British Art Fair 2025: Spotlight on L.S. Lowry by Crane Kalman Gallery

Spotlight on L.S. Lowry 

by Crane Kalman Gallery

@ BRITISH ART FAIR 2025

Modern and Contemporary British Art

@ Saatchi Gallery, London

25 - 28 September 2025

Crane Kalman Gallery, a new exhibitor at British Art Fair, reveals personal connections to L.S. Lowry, presenting a series of rare works by one of Britain’s most popular painters for sale.

L.S. LOWRY 

Sunday Morning, 1938  

Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches / 46 x 61 cms

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY 

Farm Buildings, Worsley, 1914

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY

Woman Walking, 1965 

Oil on canvas, 28 x 22.9 cms / 11 x 9 inches

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY 

A Group of Seven, 1965

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

“In 1949 Andras Kalman opened The Crane Gallery in a basement air-raid shelter in South King Street, Manchester, where the weekly £2 rent was paid by the regular pawning of his typewriter. With persuasion and charm, he managed to obtain for his first exhibition, works by Sir Jacob Epstein, Matthew Smith, Lucien Freud and John Craxton; despite sending invitations to every influential name he could discover, no one came.” Writes Shelley Rodhe in her biography, A Private View of L.S. Lowry (Collins, London 1979). The author takes us to the first meeting between Lowry and Kalman in 1950: “Lowry appeared at the second exhibition, bought a picture and as Kalman recalls ‘it cost him about £20 and I think he bought it only to give my morale a boost’. Visits to the gallery ensued, as did many hours in conversation about artists and the artworld, leading to a lifelong friendship.” 

Andras Kalman at the Crane Gallery, Manchester, 1956, 

tying a painting by Graham Sutherland to the roof of his Alvis. 

That evening, on the trunk road to London, it blew off. After a s

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

Andras Kalman with Sir Ian McKellen below, c. 2000’s 

talking to children on their school trip to 

Crane Kalman Gallery about Lowry’s work

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY and Lord Richard Attenborough 

at the opening of the artists exhibition 

A Tribute to L.S. Lowry at Crane Kalman Gallery, London, 1966 

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

Kalman first exhibited L.S. Lowry’s work in 1952 and Crane Kalman has continued to exhibit his work ever since, hosting a 70th anniversary exhibition at their Knightsbridge gallery in 2022.

Laurence Stephen Lowry RBA RA (1887 – 1976)  is best known for painting the daily lives of Northern British people, often against the background of the modern industrial city. He also painted timeless seascapes and country landscapes that were often empty and even desolate. Collections that hold Lowry’s work include The Tate, London; The Royal Academy of Arts; London; The Hepworth, Wakefield; The Lowry, Salford; Kettles Yard, The University of Cambridge; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Setagaya Museum, Tokyo.

Crane Kalman Gallery will be exhibiting seven works by L.S. Lowry for sale at British Art Fair 2025, including examples of his best known city scenes, landscapes, a portrait and a series of his later, more haunting and comic works. The price range is £25,000 to £1million. You will find them on the ground floor at Saatchi Gallery, 25-28 September 2025.

L.S. LOWRY 

Houses and Fencing, c. 1925

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY 

Crowded Street Scene, 1933  

Pencil on paper, 6.5 x 8.75 inches / 16 x 22 cm

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

L.S. LOWRY 

Portrait of a Man, 1920

Courtesy of Crane Kalman Gallery

Andrew Kalman, son of Andras Kalman and director of Crane Kalman Gallery said: ”To celebrate our debut participation at the British Art Fair, Crane Kalman Gallery is delighted to present a selection of paintings and works on paper by L.S. Lowry. Arguably, no exhibition of Modern British Art would be complete without featuring Lowry, who remains deeply popular with the general public, feted and collected by lovers of 20th-century British art.”

BRITISH ART FAIR 2025 - Modern and Contemporary British Art

Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York HQ, King’s Road, London SW3 4RY

www.britishartfair.co.uk

CRANE KALMAN GALLERY

178 Brompton Road, London, SW3 1HQ 

www.cranekalman.com

Tracey Emin @ Yale Center for British Art, New Haven - "Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning" - First North American museum Solo Exhibition of Paintings by Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin 

I Loved You Until The Morning 

Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

March 29 - August 10, 2025

The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) presents a special exhibition of work by TRACEY EMIN (b. 1963), one of Britain’s most influential contemporary artists. Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until The Morning is the first presentation of Emin’s work in a North American museum and the first ever solo museum exhibition to foreground her practice as a painter.

For more than thirty years, Tracey Emin has made expressive and candid works that explore love, loss, hope, desire, and grief. With honesty and deep emotion, her art draws on her personal experiences of illness, intimacy, and sexuality to confront broader concerns about women’s bodies and health.

Shaped through ongoing dialogue with the artist, I Loved You Until The Morning showcases nineteen large-scale paintings, set alongside a selection of drawings, sculptures, and a neon installation that welcomes visitors at the entrance to the YCBA’s iconic Louis I. Kahn building. Drawn from private collections around the world, many of the works have never been shown in a public institution. Together, they demonstrate Emin’s commitment to painting as a means of giving expression to her experience.

“It is a privilege to present Tracey Emin’s inaugural museum exhibition in this country and to introduce her work to a broader American audience,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, YCBA, who curated the exhibition working closely with Emin and the artist’s creative director, Harry Weller. “Showing the work at the YCBA offers a chance to engage with her art from a new perspective, separate from the established narratives in Britain. Although she has long been a defining figure in contemporary British art, this exhibition provides a unique opportunity to experience her deeply personal, provocative, and often meditative explorations of identity, trauma, and resilience. By placing her work in dialogue with that of J. M. W. Turner, we not only highlight their shared roots in Margate and at the Royal Academy but also illuminate how Emin’s voice resonates within a broader historical context of British art.”

“This is my first museum show in America and for me it makes perfect sense that I’m showing in the Yale Center for British Art,” noted Tracey Emin. “For me, it feels like the perfect introduction.”

Born in London and raised in the seaside town of Margate, England, Tracey Emin made her mark in the 1990s with sculptural installations that became icons of the era. Although she is known for working across a wide range of media, including neons and textiles, Emin began her artistic journey as a painter and has long considered painting her primary medium. When she was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007, Tracey Emin resolved to make a public return to painting. I Loved You Until The Morning traces the evolution of her paintings over the subsequent decades.

I Loved You Until The Morning shows how Tracey Emin uses the materiality of paint to convey emotional states that veer from the most life-affirming to the most harrowing aspects of being a woman. The multiple emotional registers of her works leave their meanings open-ended: the use of red evokes love and desire, as well as pain, trauma, and injury. The female figure unites her works across media and decades and becomes the channel for personal experiences that are at once universal and timely in their relevance.

Spanning her painting career from Pelvis High (2007), one of the works Tracey Emin exhibited in Venice, to the very recent I Followed you to the end (2024), the selection shows both the consistency of her subject matter and the evolution of her expression. Emin’s primary subject is the female body—sometimes rendered as a fully legible form, sometimes fragmented or incomplete. Yet her concern is not the body’s appearance, but how it becomes a register of emotions. Her evocative use of color, incorporation of text, outline drawing of figures, and overpainting are the leitmotifs through which she has developed a personal emotional language that transcends individual expression to convey universal ideas.

One of Emin’s largest paintings, And it was love (2023), exemplifies the artist’s unique candor. Almost hidden amid drips of paint, a small circle on the figure’s stomach and a line extending from it represent a stoma connected by a tube to a urostomy bag, recasting the work as a self-portrait made after Emin’s devastating bladder cancer surgery in 2020. Her raw portrayal challenges codes of silence around the messy details of the human body.

I Followed you to the end (2024)—recently gifted to the YCBA and one of Emin’s first paintings to be accessioned to a public museum—touches on motifs central to Emin’s practice. Red drips of paint run down the torso of a central figure to intermix with a radically candid poem about love and loneliness. The reference to “the end” in both the text and the title points to the layered and open-ended meanings of Emin’s work—invoking the end of love as well as a confrontation of mortality.

The exhibition’s immersive design draws visitors into Emin’s expressive world even before they enter the museum. A bold new neon work created especially for the Entrance is visible from the street to passersby twenty-four hours a day.

By contextualizing Emin’s work within the Center’s building and collection, I Loved You Until The Morning invites audiences to discover and see anew her pioneering art. Thirteen never-before-exhibited drawings, selected by Tracey Emin from her personal archive, will be on view in the Study Room, home to the museum’s exceptional collection of works on paper. The display visibly embeds Emin’s works within the history of British drawing traditions.

Fittingly, I Loved You Until The Morning coincides with an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and prints by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). Although born almost two hundred years apart, Turner and Emin share an understanding of the expressive potential of paint. Their distinctive ways of looking at the world were shaped by the seaside town of Margate, on England’s eastern coast, where both spent formative periods of their lives. Their work now meets in New Haven, a continent away from their shared experience of place. In this way, the historic and the contemporary connect as part of a larger story of British art that spans geography and time.

The exhibition was curated by Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, with Tracey Emin and her creative director, Harry Weller.

About Tracey Emin

Born in London in 1963, Tracey Emin is a British artist known for her autobiographical artwork. Her paintings lay bare intimate and private experiences that veer from the prosaic to the most profound and life-affirming aspects of being a woman. Emin came to prominence in the 1990s as a multidisciplinary artist known for her sculptural installations and her use of unconventional materials such as textiles and neon. But she began her career as a painter, and in the last two decades has returned to painting as her primary medium.

Tracey Emin was elected to the Royal Academy in 2007 and became its Eranda Professor of Drawing in 2011. In 2024, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts. In 2020, Tracey Emin founded TKE Studios in Margate, Kent, her former hometown. TKE Studios provides affordable studio space for professional artists and also hosts TEAR (Tracey Emin Artist Residency), a training program for emerging artists. Tracey Emin lives and works in London, Margate, and the South of France.

Related Publication

Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until the Morning

Published by the Yale Center for British Art 

by Martina Droth

Contributions by Claire Gilman, Courtney J. Martin, and Tracey Emin

Hardcover, 128 pages, 75 color illustrations

ISBN-13: 9780300279726

Publication date: April 15, 2025 

Photo courtesy of the YCBA

A generously illustrated catalogue accompanies the artist’s first major exhibition in North America. Authored by Martina Droth, with contributions by Claire Gilman and Courtney J. Martin, the publication features an exclusive interview with the artist, places her work in its art-historical context, and opens new avenues for approaching Emin’s painting and closely related drawing practice.

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART -  YCBA

1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut

britishart.yale.edu

Joe Tilson @ Marlborough Gallery, London - Modest Materials & A-Z Box of Friends & Family + Monograph by Marco Livingstone

Joe Tilson 

Modest Materials 

A-Z Box of Friends & Family 

Marlborough Gallery, London 

28 April – 3 June 2023 

JOE TILSON

Geometry 3, 1964

Oil and acrylic on wood relief

74 x 74 in./ 188 x 188 cm

Courtesy of Joe Tilson and Marlborough London

Marlborough London presents two complimentary exhibitions to mark the 95th birthday of the British artist Joe Tilson RA.

Modest Materials on the ground floor and first floor galleries is an overview of Joe Tilson’s career, spanning seven decades and ranging from bold Pop Art pieces to political works and elaborate wood reliefs, through to Joe Tilson’s most recent body of work honouring his love for Venice and Tuscany. The exhibition title plays on Joe Tilson’s early training as a carpenter and joiner, and his unorthodox approach to art practice that led him to work with ‘modest materials’. 

Born in London to working-class parents in 1928, Joe Tilson joined the Royal Air Force before going to study at St Martin’s School of Art (1949-52), where he became friends with Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff amongst others, and the Royal College of Art (1952-55). After graduating, he was awarded the Rome Prize for a year in Italy, introducing him to classical history and culture which would become important to his art and philosophy in later decades.

Joe Tilson went on to become one of the foremost pioneers of Pop Art in Britain presenting his mixed media works in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and moving in a circle of artists that included Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Allen Jones. 

David Hockney was a neighbour in Notting Hill for a time, and Joe Tilson is credited as having introduced Peter Blake to The Beatles.

At the end of the 1960s, tired of the London art scene, Joe Tilson moved to the country where he began developing a new body of work inspired by nature and myth. In the decades since he has continued to work in a wide variety of media and styles, dividing his time between Wiltshire, London and Venice. Joe Tilson has taught at St Martin’s, the Slade School of Fine Art, the School of Visual Arts, New York and the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg.

A-Z Box of Friends and Family on the second floor gallery is inspired by Joe Tilson’s 1963 work of the same title, and features original artworks by friends including Auerbach, Paolozzi and Hamilton, as well as some of his artist family members including his wife Jos Tilson and children Sophy, Jake and Anna. The exhibition, which also includes portraits of Joe Tilson by fellow artists Blake and Hockney, is an eclectic celebration of an extraordinary life.

JOE TILSON by MARCO LIVINGSTONE

Lund Humphries, May 2023

The Marlborough London exhibitions coincide with the publication of a major monograph by Lund Humphries. Written by Marco Livingstone and designed by Tilson’s son Jake, the book provides a definitive overview of the artist’s oeuvre. 

MARLBOROUGH

6 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BY

marlboroughgallerylondon.com

Soheila Sokhanvari @ The Curve, Barbican Centre, London - Rebel Rebel

Soheila Sokhanvari: Rebel Rebel

The Curve, Barbican Centre, London

7 October 2022 – 19 February 2023

Soheila Sokhanvari 

Wild at Heart (Portrait of Pouran Shapoori), 2019

© Soheila Sokhanvari. Courtesy of the artist and Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

Soheila Sokhanvari 

Rebel (Portrait of Zinat Moadab), 2021

© Soheila Sokhanvari. Courtesy of the artist and Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

Barbican Art Gallery presents Rebel Rebel, a site-specific installation for The Curve and the first major UK commission by Iranian artist Soheila Sokhanvari.

The exhibition features a series of 27 exquisite portraits of feminist icons from pre-revolutionary Iran, painted in egg tempera onto calf vellum with a squirrel-hair brush. Each of Sokhanvari’s miniatures – hung against a hand-painted mural based on Islamic geometries decorating the 90-metre gallery – is a labour of love, as she transforms The Curve into a devotional space in which these rarely told feminist histories can be contemplated.

The exhibition title, Rebel Rebel, borrows from David Bowie’s 1974 cult pop song and pays tribute to the significant courage of these 27 female icons, who pursued their careers in a culture enamoured with Western style but not its freedoms. These women include Roohangiz Saminejad, the first unveiled actress to appear in a Persian language film; the controversial modernist poet Forough Farrokhzad; and the leading intellectual and writer Simin Dāneshvar. The title also serves as a lament to the fate of these women, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the subsequent establishment of a conservative Islamic theocracy, left them with a stark choice: to renounce any role in public life, or be forced into exile.

Flowing through the exhibition is a new soundtrack, composed by Marios Aristopoulos, which weaves together songs by celebrated Iranian singers from the mid-20th century, including Ramesh and Googoosh – a poignant gesture given that it remains illegal for a woman’s voice to be broadcast in Iran. Rebel Rebel culminates in extravagant sculptural forms, made of mirror and featuring internal projections drawn from classic Iranian cinema. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication featuring an interview with Barbican curator Eleanor Nairne, alongside a new text by Dr Jordan Amirkhani.

Soheila Sokhanvari said: ‘The Curve has always been a magical space for me, where artists are given the freedom to tell stories in an immersive way. When I was invited for this commission, I knew immediately how I wanted to respond: with a body of work that would transport visitors to the pulse of life in pre-revolutionary Iran and to the women at the heart of that culture.  I hope that visitors will revel in the opportunity to learn about the lives of these formidable women, who gave up everything to pursue their creativity.’

Soheila Sokhanvari’s previous work has addressed the pervasive influence of Western culture in the Middle East. Portraiture has been an enduring concern, from a series of expired passports adorned with handmade stamps drawn from vintage advertising slogans – ‘Just for men – won’t let you down’ and ‘reveal your inner goddess’ – to paintings of her father Ali Mohammed dressed as the Hollywood actor James Dean. Humour is always just beneath the surface, as a subversive means to consider the violent legacies of Western politics in Iran.

Eleanor Nairne, Curator, Barbican said: ‘I am delighted that we have commissioned Soheila Sokhanvari to make this ambitious project for our free programme in The Curve. Soheila’s dazzling reimagining of the space, in which visitors can commune with these extraordinary creatives from pre-revolutionary Iran, will no doubt be a revelation for many.’

Soheila Sokhanvari was born in Shiraz, Iran, and currently lives and works in Cambridge, where she is a studio artist at Wysing Arts Centre. Sokhanvari has exhibited internationally, with recent projects including participation in The NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2020-2021); Addicted to Love, a solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2019); Salam Salam, an installation commissioned by the Magic of Persia Foundation (2018); LDWN, an installation at Victoria Station, which was a collaboration between the Tate Collective and City Hall (2018); Heart of Glass, a solo exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall (2017); Paradise Lost, a solo exhibition at Jerwood Project Space (2017); and Homeland at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück in Germany. In 2018 she won the Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship at the British School at Rome. Her work now features in major permanent collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Saatchi Gallery Collection. Sokhanvari gained her postgraduate diploma in fine art from Chelsea College of Art and Design and her MFA from Goldsmiths College. She has been represented by Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery since 2012.

The exhibition has been commissioned by the Barbican, and is supported by the Bagri Foundation, Arts Council England, and the Soheila Sokhanvari Exhibition Circle: Marie Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre (Spirit Now London), Sayeh Ghanbari, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Elizabeth and J. Jeffry Louis, Pat and Pierre Maugüé, Hugh Monk, and those who wish to remain anonymous.  

An exhibition catalogue will be available.

BARBICAN CENTRE

Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS

www.barbican.org.uk

Bernard Cohen @ Flowers Gallery, London - Interiors

Bernard Cohen: Interiors

Flowers Gallery, London

14 April - 22 May 2021

BERNARD COHEN

Interiors, 2020 

Acrylic on linen, 120 x 150 cm

© Bernard Cohen, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

BERNARD COHEN is considered one of Britain’s most significant painters, whose paintings tell stories about identity and experience. Interiors is an exhibition of recent works demonstrating Bernard Cohen’s sustained enquiry into the complex chaos of everyday existence.

Since the 1950s, Bernard Cohen has developed a wide range of inventive techniques and processes of painting, creating labyrinthine compositions of line, shape, pattern and colour. His paintings will often tell many stories at once, using distinctive strategies of layering, superimposing, and condensing multiple images to establish intricate networks and relationships.

In a Spotlight exhibition at Tate Britain in 2017, Bernard Cohen's paintings were described as being, both individually and as a whole, "a series of diagrams about painting.” This approach developed during the 1960s, with works that incorporated many small independent paintings within the same canvas. (For example, Matter of Identity, 1963, in the Tate collection.) Bernard Cohen refers to the inner paintings as "small objects, that together establish the identity of the whole painting". In the recent works in this exhibition, recurring individual figurative motifs such as doors, windows, airplanes, paw marks and railway tracks, are interlaced to form an accumulative coherence and logic. The motifs are always rooted in personal experience, as Bernard Cohen explains: "There is nothing that appears in my paintings that hasn’t been seen by me or experienced by me. I paint things that I’ve seen, things that are part of the everyday, the ordinary. Among things that I see are random things: the way things overlap or interfere with each other. The random has become a very important part of my painting."

Bernard Cohen credits the beginning of his interest in interiors as a subject for his work with an encounter with Velasquez's 1656 painting Las Meninas and what he describes as "the extraordinary way in which [Velasquez] made everything in the space I was occupying part of the painting, so that half the painting is of things outside of the canvas." Cohen's paintings similarly operate around the complex space of the picture plane, navigating the unseen border that separates, in his own words "what is in the spectator’s world from what is in the painting".

The composition of the painting How to Paint the Milky Way is underpinned by a cosmos of dots, overlaid by a random configuration of airplane symbols and various cube-like planes and lattices that together make up a domestic scene of a doorway, pictures on the wall and a carpet on the floor. Bernard Cohen recalls: "During a long stay in New Mexico I experienced a daylight that was so bright that it voraciously consumed objects, while at night at 10,000 feet, away from any artificial light, the Milky Way appeared as one overwhelming physical object. I was overwhelmed by the density of what I saw. What is a painting and what fills it? Where is its all-containing identity? I continue to ask myself these questions.”

BERNARD COHEN

Born in London in 1933, Bernard Cohen studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1951-1954. In 1988 he was appointed as Slade Professor and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. Bernard Cohen came to prominence during the 1960s and has since exhibited widely. His first solo exhibition with Flowers Gallery was in 1998. In 2007 the gallery hosted Bernard Cohen: Paintings from the Sixties, focusing on an important period in Bernard Cohen’s artistic development, followed by Work of Six Decades in 2009, which celebrated his career by bringing together a selection of key works and the publication of a comprehensive book. A subsequent survey exhibition titled About Now: Paintings and Prints 2000-2015 took place at Flowers Gallery in 2015, accompanied by the book About Now by Ian McKay. Other important exhibitions include Artist in Focus, Six Paintings from the Tate Gallery Collection, The Tate Gallery, London in 1995; Stroll on! Aspects of British Abstract Art in the Sixties, Mamco, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva in 2005-2006; Abstraction and the Human Figure at CAM’s British Art Collection, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon in 2010; and a solo retrospective Spotlight Display at Tate Britain in 2017-18. Bernard Cohen lives and works in London. Ten of Bernard Cohen’s paintings are in the Tate collection, and his work is included in numerous public collections worldwide.

FLOWERS GALLERY

21 Cork Street, London W1S 3LZ

www.flowersgallery.com

Get Up, Stand Up Now. Generations of Black Creative Pioneers @ Somerset House, London

GET UP, STAND UP NOW
Generations of Black Creative Pioneers
Somerset House, London
Through 15 September 2019

DEBORAH ROBERTS

Untitled, 2018

Copyright of the artist. Courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery

Featuring: Anthea Hamilton, Armet Francis, Black Audio Film Collective, Bradford Young, Carrie Mae Weems, Chris Ofili, David Hammons, Dennis Bovell, Derrick Adams, Ebony G Patterson, Gaika, Glenn Ligon, Grace Wales Bonner, Hank Willis Thomas, Helen Cammock, Horace Ové, Jenn Nkiru, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lubaina Himid, Marlon James, Martine Rose, Mowalola Ogunlesi, Nari Ward, Peter Doig, Ronan McKenzie, Sanford Biggers, Sonia Boyce, Steve McQueen, Yinka Shonibare, Young Fathers, with a specially commissioned soundtrack by Jillionaire of Major Lazer. Curated by Zak Ové.

This summer, Somerset House celebrates the impact of 50 years of Black creativity in Britain and beyond, with a landmark exhibition showcasing art, photography, music, literature, design and fashion. It is the first time that this distinguished group of approximately 100 artists are represented together, with their work articulating and addressing the Black experience and sensibility, from the post-war era to present day.

Historic artworks and new commissions sit alongside items from personal archives, much of which has never been seen by the public before. Through these original photographs, letters, films and audio clips, the exhibition connects the creative, the personal and the political, reflecting how artists have responded to the issues of our times.

RICHARD RAWLINS

The True Crown, from the series I AM SUGAR, 2018

Copyright of the artist

Curated by acclaimed artist Zak Ové, Get Up, Stand Up Now begins with the work of his father, Trinidadian Horace Ové, credited as the creator of the first feature film by a Black British director, and his pioneering peers who were part of what is now known as the Windrush generation, such as Armet Francis, Charlie Phillips and Vanley Burke. During the 1960s and 1970s, they developed a new creative model for modern multicultural Britain, paving the way for the next generation of artists, such as John Akomfrah, Sonia Boyce and Steve McQueen, who all contribute to the exhibition.  Get Up, Stand Up Now extends to works from today’s brilliant young Britain-based talent too, including photographer Ronan McKenzie, fashion designer Mowalola Ogunlesi and musician Gaika, who interrogate identity in innovative ways.  Carrying forward the line of enquiry and internationalist ambition established by Horace Ové and his dynamic creative circle, a number of renowned contemporary diasporic artists also participate in the exhibition, including David Hammons, Carrie Mae Weems and Sanford Biggers.

Curator Zak Ové has invited each artist to exhibit on account of their significant contribution to shaping our cultural landscape.  All the artists’ trailblazing work transforms their local experiences into a global, universal language, which challenges the systems of power and representation and continues to change the consciousness of society today. 

CHE LOVELACE

Figure at Treetop, 2016

Courtesy and Copyright of the artist 

and Galerie Eric Hussenot, Paris

Photo Brendan Dalzin

HIGHLIGHT EXHIBITION WORKS

INFLUENTIAL FIGURES

Many works reflect on the act of remembrance and recognition of places and people, acknowledging the significant contribution of Black culture and individuals, both those renowned today and those overlooked or forgotten by history.

One of the show’s opening works includes award-winning film maker Steve McQueen’s poignant Remember Me, his first work conceived in neon and consisting of three handwritten versions of its title.  Originally made in the wake of McQueen’s celebrated film installation Ashes, about the violent and premature death of a young Grenadian man, it was personally chosen by McQueen for Get Up, Stand Up Now.  McQueen’s meditation on memory is particularly pertinent in relation to the impact of Horace Ové, whose work is recalled throughout the show by subsequent generations of artists.

Michael X, who once claimed to be “the most famous Black man in Britain” as the self-styled leader of the British Black Power movement, is shown alongside supporters John Lennon and Yoko Ono in an unseen shot by Horace Ové, recently discovered in his personal archives.  The activist lived in the flat above the Ové family and many of the British Black Power meetings took place in the Ové’s garden.  His life is also mined in John Akomfrah and Black Audio Film Collective’s most controversial film Who Needs a Heart.  Michael X’s US counterpart Leroy Eldridge Cleaver is captured with his wife Kathleen by Gordon Parks, one of the most important figures of twentieth century film and photography and a significant influence on many Black British creatives.  Parks is the first African-American to produce and direct major motion pictures, including the original Shaft film, and became the first Black photographer for Life and Vogue magazines.  Photo conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas draws a striking parallel between a labourer and an American football player, depicting the athlete in a kneeling stance in his 2011 work Cain't See in the Mornin' til Cain't See at Night.

The 2017 Turner Prize winning artist Lubaina Himid’s painting Venetian Maps: Ceramicists represents the contribution made by Africans to the cultural history of Venice.  The Oscar-nominated cinematographer of Arrival and Selma, Bradford Young, is reworking his video installation REkOGNIZE, especially for the exhibition.  It documents the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where millions of African-Americans migrated in the early 20th century, becoming a centre of artistic creation.  Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson’s intricate tapestries compile images of murder victims in the crime scene, uploaded onto social media from around the world.  The works are highly embellished with beads, glitter, flowers, fringing and appliqué fabrics, seducing viewers into witnessing the underreported brutality experienced by those of lower socioeconomic standings, often from Black communities.

Photographer Ajamu showcases his sublime series of portraits of young Black British queer artists, activists and cultural commentators.  Birmingham-based artist Barbara Walker’s detailed drawings recall Britain’s Black servicemen. Created using archive material from the First and Second World Wars, the pictures are a powerful reminder of how they are often missing in representations of the British Armed Forces.

MUSIC

Music plays an important part in Get Up, Stand Up Now, exploring the immense influence of Black artists on many genres of music.  Somerset House has commissioned two new audio works, especially for the exhibition.  The stratospheric DJ Jillionaire, one third of supergroup Major Lazer, has mixed an exclusive soundtrack to be streamed inside the gallery.  He has created a musical bridge between the generations in Get Up, Stand Up Now, bringing his take on the beats of calypso and soca, straight from the streets where he grew up in Trinidad, to the sounds of Afrofuturism. Artist Libita Clayton will orchestrate live percussive performances inside the space on select dates, exploring ideas of resistance through rhythm and language.

A host of musicians have also selected objects to go on display, which speak of their musical inspirations and creative processes.  Each object is additionally accompanied by a playlist curated by the musician.  Contributors include reggae maestro Dennis Bovell, a musician and producer on many classic hits, having collaborated with the likes of Marvin Gaye, The Slits, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Horace Ové on the seminal television series Empire Road.  Sons of Kemet’s frontman Shabaka Hutchings – who is performing at this year’s Somerset House Summer Series with American Express – has given the clarinet gifted to him by legendary jazz musician Courtney Pine. 

Somerset House Studios resident Jenn Nkiru – one of Jay Z’s and Beyoncé’s collaborators on APESH*T – showcases her trailblazing films, made with the likes of Neneh Cherry and Kamasi Washington.  Her fellow Studios artist Gaika presents his new immersive installation Heaters 4 the 2 Seaters, inviting visitors into his signature subversive and satirical take on the current political and geo-economic climate.

Clips from Horace Ové’s seminal 1970s documentaries Reggae and King Carnival will also be shown.  One of the first documentaries made on Reggae music, Reggae features exclusive footage from a festival held at Wembley Stadium in 1970 and King Carnival charts the history of the Trinidad & Tobago Carnival, commissioned for the BBC series The World About Us.  Carnival is referenced in numerous exhibition works, recognising the rich symbolic and historical significance of colonial independence through this celebration.  Rarely seen archive materials documenting Notting Hill Carnival, Europe’s biggest street festival, will also be on display.

  

IDENTITY

A series of sculptural works represent self-identity and transformation.  Fashion’s favourite new designer Mowalola Ogunlesi will create a new life-size mannequin of an Afrofuturistic cowboy, complete with guitar to conjure a future-facing soundtrack, drawing inspiration from the street style and sounds of Lagos.

Berlin-based artist Satch Hoyt presents Ice Pick, an Afro hair pick cradled in an upholstered musical instrument case, usually carried by classical orchestras.  It is accompanied by a rhythmic soundscape of two African-American women performing the daily ritual of combing their hair with wooden, plastic and metal picks.  Faisal Abdu’Allah, who works as a barber alongside his artistic and academic practice, brings his gold-plated The Barber’s Chair to the show, recognising the barber’s salon as an indistinguishable site of communal exchange and comradery.  David Hammons also draws inspiration from African hair in his Hair Relaxer.  The title refers to the painful practice of ‘relaxing’ or straightening African hair, yet the sculptural installation shows a long head of hair, unstraightened and retaining its natural kinkiness, lying at ease on an old-fashioned chaise lounge, often used in the representation of female beauty in European art.

The archives of Althea McNish, Britain’s first Black textile designer of international repute who brought tropical colour to British textiles and changed interior design trends, have been referenced for the exhibition.  McNish’s work resonates with Yinka Shonibare’s trademark wax batik fabric, summoned in Self Portrait (after Warhol) and incorporated into the 24-carat gold gun-toting Revolution Kid (Calf).  In a new, site-specific commission for the show, Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk creates an Afrofuturistic mural and temple to learning, with bespoke table and seating by exhibition designer Yinka Ilori.

Get Up, Stand Up Now also presents rarely seen work from an exciting range of photographers, who have provided new perspectives in fashion photography, including Ronan McKenzie, Armet Francis and Campbell Addy.

FILM

Visitors will have the opportunity to watch feature-length screenings of Horace Ové’s seminal films Pressure and Baldwin’s Nigger, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.  Baldwin’s Nigger documents a conversation between the eminent American author James Baldwin, whose books include If Beale Street Could Talk and I Am Not Your Negro, and comedian Dick Gregory.  Ové’s close relationship with Baldwin is further illustrated in a number of intimate photographic portraits. Pressure follows the fictional story of a British-born son of a first-generation Trinidadian family finding himself adrift between two cultures.  Behind the scenes photographs, hand-notated scripts, original film cannisters and letters relating to the film are also shown.

Scottish born, Trinidadian based artist Peter Doig has created original hand-drawn film posters for both Horace Ové and Zak Ové’s films to be screened in Get Up, Stand Up Now. They feature alongside Doig’s numerous alternative film posters, used to advertise his Studio Film Club, free weekly film screenings organised by himself and fellow Get Up, Stand Up Now contributor Che Lovelace in Doig’s Port of Spain studio.

LITERATURE

Poems from dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, Commonwealth Poetry Prize winner Grace Nichols and former Young Poet Laureates for London Caleb Femi and Selina Nwulu will be vibrantly reimagined throughout the exhibition. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, featuring the poems and new essays from editor of New Daughters of Africa Margaret Busby, artist and curator David A. Bailey and publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove.

EVENTS

An extensive talks and events programme provides exclusive insights into some of the key protagonists and works within the exhibition.

SOMERSET HOUSE
Strand, London, WC2R 1LA
www.somersethouse.org.uk

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Royal Academy of Arts, London

Giovanni Battista Moroni

Royal Academy of Arts, London

25 October 2014 – 25 January 2015

This exhibition of outstanding works by Giovanni Battista Moroni (c.1520-1579), widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of the sixteenth century, will be the first comprehensive survey of his oeuvre to be held in the UK. In the autumn of 2014, the Royal Academy of Arts will gather a selection of over 40 works to present Moroni not only as a distinctive portraitist but also as a fine religious painter, a role for which he is lesser known. For the first time, a number of altarpieces from the churches of the Diocese of Bergamo, northern Italy, will be displayed alongside examples of Giovanni Battista Moroni’s portraiture, chronologically charting his rise to the summit of Italian sixteenth-century painting. From works influenced by Lotto and Moroni’s master Moretto, to later commissions earned as the leading painter of Bergamo, Giovanni Battista Moroni will offer viewers the chance to discover Moroni as an unsung genius of the Renaissance.

Moroni captured the exact likeness, character and inner life of his sitters with rare penetrating insight. His portraiture, singular not only for its unprecedented realism but also its psychological depth and immediacy, was in many ways ahead of his time. Preempting the work of Caravaggio, Moroni came to be widely collected in the nineteenth century, including Portrait of a Lady (c.1556-60) and A Knight with a Jousting Helmet (c.1556), purchased by the National Gallery, London, in 1876. Moroni’s portraits depict members of the society in which he lived, a cast of compelling Renaissance characters whose lives played out the feuds and family dramas of a pro-Spanish aristocracy living under the Republic of Venice in the mid-sixteenth century. With a selection to establish Moroni as one of the major specialists in the genre, his portraits reveal an enamel-like brightness, a clarity of design and a touch of realism which is in contrast to the adorned portraiture of his contemporary Titian.

Although Moroni’s name was linked to Bergamo, he also lived and worked in the nearby towns of Brescia, Trent and Albino. Working in a city without a leading court, Moroni’s sitters span a surprisingly wide social spectrum; his clientèle, unique at the time, comprised intellectuals, professionals, state officers and artisans. His famous portrait of The Tailor (1565-1570), one of the highlights of this exhibition, is the first known portrait of a man depicted whilst undertaking manual labour. In capturing the world around him, Moroni’s works also offer a vivid record of the fashions and fortunes of Bergamo, revealing changes in costume as the colourful silks of the portraits of Isotta Brembati (c.1555) and Gian Gerolamo Grumelli (c.1560), yield to the more sombre styles of the Spanish fashion, seen in the portrait of Pietro Secco Suardo (1563).

Moroni’s religious paintings were completed in accordance with the principles of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent (1545-1563). In these, a worshipper is often depicted as a witness to the sacred scene, as demonstrated by The Last Supper (c.1566-1569). The pastoral visit of the religious reformer Cardinal Charles Borromeo to the Diocese of Bergamo in 1575 prompted the churches of the region to commission many new religious paintings, and Moroni as the leading painter produced several art works for public devotion, including the altarpiece painting Saint Gotthard Enthroned with Saint Lawrence and Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c.1575). The selection of Moroni’s religious works will also include examples of paintings intended for private devotion, such as A Gentleman in Adoration before the Baptism of Christ (c.1555-1560).

The exhibition will be a definitive survey of Moroni’s output and includes many of his greatest masterpieces. It will reveal an artist who has perhaps gone unrecognised as an exceptional painter and a master of the Renaissance.

Giovanni Battista Moroni has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibition has been curated by Simone Facchinetti, Curator of the Museo Adriano Bernareggi in Bergamo, and Arturo Galansino, Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Giovanni Battista Moroni 

(c) Royal Academy of Arts, London

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated and scholarly catalogue with contributions from Simone Facchinetti and Arturo Galansino.

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS 

Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD

www.royalacademy.org.uk

Alison Erika Forde: Exhibition at International 3, Manchester - Smotherland

Alison Erika Forde: Smotherland
The International 3, Manchester
Throught 30 October 2010

Smotherland, at the International 3 in Manchester is the artist ALISON ERIKA FORDE’s first solo exhibition.

Alison Erika Forde draws on her dreams and memories of past experiences to produce fantastical images that acknowledge the capacity of daydream to allow us to consider the complexity of the everyday. Her imagery and illustrative style is influenced as much by graphic novels, comic strips, street art and kitsch as it is by fine art’s history and whilst initial viewing suggests a disarming playfulness, her work is imbued with a vital mischief and dark humour. Wide-eyed characters frequently face impending doom and uncomfortable scenarios are enacted on the picture’s periphery. 

Moving away from a previously exclusive use of 2D, in Smotherland, Alison Erika Forde expanding this charmingly malevolent world to encompass 3D. Giant painted figures provides a menacing backdrop to a group of intricately painted wooden peg people and a new collection of paintings on charity shop sourced pictures and donated second hand materials.

Smotherland is accompanied by commissioned texts written by freelance curator Bryony Bond and D.I.Y craftster and writer Seleena Daye.

ALISON ERIKA FORDE (born 1985, Greater Manchester) gained a first class BA (Hons) Fine Art from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2008 where she also won the British Airways Student Prize. Alison Erika Forde’s recent exhibitions include, ‘How we work’ at Blackburne House in Liverpool and ‘Not at this address’ at Bury Museum and Art Gallery’. The International 3 has also presented her work at Preview Berlin 08, VOLTA 5, Basel, The Manchester Contemporary and VOLTA New York. Alison Erika Forde has an upcoming solo exhibition at MasART Galeria in Barcelona followed by The International 3’s presentation of her work alongside Rachel Goodyear’s at NADA Art Fair Miami Beach 2010 from 2nd – 5th December.. Work by Alison Erika Forde is held in the Olbricht Collection and in private collections in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, U.S.A. and U.K.

Alison Erika Forde, Smotherland
24th September – Saturday 30th October 2010

THE INTERNATIONAL 3
8 Fairfield st., Manchester M1 3GF

Opening Times: Weds – Sat 12pm – 5pm and Sunday 31st October 12pm-5pm

George Maciunas: The Dream of Fluxus, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead - Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit

George Maciunas: The Dream of Fluxus 

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 

25 November 2008 – 15 February 2009

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art explores the history and works of Fluxus through the renowned Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit. This unprecedented exhibition of over three-hundred and fifty works from 1961 – 1978 is the largest display of Fluxus ever mounted in Britain. 

Fluxus is often historically regarded as a global network of influential and vibrant artists who shared a unique, if not united, aspiration to revolutionise the avant-garde. Through the introduction of concept art, intermedia, and radical performance practices, Fluxus pioneered an aesthetic appreciation for the everyday. By intentionally confusing the boundaries of how and when an artwork could begin or end, exiting a room, making a salad, or ending a war were transformed into performative works of art. 

Reflecting its international network of artists, Fluxus began in many places from as many creative perspectives. The origins of this network have been traced to the teachings of John Cage, the serial compositions of German composer Karl Heinz Stockhausen, and the organisational talents of graphic designer, architect, and artist George Maciunas. Maciunas was the self-appointed chairman of Fluxus. His political and agitprop approach to Fluxus aspired to a complete overhaul of the complacent bourgeois art world. George Maciunas dreamed of a Fluxus whose collective spirit enabled the availability of Fluxkits, Fluxfeasts, Fluxfests, and Fluxfilms for the price of a paperback. Having coined the phrase Fluxus in 1961, Maciunas organised a series of groundbreaking European performance festivals beginning in 1962 that set the tone for countless Fluxus events that continue throughout the world in theatres, galleries, and on the street. 

Centring on George Maciunas’s contributions to Fluxus until his death in 1978, The Dream of Fluxus is curated by Thomas Kellein of Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany in collaboration with Jon Hendricks, curator of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection. 

This collection of works, many of which were acquired directly from the George Maciunas estate in 1984, began with Gilbert Silverman’s interest in the work of Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks in the early 1970s. Silverman adds: “You have to understand that real collectors are on a major ego trip and that the idea of collecting something is to have something more than someone else, that if I worked very hard and really fast I could put together the biggest Fluxus collection in the world.”

Artists whose works feature in George Maciunas, The Dream of Fluxus include: Genpei Akasegawa, Eric Andersen, Ay-O, Jeff Berner, George Brecht, Gieseppe Chiari, John Chick, Jack Coke’s Farmer’s Co-op, Robert Filliou, Albert Fine, Ken Friedman, Henry Flynt, Geoffrey Hendricks, Hi Red Center, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Joe Jones, Per Kirkeby, Jane Knizak, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, John Lennon, Carla Liss, George Maciunas, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Miller, Peter Moore, Olivier Mosset, Claes Oldenburg, Serge Oldenbourg, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Jock Reynolds, Willem de Ridder, James Riddle, Takako Saito, Paul Sharits, Tomas Schmit, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Yoshi Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, and La Monte Young.

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 

Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead NE8 3BA

www.balticmill.com

Vivienne Westwood Retrospective, V&A, London

Vivienne Westwood

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

1 April - 11 July 2004

Vivienne Westwood

Exhibition Invitation Card

The Victoria and Albert Museum presents a major exhibition of the work of Vivienne Westwood, one of the most influential fashion designers of the last 30 years. 

The exhibition is the largest the V&A has ever dedicated to a British designer and features more than 150 designs mainly selected from the V&A’s collection and Vivienne Westwood’s personal archive. The show examines Westwood’s career from the 1970s to the present day.

 

Vivienne Westwood has been a major influence on fashion design from haute couture to ready-to-wear. Her career has spanned the punk era including outfits worn by the Sex Pistols in the 70s to grand ball-gowns influenced by historical art and dress. 

Vivienne Westwood, said: “It is extremely exciting that the V&A is mounting this exhibition exploring my work over more than 30 years. I am delighted to be able to share with people my archive and ideas. It is very important that the V&A continues to put on fashion exhibitions – fashion is an applied art and it is extremely vital and alive today.”

The curator of the Westwood exhibition, Claire Wilcox, said: “Highly influential and always ahead of her time, Vivienne Westwood encapsulates a particular kind of Britishness, combining fearless non-conformity with a sense of tradition. She has made a major contribution to international fashion over the last 30 years and we are delighted to be holding this retrospective.”

The exhibition celebrates the long-standing relationship between the V&A and Vivienne Westwood. The museum’s first acquisition was an outfit from the 1981 “Pirate” collection. Since then, the V&A has followed her career closely and now has one of the largest public collections of Vivienne Westwood’s designs. 

The exhibition explores how Vivienne Westwood has incorporated historical references from fashion and culture in a unique and inspiring way. She has been influenced by the V&A’s historical collections and is renowned for her interpretation of the corset, crinoline and bustle. Historical garments are included alongside examples of Vivienne Westwood’s creations. An 18th century “sacque-back” dress is displayed, for example, next to a green silk ‘Watteau’ evening dress by Vivienne Westwood, worn by Linda Evangelista in 1996. 

The exhibition looks at Vivienne Westwood’s often subversive adaptation of British traditions and gentle parodies of royalty. 

The exhibition includes sections devoted to tailoring, tartan and accessories. The famous blue mock-croc platform shoes Naomi Campbell wore when she fell on the catwalk in 1993 is on display. 

Film and catwalk footage about the life and career of Vivienne Westwood are shown throughout.

Vivienne Westwood was awarded British Designer of the Year in 1990 and in 1992 she received an OBE for her outstanding contribution to fashion. In 1998 she was given the Queen’s award for Export and in 2003 she was named Export Designer of the Year.

Vivienne Westwood

Exhibition Catalogue

A book, Vivienne Westwood, is published by V&A Publications to coincide with the exhibition. Written by exhibition curator Claire Wilcox, with a Foreword by Vivienne Westwood, this is the first full-length study of her work as a fashion designer and contains over 200 illustrations. Photograph Cover: Rankin

The Vivienne Westwood exhibition will tour to the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra from 5 November 2004 to 23 January 2005.

VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM - V&A

Cromwell Road, London SW7

www.vam.ac.uk

Updated Post (11.09.2022)

Ed Ruscha, Museum of Modern Art Oxford

Ed Ruscha

Museum of Modern Art Oxford

3 November 2001 - 13 January 2002

“When I began painting, all my paintings were of words which were gutturalutterances like Smash, Boss, Eat. Those words were like flowers in a vase; I just happened to paint words likesomeone else paints flowers." Ed Ruscha

“Ed Ruscha has the coolest gaze in American art.” J G Ballard

The Museum of Modern Art Oxford presents the UK’s first major retrospective of American artist Ed Ruscha, in an exhibition organised with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The exhibition comprises a wide range of Ed Ruscha’s paintings from early ‘pop’ works such as Annie and Boss through to recent highly acclaimed ‘mountain’ paintings and metro plots, and also offers visitors a rare opportunity to see a selection of drawings and all of his books, including Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963).

Considered both a pop and a conceptual artist, Los Angeles based Ed Ruscha has resisted such convenient labels for his work, but has always been a pioneer in the use of language and imagery drawn from the popular media. From his early, powerful word paintings, to his influential artist books of the 1960s and 70s, through to his recent, colourful views of generic mountains, Ruscha has investigated the spaces between highways and journeys, image and words, abstraction and representation, public imagery and the contemporary landscape.

“I am more firmly rooted in issues of abstract art than I am with things figurative, yet I use figurative objects. This is a contradiction that is never resolved but does not confuse me.” explains Ed Ruscha of his work.

Ed Ruscha was born in December 1937 in Omaha, and grew up in Oklahoma City. In 1956, (aged 18) he left home driving along Route 66 to California. The highways and landscapes he passed on his journey were to influence his work in a profound and lasting way. In Los Angeles, Ruscha attended the Chouinard Art Institute until 1960 where, under the influence of teachers such as Robert Irwin, Richards Ruben and Emerson Woelffer, he gave up his original intention of becoming a cartoonist and began to focus instead on fine art.

In the early sixties, Ed Ruscha worked for an advertising agency, after which he made his first paintings using words, a prime focus for him throughout the years since. At first, words were rendered in great brushstrokes in the style of Abstract Expressionism, which later became words that floated against a variety of backgrounds. His early work featured mostly single words such as “Ace” and “Jelly”.

Ed Ruscha’s work is included in numerous international museum collections, and previous retrospectives have been mounted by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. The MOMA exhibition brings together, for the first time in the UK, works from private and public collections from all over the world, that survey Ruscha’s entire career to date.

“There’s been a kind of renaissance of interest in his work in the last three or four years” says Neal Benezra, who co-curated the exhibition. “He’s continually reinventing his paintings and reinventing not just the look of art but the way it’s made.”

Ed Ruscha opened in June 2000 at the Hirshhorn, and has toured to MoCA, Chicago, Miami Art Museum, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The exhibition has been organised by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art Oxford. The exhibition is co-curated by Neal Benezra, Deputy Director, Art Institute of Chicago and Kerry Brougher, Chief Curator at the Hirshhorn.

A fully illustrated, 196 page catalogue has been produced in association with Scalo Ltd, including essays by Neal Benezra, Kerry Brougher and Phyllis Rosenzweig. 

MOMA - MUSEUM OF MODERN ART OXFORD

30 Pembroke Street, Oxford, OX1 1BP

www.moma.org.uk

Art in Brazil 1958 - 2000 @ MOMA Oxford - Experiment Experiência

Experiment Experiência 

Art in Brazil 1958 - 2000

Museum of Modern Art Oxford

28 July - 21 October 2001

The Museum of Modern Art Oxford presents sculpture, installation and film by eighteen of Brazil's most influential and ground-breaking artists.

Experiment Experiência captures the unique spirit of experimentation and dynamism of Brazilian Art since the late 1950s, presenting the work of three generations of artists. As well as artists exhibiting in Britain for the first time, the exhibition includes artists such as Tunga and Ernesto Neto, both of whom are featured at the Venice Biennale 2001.

Taking as its starting point the early experiments of the Brazilian avant-garde led by Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, Experiment Experiência reveals how artists sought radical alternatives to the confines of the picture plane. Rising out of an art of geometric abstraction, more expressive ways of working were explored, leading to an art that combined the sensuous use of materials with audience participation and interaction. Sérgio Camargo and Mira Schendel, shown at the Signals Gallery in London in the 1960s, together with their contemporaries, reached a wide international audience and began to establish Brazilian art as amongst the most radical in the world.

This was an art of lived experience, a meeting of mind and body, as seen in performances such as Lygia Pape’s ‘Divisor’ of 1968, which involved the participation of many communities in Rio de Janeiro, including children from the favelas. In the 1960s and 1970s the work of artists such as Antonio Dias and Antonio Manuel became increasingly politicised, produced as it was against a background of profound social and political change. Conversely, much art of the 1980s became more poetic and site specific, whilst retaining a sense of experimentation and a fascination with bodily movement, such as the expansive flowing steel and perspex structures of Iole de Freitas.

Experiment Experiência brings the work of these three generations of artists together for the first time in the UK, and will include: Waltercio Caldas, Sergio Camargo, Lygia Clark, José Damasceno, Iole de Freitas, Antonio Dias, Carmela Gross, Jac Leirner, Antonio Manuel, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Nuno Ramos, Rosângela Rennó, José Resende, Mira Schendel and Tunga.

The exhibition also offers visitors a unique opportunity to view films made by the artists, such as rarely seen works by Lygia Pape and Antonio Manuel, as well as documentaries and filmed performances.

Experiment Experiência culminates in the explosive and paradoxical art of Brazil today: forms which take on organic, monumental and often surreal perspectives but whose sensibilities can nevertheless be traced back to the earliest exponents of the Brazilian avant-garde.

Although many contemporary Brazilian artists such as Antonio Dias, Waltercio Caldas, Tunga, Jac Leirner and Ernesto Neto have already achieved international acclaim, the exhibition also presents the work of important Brazilian artists such as José Resende, who although less well-known here, are celebrated as seminal figures of contemporary art in their own country.

Experiment Experiência: Art in Brazil 1958-2000 is part of a broad programme of UK events organised by BrasilConnects celebrating Brazilian art and culture in 2001.The exhibition is curated by Nelson Aguilar and Astrid Bowron. A catalogue is available to accompany the exhibition with an essay by Paulo Venancio Filho and an introduction by the curators.

MOMA - MUSEUM OF MODERN ART OXFORD

30 Pembroke Street, Oxford, OX1 1BP

www.moma.org.uk

Alan McKernan, University of Liverpool, Senate House Exhibition Hall - Contrasting Light

Alan McKernan: Contrasting Light

Senate House Exhibition Hall, 

University of Liverpool

1 February - 16 March 2001

Enter a new and unfamiliar landscape in this exhibition of photographs of Formby and the Dock Road area by local artist, Alan McKernan. There will be a selection of 36 black and white photos from two recent series called 'Last Light' made at Formby and 'Continuum of Change' taken around the Dock Road.

Laying aside the high-tech digital equipment now available to photographers Alan McKernan decided to show what could be done with the simpler medium of camera, black and white film and daylight. He wanted to demonstrate to himself, and his students at Liverpool's Community College, the continuing potential of traditional camera technology to surprise and please the eye.

Visiting the woods and dunes at Formby, Alan McKernan made a series of photographs often taken in the last light of day. 'The familiar landscape emerged re-drawn in the ever-changing light. The pinewoods and marram grass became reminiscent of equatorial forests, savannah grasslands and dry deserts.' The resulting images in the 'Last Light' series are of unusual and haunting beauty; creating connections with a distant past and echoes of a fairy-tale world.

A stark contrast appears in Alan McKernan's second series of photos, which are of the Dock Road area, actually Regent Road. The grid-like pattern of brick and stone are deeply etched in these strongly urban images. Yet what attracted Alan McKernan to the subject was the 'Continuum of Change' between the man-made structures and the working of natural forces. As the disused warehouses of the Dock Road area age and decay, plants have begun to reclaim the buildings. 'This flourishing of nature symbolises man's transient impact; the apparently random distribution of the plant forms is in contrast to man's attempts to bring order and structure to the landscape'.

The 'Contrasting Light' of the two series are linked by this exploration of the forces of nature and by a common theme of light: 'its ephemeral effects sculpt and re-present the landscape'.

Ann Compton, Curator, University of Liverpool Art Collections

Senate House Exhibition Hall 

University of Liverpool

Oxford Street, Liverpool L69 7WY

www.liv.ac.uk