UK Platform for emerging artists shorlist - Platform Graduate Award 2012

UK Platform for emerging artists

Announcing the shorlist for the Platform Graduate Award

Four flagship contemporary art organisations will announce the recipient of the inaugural Platform Graduate Award later this month at Modern Art Oxford. This pilot project, devised through the Contemporary Visual Arts Network (CVAN) is an inaugural mentor programme between galleries and emerging artists from the South East. Over the last few months Aspex, MK Gallery, Modern Art Oxford and Turner Contemporary have each provided a platform for recent graduates from each of their region’s art colleges. 

KAREN CROSBY

Platform Graduate Showcase Karen Crosby, Traces, 2012

Digital Print 80cm x 59cm 

(c) Karen Crosby - Courtesy Turner Contemporary, Margate

ALEXANDRA HANSCHELL

Platform Graduate Showcase Alexandra Hanschell, Architectural Fracture, 2012

(c) Alexandra Hanschell - Courtesy Turner Contemporary, Margate

DOMINIC MAFIA

Platform Graduate Showcase Dominic Mafia, Picnic, 2012

(c) Dominic Mafia - Courtesy Turner Contemporary, Margate

Artworks from Jack Coulson, Karen Crosby, Naomi Eaton-Baudains, Alexandra Hanschell, Dominic Maffia, Sabina Tupan are on view at the Platform Graduate Showcase 2012 Exhibition through 18 November 2012 at Turner Contemporary, Margate

PLATFORM GRADUATE AWARD SHORTLIST OF ARTISTS

In total 31 artists presented their work and eight have been short-listed for the Platform Graduate Award.

A selection panel comprising of artist Lindsay Seers and representatives of the participant galleries will decide the recipient of the twelve month tailored programme of professional development, and £2,500 bursary. This will be announced on Thursday 22 November at Modern Art Oxford alongside a panel discussion on the role of the institution in the professional development of young artists.

Turner Contemporary, Margate

Dominic Maffia Sisters, 2012

University for the Creative Arts

Dominic Maffia was selected for his series of monochromatic paintings based on colour photographs taken from a family album. The artist’s older sisters feature in each of the paintings in various stages of their childhood. Maffia sensitively handles the subject matter of personal memory and the particular moment captured in a photograph, to create a striking and memorable series of paintings.

Naomi Eaton-Baudains Connection to the Earth, 2012

Canterbury Christ Church University

Naomi Eaton-Baudains inspiring site-specific installation Connection to the Earth, 2012 is the result of her ongoing interest in the relationship between science and nature. Eaton-Baudains curiosity led her to undertake a residency at Thanet Earth and has made a number of installations based on drawings made in a hydrophonics greenhouse there. Eaton-Baudains research-based practice enabled the artist to produce an impressive body of work.

Aspex, Portsmouth

George Bills The Wilson Project

Arts University College at Bournemouth, BA (Hons) Fine Art

George Bills' work relies on his sense of adventure and curiosity and about the world around him, often exploring the spaces we inhabit. Predominantly an installation artist, he often explores the spaces we inhabit. His approach is impulsive giving him freedom within all projects. The starting point might be anything, from material choices through to the context of the work's placement. Drawing is a large part of the way in which he works. It is where his ideas are developed first, and they sometimes becoming the finished piece. The Wilson Project is a combination of gallery object and film. George Bills created a transportable, mobile raft and documented its overland journey to the shore, where he successfully launched it and floated out to sea.

Joella Wheatley

Arts University College at Bournemouth, BA (Hons) Fine Art

Joella Wheatley's intense paintings explore the mind as a channel for restructuring the concept of space. Using the combination of drawing and painting as a springboard for invention, she challenges the boundaries of a first hand experience by containing herself within an actual physical space for a certain amount of time. This drastically reduces the amount of normal social interaction, of reasonable mental stimulus of exposure to the natural world, where almost everything that makes life human and bearable is emotionally, physically and psychologically removed. When the things that our brain and body rely on to connect to and understand are taken away from us, this denies us the ability to ask questions and seek reasons for explanations that allow us to understand ourselves. Joella Wheatley challenges the concept that a space is only defined by what you believe it to be.

Update 23-11-2012: Joella Wheatley is the recipient of the Platform Graduate Award 2012 (see more recent post)

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes

Marion Piper In Deed 

Buckinghamshire New University

Marion Piper’s practice is concerned with her sensory responses to the experience of walking through city spaces in London, New York and in her latest work, In Deed, through Milton Keynes. The performative activity of pacing through geometry physically connects her to the grid of the city.

Back in the studio she re-enacts the perceptual pleasure of the movement and observation within the structure of the city avenue, playfully interlayering clues from fiction, music, art history and theory. These include ideas of structure and movement within Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities, rhythm and harmony in the jazz music of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, and body motion and seeing from the writings of Paul Klee.

This latest series of paintings and drawings were created in June 2012, and include a selection of notebooks that play an important role within the work; along with several in progress canvases positioned on trestles.

Karolina Lebek Landscapes of Poland 

University of Bedfordshire

Karolina Lebek presents a mixture of photography, video and sound works which explore ideas of memory, distance and emotional loss.

Since moving from Poland to the UK, Karolina Lebek's emotional relationship with her native country has grown stronger, and has become the subject of this exhibition. In search of her own identity, Karolina Lebek kept revisiting places in Poland of great emotional charge. By confronting the utopian image of the past with the raw reality of the present surroundings, the artist has created a personal, emotional dialogue between the past and present. Captured landscapes and objects become visual references creating a diary of loss.

Modern Art Oxford

Kamila Janska Stem, Bars 2, Big Toe, Yellow, yellow, yellow, red, red, red… Grids – Pink & White, Grid –Brown, Grid – Green 2012

BA Fine Art, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art

Kamila Janska investigates the control of social behavior through architecture. Her plaster and steel sculptures process discarded forms and combine them with raw materials, investing them with new meanings.

Cara George Bird Man,The Point was on a Corner, It’s what I call wallpaper 2012

BA Fine Art, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art

Cara George uses sound and HD video editing techniques to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. Platform presents three works by Cara George; a ‘documentary’ on Bird Man Chris Lawton, The Point was on a Corner, an observational video of two voices recalling the same incident and It’s what I call wallpaper, a manipulated audio recording of a conversation with a BBC war correspondent.

About Platform Graduate Award 

Devised through the Contemporary Visual Art Network South East network (CVAN) , this project has brought together the professional expertise of both the higher education and public gallery sectors for the benefit of young artists.

With support from tutors and course leaders, teams of curators and education specialists from the four participating galleries attended local Summer degree shows, each selecting a handful of promising graduates for inclusion in their Platform exhibitions.

These have been taking place over the past few months with each selected artist being given the opportunity to work with professional teams during the installation and production of their shows. All mediums were considered and each have shown the rich variety and quality of work being produced by our next generation of artists in the South East.

Turner Contemporary www.turnercontemporary.org

MK Gallery www.mkgallery.org

Aspex www.aspex.org.uk

Modern Art Oxford www.modernartoxford.org.uk

Jannis Kounellis at Modern Art Oxford

Jannis Kounellis 

Modern Art Oxford  

15 December 2004 - 20 March 2005 

Italian artist Jannis Kounellis, a major figure in contemporary art for over forty years, will create a unique installation of new and earlier works, specially conceived for the gallery spaces at Modern Art Oxford. It is his first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery for more than ten years.

Poetic and deeply stirring, the paintings, sculptures and carefully staged installations of Jannis Kounellis evoke shared experiences of people, places and history. His signature materials of steel, cotton, coal, coffee, wood, stones, burlap sacks and gas lamps, form the basis of an artistic language developed by Jannis Kounellis since the 1960s.

Recent interventions, both in 2004, includes a steel labyrinth at the EMST Museum in Athens and a major installation in the interior of Sarajevo's National Library, bombed during the war in Yugoslavia, in which Jannis Kounellis blocked the library's hexagonal Byzantine structure with walls of books.

At Modern Art Oxford, Jannis Kounellis will create a stunning new work for the upper gallery. Earlier works, from the 1960s to the 1990s, will be presented in the Gallery's four other spaces.

The exhibition is curated by Suzanne Cotter and Andrew Nairne. 

A fully illustrated publication featuring new essays by Suzanne Cotter, Andrew Nairne and Art Historian Adachiara Zevi accompanies the exhibition.

JANNIS KOUNELLIS was born in 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. From 1956 he has lived and worked in Rome. Associated with the Arte Povera (literally 'poor art') group of artists in Italy in the 1960s, he has gone on to exhibit his work throughout the world. Included among Kounellis's many solo exhibitions internationally are retrospectives at the MusŽe d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (1980); Whitechapel Art Gallery (1982); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1986); and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (1996). Group exhibitions include Arte Povera e IM spazio, Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa (1967), curated by Germano Celant, When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle, Bern, the groundbreaking exhibition curated by Harald Szeeman in 1969; Documenta V, Kassel (1972); Italian Art in the Twentieth Century, Royal Academy, London (1989); and Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, Tate Modern (2001).

MODERN ART OXFORD

30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP

www.modernartoxford.org.uk

Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema, Hiroshi Sugito @ Modern Art Oxford - "Real World: The dissolving space of experience"

Real World

The dissolving space of experience

Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema, Hiroshi Sugito

Modern Art Oxford

25 September - 28 November 2004

Six artists working internationally reconsider the nature of the sculptural object and its relationship to space in this new exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. The work of Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema and Hiroshi Sugito engages with the articulation of image, information, and cultural and social economies that shape contemporary perception. Their built up and assembled objects, structures and spatial scenarios suggest new artistic attitudes in which indeterminacy, resistance and the convergence of multiple spheres of experience are the new creative conditions for understanding space and the way we inhabit it.

Katie Grinnan [b. 1970, Richmond, lives in Los Angeles] creates complex and fantastical sculptures from photographs, found, moulded and modelled objects. Distorted space, actual space and remembered space are activated and collapsed into new constructed forms. In Real World, the artist presents a new sculptural work consisting of dissolving figures, magic brews, and a New Age constructivist tower which she will install in the galleries.

Wade Guyton [b. 1972, Hammond, Tennessee, lives in New York City] describes his sculptures and drawings as Ôacts of protestÕ. The relationship between image and object is central to his work which ranges from crossed out images of vernacular architecture and modernist abstract sculpture to elegant plywood constructions and vast impenetrable objects.

Christina Mackie [b. 1958, Oxford, lives in London] describes her mixed media installations of sculpted and assembled objects, drawings and videos as paintings. Her elaborate works articulate interests in parallel worlds of knowledge and experience and the points at which they intersect. Integral to her installations is the experience of the viewer, which is often orchestrated around structural props and stages.

In his compelling sculptural explorations Paul Sietsema [b. 1968, lives in Los Angeles] unravels and reconfigures relationships between spaces and the objects inhabiting them. His mesmeric film, Empire (2002), presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003 and included in Real World, is a journey through historically specific spaces from the eighteenth century rococo interior of the Hôtel Soubise in Paris, to the 1960s modernist apartment of art critic Clement Greenberg. The figures and interiors, all seemingly real but in fact meticulously crafted by the artist, fade in and out of an absorbing prismatic haze. Drawings and a new sculptural work relating to Empire will also be presented in the exhibition.

At the heart of the work of Bojan Sarcevic [b. 1974, Belgrade, lives in Berlin] is a displacement of materials, places, people and things to create situations that are dysfunctional or incongruous. Moving between sculpture, architecture, photography and film, his works are melancholy encounters between object, space and viewer. The exhibition includes Sarcevic's large-scale sculpture, Ou la main nÕentre pas, la chaleur sÕinsue (Where the hand doesn't enter, heat infuses) (2002) and 1954 (2004), a series of 78 photographic collages in which the artist has incised and reassembled views of modernist interiors with a fractured appliquŽ of image and forms.

Hiroshi Sugito [b. 1970, Nagoya, lives in Nagoya] makes enigmatic paintings in which images and spaces float in a visual reverie of remembered experience. Trained by Yoshitomo Nara in the school of traditional Japanese painting, Hiroshi Sugito builds up his images of vaporous views of dreamlike interiors and hazy sea and landscapes through a meticulous process of layering and covering over. Working from the minute to the monumental in scale, his paintings are a meditative conversation on the motif which seems to separate itself from its pictorial support to declare itself in the world of three dimensional objects.

Real World. The dissolving space of experience is curated by Modern Art Oxford's Senior Curator, Suzanne Cotter.

A fully illustrated book featuring reproductions of work by the artists and new essays by writer and critic Michael Archer and Suzanne Cotter is available from 1 October 2004.

MODERN ART OXFORD

30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP

www.modernartoxford.org.uk

Jake & Dinos Chapman: The Rape of Creativity, Modern Art Oxford

Jake & Dinos Chapman 

The Rape of Creativity 

Modern Art Oxford 

12 April - 8 June 2003 

Authenticity and the creative act are central themes of this exhibition of new work by Jake and Dinos Chapman at Modern Art Oxford (previously Museum of Modern Art Oxford).

Enfants terribles of British art, the Chapman brothers are known for their aesthetic of shock and provocation and for their consummate skill as draughtsmen and object makers. From sculptural tableaux and drawings inspired by Goya, to their sexually reconfigured mannequins sporting Nike trainers and the epic sculptural work Hell, the artists create works of weird beauty, horror and excess.

For their exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, the Chapmans present sculptures, paintings, drawings and a major new installation in the main Upper Gallery. The exhibition develops on the artists delight in cultural confusion and in challenging our assumptions about taste and meaning in art, explored most recently in The Chapman Family Collection; a faux-museographic display of hand-carved wooden fetish objects infected with the iconography of the global food outlet McDonalds.

All of the work in The Rape of Creativity are presented in the UK for the first time. 

The exhibition is organised by Modern Art Oxford.

A fully illustrated publication featuring newly commissioned essays, produced by Modern Art Oxford, accompanies the exhibition. A limited edition print are available to purchase. Jake and Dinos Chapman's last solo exhibition in a public gallery was Chapmanworld at the ICA in 1996.

MODERN ART OXFORD

30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP

www.modernartoxford.org.uk

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