Donald Judd, the first in a series of exhibitions focusing on, close and often overlooked, friendships between seminal artists.

Friends for over thirty-five years, John Wesley stated that the two spoke about 'anything but art' (1) and, although there was a clear admiration for Donald Judd's work he 'wouldn't dare write about him' (2). In contrast, Donald Judd wrote several times in praise of John Wesley's work and in 1982 he invited John Wesley, on what would be the first of several visits, to spend time in Marfa making new work. Donald Judd's vision of a permanent purpose-built John Wesley Gallery for his friend's work was always on the horizon but not realised in full until 2004 by the Chinati Foundation. Given the apparent disparity between John Wesley and Donald Judd's work, visitors are often surprised to find the John Wesley Gallery at Chinati and to discover the close friendship between the two artists.

This exhibition brings together John Wesley and Donald Judd's work for the first time in direct dialogue with one another. A group of John Wesley's painting on canvas and paper from 1983-1990 will be exhibited alongside four key Donald Judd sculptures from 1969-90. It becomes clear, from experiencing their work side by side, that the friendship was born from Donald Judd's understanding of what John Wesley was doing and an ability to relate to aspects within his own approach to making art.

Donald Judd's interest in John Wesley's work arose in the 1960s, 'most of the best painting has got to the point where it is nearly flat and nearly without illusionistic space' but 'the most illusionistic of the best painting generally is the work by Lichtenstein, Wesley and especially Rosenquist - since they deal with subject matter' (3). Donald Judd was fascinated by the fact that in John Wesley's work the spatial foreground and background shift back and forth enabling surfaces to be perceived on different levels. Donald Judd considered this 'ambiguity' to be one of John Wesley's main devices and admired the fact that not only the forms but the spaces between them could be perceived as forms in their own right which, in relation to one another, create a "coherent whole". 

Although his work is predominantly figurative, John Wesley plays with flatness and repetition to negate subject matter. Untitled (Birds) (1988) uses the repetition of a reduced bird-form so that it becomes a pattern on a recurring loop; almost like wallpaper. Donald Judd describes John Wesley's paintings as 'copies of the patterns of blue and white china. Most of the forms are nineteenth century. The forms selected and the shapes to which they are unobtrusively altered, the order used and the small details are humorous and goofy. This becomes a cool, psychological oddness.' (4) This 'coolness' and democratisation of form is seen in Donald Judd's stack sculpture from 1990 composed of several wall-hung modules, forms favoured for their symbolic neutrality and industrial finish. John Wesley's art also related to the aesthetics of mechanised production. Shortly after his move to New York in 1960, whilst working in the Post Office, he began to make paintings representing stylised versions of enlarged badges or stamps. He found images geared towards mass production through simplified form conveyed his message through an economy of means, which became the essential language of his paintings.  

John Wesley was born in Los Angeles and currently lives in Manhattan, New York (1928). His most recent museum retrospective was organised, curated by Germano Celant and organised by the Fondazione Prada (2009). In 2014, John Wesley was commissioned to create a public artwork for the High Line, New York.

Donald Judd was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri (1928); died New York (1994). His last solo museum show in his life time was The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1988). Numerous museum shows since his death include Tate, London (2004) and a forthcoming retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020).

1. Alanna Heiss, 'Conversations with John Wesley', in John Wesley: Paintings 1961-2000, (New York: P.S.1, 2000), p. 21.

2. Hannah Green, John Wesley, 'Donald Judd: Remembrances' Artforum, Summer (1994), p. 114.

3. Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975 (New York: Judd Foundation, 1975), p. 154.

4. Donald Judd, 'In the Galleries', Arts Magazine, April (1963).

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
16-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN
www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Hannah Wilke @ Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Hannah Wilke

Alison Jacques Gallery, London

27 September - 21 December 2018

"Since 1960 I have been concerned with the creation of a formal imagery that is specifically female... Human gestures, multi-layered metaphysical symbols below the gut level translated into an art close to laughter, making love, shaking hands... Eating fortune cookies instead of signing them, chewing gum into androgynous objects... Delicate definitions... Rearranging the touch of sensuality with a residual magic made from laundry lint, or latex loosely laid out like love vulnerably exposed... continually exposing myself to whatever situation occurs...."

Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, University of Missouri Press, 1989, p.139.

Alison Jacques Gallery presents an exhibition spanning three decades of the American painter, sculptor, photographer, video and performance artist HANNAH WILKE (1940 - 1993), in partnership with The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles.

Hannah Wilke's firm legacy as a pioneering, often controversial, feminist and conceptual artist is evident not only in her early use of vaginal imagery as a feminist intervention but also in her radical choice of materials. The use of terracotta and ceramic, latex, chewing gum and erasers was unusual for this time period and their characteristics of malleability and fragility reflect the sense of vulnerability that is consistent throughout Hannah Wilke's practice.

Over the last decade, major museums have acknowledged Hannah Wilke's previously overlooked importance through significant acquisitions: MoMA, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Tate, London recently acquired Hannah Wilke's iconic installation Elective Affinities (1978) consisting of 76 glazed porcelain white sculptures laid out in grid-like formats; a maquette for this work, Untitled (1977), is included in the current exhibition.

Bringing together works from the early 1960s through to 1987, this is the first time since Wilke's death in 1993 that her paintings on canvas from the 60s have been exhibited. The colours of these works and the forms depicted, relate to many of Hannah Wilke's drawings and sculptures. Other lesser-known intensely coloured small-scale works on paper are shown alongside Hannah Wilke's iconic performance photographs including Gestures (Triptych), (1974 - 76) in which the artist stretches and contorts her face directly at the camera, using her skin as a malleable sculptural medium. As Hannah Wilke explained Gestures shows "the pathos past the posing" and this reference to primal female instinct was fundamental to her thinking.

From the beginning, drawing was central to Hannah Wilke's practice as well as her considered use of colour. The early abstract works on paper and card from the 60s, often in charcoal, pastel and pencil reference the body sexually with yonic and phallic shapes merging within floral landscapes to create sensual abstract forms. As Hannah Wilke stated, she was concerned with creating: "a new language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are nameable and at the same time quite abstract. Its content has always related to my own body and feelings, reflecting pleasure as well as pain, the ambiguity and complexity of emotions." (Hannah Wilke, A Retrospective, University of Missouri Press, 1989, p.139).

Central to the exhibition is one of Hannah Wilke's largest installations, Untitled, (1974 - 77) consisting of 103 painted flesh-coloured terracotta sculptures. Although the forms are arranged in a scattered configuration they are, as with many of Hannah Wilke's multi-part sculptures, confined within the minimalist square and show "Wilke's subversion of the Minimalist/Conceptualist concern with systems, while also demonstrating her genius for fusing her personal, bodycentric feminism with the formal issues and rigorous philosophy of Conceptualism " (Paige K. Bradley, Artforum, October 2014).

HANNAH WILKE (born Arlene Hannah Butter, New York, NY, 1940; d. Hannah Wilke, Houston, TX, 1993). Wilke studied at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia and taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York (1974 - 1992). Wilke had two solo museum exhibitions during her life: Hannah Wilke: Starification Photographs and Videotapes, Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine (1976); and Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, University of Missouri, Missouri (1989) as well as a posthumous museum survey show; Gestures curated by Tracy Fitzpatrick, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY (2009).

Recent major group exhibitions include: Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings, Tate St Ives, UK (2018); Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950 - 1980, Met Breuer, New York (2017); Generation Loss: 10 Years of the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2017); Campaign for Art, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2016); The Imaginary Museum, Tate Liverpool, UK (2015) toured to MMK, Frankfurt and Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz (2016); and Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016, Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles (2016).

The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles was founded in 1999 by Hannah Wilke's sister Marsie Scharlatt and her family, and has been represented by Alison Jacques Gallery since 2009. 

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY

16-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN

www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Birgit Jürgenssen @ Alison Jacques Gallery, London - Nocturnal Light

Birgit Jürgenssen: Nocturnal Light
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
17 April - 19 May 2018

It is as if we have crossed into night, where in moonlight the world appears as half shadows and emergent forms. As we make our way through the dark we become aware that things are not what they might at first seem to be. The figures and forms that are perceived in the dark can change dramatically with examination.

 Julien Robson, John Hansard Gallery,

Nekyia. Night See Ride. Night Lake Crossing, exhibition catalogue, Southampton, UK, 1987

Alison Jacques Gallery in collaboration with the Birgit Jürgenssen Estate, Vienna, presents Nocturnal Light, a solo exhibition of work by the Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen (b.1949, Vienna). Whereas Birgit Jürgenssen's 2013 solo show at the gallery focused on works from the 1970s, the current exhibition presents later work, made between 1987 - 1996. Jürgenssen, who died in 2003 aged 54, left several decades of work from performative photography to painting, drawing, and sculpture.

The title Nocturnal Light is taken from one of the largest works in the show, made in 1987, a mixed media on linen triptych which depicts three sources of nocturnal light: angel, moon and torch. Another painting, Double-Moon from the same year continues this narrative and explores the symmetry between day and night, light and shadow or reality and fantasy. This work is from a series originally exhibited in Birgit Jürgenssen's only UK museum solo exhibition Nekyia. Night See Ride. Night Lake Crossing, curated by Julien Robson first shown at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (1987). In the same year the exhibition also travelled to IKON Gallery, Birmingham and the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol.

The main focus of this show is on Birgit Jürgenssen's experimental photographic work from her fabric series. These consist of photographic prints mounted on canvas, which are screwed to iron frames that Birgit Jürgenssen constructed herself. Thin, translucent fabrics are stretched over the surface, veiling and slightly obscuring the images. The photographs themselves are created through a range of processes, including photograms, solarisation, and multiple-exposures. In some of the works, Birgit Jürgenssen employs cyanotype, a contact printing technique which creates a blue tint that reduces her figures and objects to silhouettes and dreamlike forms.

Born and educated in Vienna, Birgit Jürgenssen studied at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (1967-71) and lectured at both the University of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (1980-97). Her work has been featured in museum exhibitions including XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography, curated by Sarah Meister and Eva Respini, MoMA, New York (2013-2014); The 10th Gwangju Biennale, Burning Down The House, curated by Jessica Morgan, South Korea (2014); Women House, curated by Camille Morineau, La Monnaie de Paris, France (2017). Jürgenssen is included in: Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired By Her Writings, curated by Laura Smith, Tate St Ives, UK (2018) and The Shape of Time, curated by Jasper Sharp, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna (2018). A retrospective of Birgit Jürgenssen entitled Snow Storm will open at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany in November 2018. Jürgenssen's work has been acquired by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MAK, Vienna; Tate, London and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
16-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN
www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Robert Mapplethorpe Exhibition at Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Robert Mapplethorpe: A Season in Hell
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
14 October - 21 November, 2009

Alison Jacques Gallery, London,  presents a new interpretation of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989). Bringing together a range of works in a variety of media, including rarely seen collages as well as photography, the exhibition focuses on the hitherto neglected roles of religious themes and imagery that informed much of Mapplethorpe’s practice throughout his career.  Since Mapplethorpe's tragically early death from complications arising from AIDS in 1989, the artist has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in museums worldwide and is now considered one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. This new exhibition offers a timely reappraisal of the diversity of Mapplethorpe’s work, and the significance of the sacred and profane in his art.

Alison Jacques has represented the Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe in the UK since 1999; for this exhibition she has assembled a number of important works which reveal the significance of religion, of Catholicism and Satanism and the extremes of these opposites, in Mapplethorpe’s life and work. For the first time in a European gallery, five major early works will be exhibited, a series of collages from 1968-1969 when the artist was living with the poet and rock singer Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel. Drawing on the Catholic culture of his upbringing, Robert Mapplethorpe was inspired to make shrine-like works out of a broad range of materials, from men’s underwear to prayer cards.  However these works, both formally and substantially, become transformed more into objects of fetish than images of devotion, revealing the incessant influence of his religious background on Mapplethorpe’s life and art, and his irreverent and rebellious relationship to it. As Robert Mapplethorpe himself said “A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child…. It still shows in how I arrange things. It’s always little altars.”

Later in his career Robert Mapplethorpe became more renowned for his photography, yet the themes of Heaven and Hell, the sacred and profane, still filtered through into his practice and are very much in evidence throughout the corpus of his work.  The photographs in the exhibition bear witness to the recurrent impact of Catholicism on Mapplethorpe’s craft, such as the use of the Crucifix as a compositional device in the photographs, a framing motif or as an actual sculpture. Mapplethorpe’s influences were not, however, limited to Christian imagery; darker religious motifs, such as images of Pentagrams, references to witchcraft and shocking depictions of sexuality also feature in his work, and left Mapplethorpe mired in controversy in both life and death. Iconoclastic and aesthetically exhilarating, allusions to the sacred such as haloes in portraits, the use of traditional iconographic symbols such as white flowers, bread and, thorns, contrast powerfully with the devil imagery, of serpents and of smoke. Mapplethorpe himself in one of his most famous self-portraits assumed the aspect of Satan, complete with devil’s horns.

In 1986, a newly translated version of French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s 1873 extended poem ‘A Season in Hell’ was published with photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. The book exemplified intriguing connections and parallels between the unorthodox and prematurely brief lives of Rimbaud and Mapplethorpe.  They shared an often defiant and libertine excess in their personal lives, born partly of their queer sexualities and partly of innately rebellious spirits.  This resistance to, and fascination with, the norms and strictures of bourgeois culture also led to both exploring through art the darker side of humanity’s private life, in all its emotional, physical and sexual complexity. To mark Rimbaud’s October birthday and the twentieth anniversary of Mapplethorpe’s death, Patti Smith, a passionate devotee of both artists, will perform especially dedicated music and poetry at the opening of the exhibition in London. In 2010, Patti Smith will publish her memoir about Robert Mapplethorpe, a diary of their love and friendship called ‘Just Kids’.

Robert Mapplethorpe's work features in the collections of many major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and Tate, London.

A new publication of ‘A Season in Hell’ by Morel Books will accompany Patti Smith’s performance and Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition at the gallery.

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
16-18 Berners Street
London W1T 3LN

Next exhibition: André Butzer, 27 November 2009 - 9 January, 2010

Related Post : Robert Mapplethorpe curated by David Hockney, Alison Jacques Gallery, London, January 14 - March 12, 2005

Catherine Yass at Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Catherine Yass 
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
18 November - 23 December 2004

Alison Jacques Gallery presents a new film and series of four photographs on light boxes by Catherine Yass. Over the last year, Yass has been filming and photographing the Israel/Palestine separation wall from Israeli-controlled areas.

The resulting film entitled Wall, will be projected across the entire width of the gallery. Using a widescreen film format, Catherine Yass has concentrated on the physicality of the wall as it winds through communities and stretches across the landscape. The footage is structured in separate sequences, corresponding to recently constructed sections of the wall in Baqa, Qalqilya and Jerusalem.

Catherine Yass has developed a distinctive language which conveys her own personal response. As with her previous film Descent, for which she was nominated for the Turner Prize at Tate Britain (2002),  the single viewpoint and insistent camera movement are at once subjective and mechanical . The wall almost fills the frame, so buildings and minarets are only just visible behind it. The restricted viewpoint of the camera re-enacts the limited view imposed by the wall, and reflects the inability to see the other side. As well as representing a physical structure, the film shows the wall as, literally, a concrete manifestation of psychological barriers.

The photographs are on light boxes and underlaid with a blue negative, which gives the wall the quality of a mirage hovering somewhere in the imagination. In the areas where the wall is still under construction, building blocks lying in the rubble take on an eerie sense of ruin, as though they are part of an archeological site. The concrete blocks of the wall bear a resemblance to modernist architecture and sculpture, only here it is the wall which imposes the grid and brings modernism back to contemporary experience in a form where aesthetics and politics become indissoluble.

Catherine Yass was born in London (1963) and graduated with an MA from Goldsmiths College (1990). In 2002, Catherine Yass was nominated for the Turner Prize at Tate Britain. Since then, Yass has collaborated with Merce Cunningham on his world tour of Split Sides, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy, New York (2003) and toured to Paris and London (The Barbican, October 5-9, 2004). Forthcoming projects include a solo show at the Herzilya Museum, Tel Aviv and participation in WOW at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and Expo Tokyo, Japan (2005). Catherine Yass is represented in many public collections including The British Council, Tate, and The Jewish Museum, New York.

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
4 Clifford Sreet, London W1X 1RB
www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Jack Pierson at Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Jack Pierson
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
10 September - 9 October 2004 

Alison Jacques Gallery announces its inaugural exhibition featuring nine new word sculptures by American artist Jack Pierson. Assembled with plastic, wood and metal letters pirated from discarded commercial signage, Jack Pierson’s sculptural aphorisms denote a parallel universe of seduction, wistful yearning, and false promise. The letters, which are salvaged from junkyards, derelict movie houses, roadside diners, and other forsaken enterprises, consolidate disparate relics from the commercial American landscape into a concise and personal visual rhetoric. The letters are alternately weathered, shimmering, rugged, gilded, or down-at-heel. They suggest an American voice trying to express a sense of authority long since mired in dust and disappointment.

The new word sculptures continue Jack Pierson’s taste for the gritty and blunt, tantalising us with promises of ‘TRUTH’ and ‘LOVE,’ only to dash the dream with deceit and accusation: ‘YOU ROTTEN PRICK’. Appropriately, ‘PORNOGRAPHY’ hangs in the balance, promising ‘ANYTHING YOU WANT’ with a cynical wink acknowledging that earnest desire is a meagre commodity in today’s transitive, heavily mediated, post-sexual age.

Since the late 1980s, Jack Pierson has been promiscuous in his art, producing drawings, installations, sculptures and photographs. His work often functions like a series of film stills, communicating shudders of self-awareness caught between here and there, public and private. This diverse practice is intent on smudging the distinctions between autobiography and a curiosity with popular culture’s darker corners. Jack Pierson has long been fascinated by the props and clichés of distressed glamour, lost time and thwarted desire. His work revels in its personality crisis, accommodating the allusions and delusions from which his life has been constructed.

Jack Pierson’s acclaimed early photographs capture nostalgia for an elusive golden boy bohemia. They are personal, diaristic, fleeting and flagrantly sentimental. His more recent photography parallels the tone of the new word sculptures. It is increasingly indebted to established codes of commercial, homoerotic portraiture without forsaking the previous work’s autobiographical impulse and heavyhearted charm. Pornography is indeed the subtext, but so–according to Jack Pierson–is self-portraiture. As his confessional, romantic persona retreats into a growing constellation of conceptual, soft-core surrogates; his visual vocabulary similarly constructs itself from the ruins of desire and consumption.

Jack Pierson was born in Massachusetts (1960). In addition to ‘Regrets’, a solo retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, recent museum shows include: The Whitney Biennial, New York and ‘Electric Dreams’, The Barbican London. Solo shows include Cheim and Read, New York and ‘Self-Portraits’, Regan Projects, Los Angeles.

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
4 Clifford Sreet, London W1X 1RB
www.alisonjacquesgallery.com