Designs of the year 2014, London Design Museum

Designs of the Year 2014 
Design Museum, London 
Nomination announced - Exhibition from 26 March to 25 August 2014 

Kate Moss’s favourite app, a floating school in a Nigerian lagoon, friendly lamp posts, virtual mountain rescue teams, a recoiling mudguard for the discerning cyclist - just some of the 76 nominations for Designs of the Year 2014, announced yesterday.

Designs of the Year gathers together a year of cutting-edge innovation and original talent; showcasing the very best in global Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphic, Product and Transport design.

2014’s nominees include international design stars such as Zaha Hadid, John Pawson, Stephen Jones, David Chipperfield and Miuccia Prada, alongside crowd-funded start ups and student projects. All of the nominated designs go on display at the Design Museum, in an exhibition open from 26 March to 25 August 2014. A distinguished panel of experts chose a winner from each category and one overall winner, to be announced later in the year.

Designs of the Year pits the ingeniously amusing against the admirably innovative. The Dumb Ways To Die app features cute characters who meet increasingly grisly ends, accompanied by an insanely catchy tune; while the PEEK Portable Eye Examination Kit harnesses smartphone technology to revolutionise eye care in developing countries.

The broad reach of the competition allows for an overview of emerging trends and common themes from across different design disciplines. This year the ubiquity of the smartphone is particularly apparent, as is the disruptive effect of crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter. More than ever, designers are seeking to blur boundaries between the digital and physical worlds with new ideas like the calendar made of Lego that syncs with your computer/phone diary and the fire alarm that texts to let you know that everything’s ok.

After the success of its first outing in 2013, the Visitor Vote will return, allowing visitors to the Design Museum to pick their favourite design from the exhibition. New for 2014 is the Social Vote which sees two nominations fight it out each day through the exhibition’s online Social Vote platform. Broadcast to over one million of the Design Museum’s Twitter and Facebook followers, the Social Vote allows people from all over the world to participate in Designs of the Year 2014.

The gaming app that outlives its player, the mobile phone you can build yourself, the bottle caps that turn into building blocks – someday the other museums will be showing this stuff. #designsoftheyear

DESIGN MUSEUM 
Shad Thames, LONDON, SE1 2YD
www.designmuseum.org

Ged Quinn, The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK

Ged Quinn 
The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK 
Through 5 January 2014 

The New Art Gallery Walsall presents a major solo exhibition of paintings by GED QUINN. The exhibition survey Quinn’s practice over the last four years, bringing together paintings from private collections in Europe and America as well as a brand new body of work created especially for this project. The exhibition will testify to the breadth of the artist’s practice and will include landscapes, portraits and still lifes, resplendent in references to history, myth and popular culture from across and through time. The subtle, teasing and at times, unnerving nature of the juxtapositions at play in Ged Quinn’s work, situate him as a leading contemporary painter.

Although Ged Quinn has shown extensively in Europe and America, this is his first solo exhibition in a public gallery in the UK since Tate St Ives in 2004 and Tate Liverpool in 2008 as part of the Liverpool Biennial. 

In Ged Quinn’s more recent works, the mysterious and intriguing scenarios that nestled within the grand landscapes reminiscent of artists like Claude Lorrain and Jacob Ruisdael have emerged to centre stage where references to European history, mythology and Modernist architecture jostle for attention alongside artistic and literary references and homages to filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Andrei Tarkovsky.  In one of the new landscape paintings, traditional pictorial devices used to suggest depth or perspective are playfully challenged by the use of filmic text or explicit engagement with the flatness of the canvas.  Ged Quinn’s paintings provide an intellectual space for an interrogation and critique of modernism fuelled by the artist’s own unique perspective. 

Ged Quinn also produces much smaller works including intense portraits and still lifes that are equally as compelling.  Two brand new portraits currently being completed for the exhibition are inspired by the complex and troubled relationship between poet Paul Celan, a Holocaust survivor, and Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential 20th century philosophers.  Celan struggled to reconcile his admiration for the writings of Heidegger with his abhorrence of his Nazi past.  The two engaged in regular communication between 1951 and 1970. Typically, Quinn’s intriguing portraits of these figures are loaded with broader cultural references. 

A substantial publication accompanies the exhibition with texts by Michael Bracewell and Dr Brian Dillon as well as colour reproductions of all works exhibited.  The publication is co-published with Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and supported by Walsall Museums and Art Galleries Development Trust. 

GED QUINN was born in Liverpool in 1963.  He has studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford, the Slade School of Art in London, the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. He has exhibited widely and his work is represented in many collections.  Recent solo exhibitions include Bass Museum, Miami, Florida, USA (2012-13) and Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (2012).  He has an upcoming group show, at Galerie Rudolfinium, Viktor Pivovarov and Ged Quinn, Rudolfinium, Prague, Czech Republic (2014). 

Other recent solo exhibitions include Stephen Friedman Gallery (2011) and Wilkinson Gallery (2010).  Recent and forthcoming selected group exhibitions include Looking at the View, Tate Britain (2013), The Future’s not what it used to be, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, Cornwall, UK (2013), Disaster/The End of Days, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France (2013), Beyond Reality, Rudolfinium, Prague, Czech Republic (2012), Everywhere and Nowhere, Reydan Weiss Collection, Oberstdorf, Germany (2012), Restore us and Regain, Glasgow School of Art (2010), Newspeak:British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London (2010) and Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia (2009) and Made Up, Liverpool Biennale, Tate Liverpool (2008).

The New Art Gallery Walsall
www.thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk

Oscar Murillo, SLG, London - First major solo exhibition in the UK

Oscar Murillo: if i was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator

South London Gallery, London

20 September - 1 December 2013

For his first major solo exhibition in the UK, London-based artist OSCAR MURILLO empties his studio to present its contents in the main gallery space. Stitched canvases, drawings, sculptures and films, tables constructed from copper sheets, used as flooring in previous shows, and floor pieces made from masses of pulped biro drawings continue Murillo's practice of translating various aspects of studio endeavour into matter and then into form.  

Oscar Murillo’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance. Harvesting the accumulative material conditions of his studio on canvases, fabrics and paper, and mobilising the physical remnants of distinct social situations, he exposes some of the contradictions and complexities apparent across socioeconomic, racial and cultural boundaries. Gestural marks that index artistic labour are layered with dirt, dust and debris, used as materials in their own right, but equally as evidence of the often-invisible tasks and efforts of others which underpin the social and physical fabric of different locales and circumstances. 

An active component at the heart of the exhibition is a lottery that references the popularity of this phenomenon in many cultures. Oscar Murillo instigates a situation that highlights some of the intricacies of social and cultural encounters, as he has done in previous exhibitions and events, but this lottery project takes this area of his practice into new territory, raising numerous questions about authenticity, value, and the complex relationship between the public, private and commercial sectors of the art world.  

The lottery project begins on Monday 2 September when individually screen-printed lottery tickets, each bearing a different number, will be available to purchase. As tickets are sold, each of them, and their corresponding artist’s proof, are inscribed with the purchaser’s name by a calligrapher before being displayed in the SLG’s first floor galleries throughout the exhibition period. A first, second and third prize, each devised by Oscar Murillo, will be revealed at the prize draw on Friday 18 October, during the week of Frieze Art Fair in London.

OSCAR MURILLO (b. 1986, Colombia) lives and works in London. He completed a BA in Fine Art at the University of Westminster, London, followed by MA in Painting in 2012 at the Royal College of Art, London. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include those at Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Art Basel; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; MAMA Showroom, Rotterdam; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Serpentine Gallery, London; Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Studio Museum Harlem, New York and The Mistake Room, Los Angeles.

The exhibition is supported by Vicky Hughes and John Smith, and Raimund Berthold at Berthold and Paul Ettlinger. With thanks to Carlos/Ishikawa, London, Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin, and David Zwirner Gallery, New York. 

South London Gallery (SLG)

65-67 Peckham Road

London SE5 8UH

www.southlondongallery.org

J. J. Hutchins, M. E. Smith, R. O’Connell, S. Uoo, G. H. Longly at Laura Bartlett Gallery, London

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Michael E. Smith, Ruairiadh O’Connell, Stewart Uoo, George Henry Longly: Prodigal in Blue
Laura Bartlett Gallery, London
Through 21 Jul 2013

Laura Bartlett Gallery presents an exhibition of works by JESSICA JACKSON HUTCHINS, MICHAEL E. SMITH, GEORGE HENRY LONGLY, RUAIRIADH O'CONNELL and STEWART UOO.

Prodigal in Blue presents a group of artists whose work reflects on corporeal presence, an acute relationship between sensation and thought. A shared interest in the balance and conflicts between the natural and the synthetic is evident: with technology secondary to human intervention, any dystopian tendency is countered by the savour of closeness and touch. Process is visible and the hand can be detected in lingering marks and imprints, whilst bodily shapes and substances are cited, incorporating objects that would be otherwise cast off as detritus. Humour, sexuality and intimacy prevail; yet references to vanity and material wealth educe a contemporary state of longing. The human as a homogenous being is rejected. Rather imperfections are celebrated, echoed in seemingly bruised, unfinished surfaces.

The works of MICHAEL E. SMITH are imbued with an acute physicality weighted by the relationship his materials once had to the human body. Deflated fabric is suggestive of movement whilst rough, jagged textures appear to bear injury. Recollective of lost limbs or organic relics, the works appear as fragments of a whole. With an almost archaeological approach to medium and matter, Detroit-born Smith employs discarded materials such as used car upholstery or wax which lends these objects a presence that speaks of a sensitivity in an age of decline and insecurity of self. Society is mirrored in the disturbing potential of things.

MICHAEL E. SMITH (b. 1977, Detroit) lives and works in New Hampshire. Smith is represented by Clifton Benevento, New York and KOW, Berlin. Current and upcoming exhibitions include: Ludwig Forum, Aachen; CACP musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Painting from the Zabludowicz Collection Part II, Zabludowicz Collection London; Realization is Better than Anticipation, MOCA Cleveland.

New York based artist STEWART UOO, questions the social, technological, and cultural forces in relation to the contemporary “self.” Uoo’s sculptures explore the collision of sensual imagery with the notion of the commodity. Displayed in sequence, the shopping bag becomes a relic of our age, as Abercrombie & Fitch’s model assumes a status of a Greek Adonis, obscured yet transfigured by layers of epoxy resin, pigment, human and synthetic hair, maggot cocoons, flies and dust. The male idyll is humanized as the image is used as a means of expression for the individual in an age of often overbearing homogeny.

STEWART UOO (1985, California) lives and works in New York. Stewart Uoo is represented by 47 Canal, New York where he had his first solo exhibition “Life Is Juicy” in 2012. He attended Städelschule from 2010 - 2012. Current and upcoming exhibitions include Outside Inside Sensibility, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work appeared in group exhibitions at William, New York, Kunsthall Oslo, Norway; Elaine MGK, Switzerland and White Columns, New York.

In the work Five, JESSICA JACKSON HUTCHINS locates the ‘absent’ human in the ceramic and plaster forms atop a plaster-cast of a sofa. Meanwhile the fragmented human body is prominent in her strewn acid-washed jeans and the collaged surface of the sculpture. Shapes at once appear to engulf one another whilst being moulded in harmony, a romantic tenderness is presented between the two objects as they survey the scene from the living room couch. For Hutchins the persistence of the personal is a means of resisting commercialism: her absurd take on everyday rituals refuse straightforward signification.

JESSICA JACKSON HUTCHINS (b. 1971, Chicago) lives and works in Berlin. Jessica Jackson Hutchins is represented by Laurel Gitlen, New York and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London. Current and upcoming exhibitions include: The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, (solo) CentrePasquArt, Biel, Switzerland, (solo) and The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, The 55th Venice Biennale, Venice.

Held in a precarious balance, the corporeal and the psychological are central to the work of RUAIRIADH O'CONNELL. Silkscreening images of carpets in Las Vegas casinos onto molten wax, O’ Connell is interested in the strategies of design intended to continue the buzz of gambling, despite physical tiredness. When the pigment coloured wax is still pliable he applies a massage technique to the surface, rupturing the overall pattern and creating a bridge between painting and sculpture. Originally shot from a gamblers’ perspective, imagery is stimulated by the artist’s choice of colour and manual distortion of form and medium, expressing a kind of psychedelic bodily nostalgia: the feeling of being there, without necessarily being ‘present’.

RUAIRIADH O'CONNELL (1983, Aberdeen) lives and works in London. O’Connell studied at Staedelschule and graduated in 2011. He has currently a solo show at Project Native Informant, London.

GEORGE HENRY LONGLY’s body casts function as the most ‘present’ human form in the exhibition. Fluorescent pigment activates the muscular torso and thigh, historical readings transcended by their physical immediacy within the space. Glass, neon and references to popular culture reflect a buoyant enthusiasm to a medley of styles through form and medium. Yet residual wadding leftover from the casting process is suggestive of comfort and care, whilst the mirror further grounds the work in the realm of humanism through implicating the viewer. Favouring fragility over frivolity, Longly’s use of ephemeral materials gives way to questions of fleeting identity.

GEORGE HENRY LONGLY (1978, Taunton, Somerset) lives and works in London. Current and upcoming exhibitions include Laure Genillard, Hanway Place, London; Park Nights, Serpentine Gallery, London and David Zwirner, London. His work appeared in group exhibitions at Cell, Project Space, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London and Kunsthalle Mainz.

Laura Bartlett inaugurated this year her new gallery space in London with an exhibition of Los Angeles artist Alex Olson.

LAURA BARTLETT GALLERY

4 Herald Street, Bethnal Green, London E2 6JT, UK
www.laurabartlettgallery.com

Alex Olson, Bravo Zebra, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London

Alex Olson, Bravo Zebra

Laura Bartlett Gallery, London

23 March - 12 May 2013

LAURA BARTLETT inaugurates its new gallery space at 4 Herald Street in Bethnal Green with the first solo exhibition in Europe by Los Angeles based artist, ALEX OLSON.

Bravo Zebra brings together a new suite of paintings, each entitled Proposal and numbered according to the order in which they were completed. Introducing these works is a small painting, Press (December-February), which functions as a record of the making of the other works. Each day in the studio, the artist would peal the plastic covering off her palette and apply it to the surface of this painting, thereby notating some of the choices that went into the production of the subsequent paintings. The action of pressing against a surface and leaving a trace also stresses the exterior nature of these works and their use of the surface as a carrier of signs. 

The larger paintings, all of which are the same scale, take the name Proposal in relation to the artist’s belief that all paintings function as proposals. Each of these paintings presents it’s own subtle visual conundrum, choreographing the marks on its surface into signposts pointing in contradictory directions of interpretation. Olson favors “stock signage,” meaning signs that are untethered to a single specific meaning, which encourage a desire to define them while sidestepping a narrow read. 

For this particular exhibition, Alex Olson has employed patterns of dots, lines and textures for their extreme familiarity and simple ability to create an expectation of consistent repetition, only to be subtly undone by such means as a glop of paint overflowing its borders or by a collision with an alternative interpretation of the same marks. Colour likewise comes into play through its ability to highlight, muffle, counter, and clash. 

Alex Olson creates her marks using highly indexical tools, such as trawls, window scrapers, palette knives, plastic wrap, and low grade brushes. She points to the surface itself through dragging and rubbing paint into the face of the painting, exposing each scratch and mark embedded within it. Collectively these graphic and material marks compete against one another as they vie for the viewer’s attention through their conflicting signals. Viewed from different angles and distances, the paintings yield new sets of information, so that the encounter is one of negotiating and reevaluation. These works offer the viewer an unfolding experience of visual signs that highlight the process by which we encounter, translate and assign meaning to surface information on a daily basis.

The title of the exhibition Bravo Zebra is sourced from the International Code of Signals for boats, which Olson was specifically looking into for the maritime flag signaling systems. There is a common phrase, “Bravo Zulu” which combines the alphanumeric flags B and Z, or Bravo Zulu. However, prior to 1956 and the adoption of the International alphabet, the US referred to BZ as Baker Zebra. So the title is a non sensical one that combines the two and is about the act of communicating through visual signals on surfaces, but without a specific linguistic definition attached. It's more about cross signaling and encouraging the brain to want to decipher but without providing a singular statement, so that you revisit your decisions of how you are interpreting the visuals again and again. 

ALEX OLSON lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received a BA from Harvard University in 2001, and an MFA from CalArts in 2008. Recent exhibitions include Made in LA, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Lisa Cooley, New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Alex Olson is included in the current exhibition Painter, Painter at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. This is Alex Olson’s first solo exhibition at Laura Barlett Gallery, London.

LAURA BARTLETT GALLERY
4 Herald Street, Bethnal Green, London E2 6JT
www.laurabartlettgallery.com

Sculptor Carl Andre exhibits at Turner Contemporary, 2013

Carl Andre: Mass & Matter
Turner Contemporary, Kent, UK 
1 February - 6 May 2013

CARL ANDRE

Carl Andre building Cedar Piece, 1964 Document #37. 

Photo by Martin Ries / Gannett Ries Digital Designs

Courtesy of Turner Contemporary

Carl Andre: Mass & Matter brings together a group of sculptures and poems by one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Along with his contemporaries Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt, Carl André (American, b. 1935) is a leading artist associated with the emergence of Minimalism in the United States in the mid-1960s. 

Carl Andre is famous for his sculptures made of ordinary industrial materials which are arranged directly on the floor in simple linear arrangements or grids. By reducing sculpture to its most basic elements and re-orientating it from the vertical to the horizontal plane, Carl Andre helped to redefine the possibilities of sculpture for a whole generation of artists. 

CARL ANDRE

Carl Andre, Timber Piece, 1970

Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Courtesy of Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln, rba_c024180

This exhibition, Carl Andre’s first in a UK public gallery for over ten years, brings together eight sculptures made between 1967 and 1983, alongside a collection of his typed poems from the same period. At the heart of the exhibition, and of Carl Andre’s practice, is a concern with materials, which for Andre has always meant the common materials of everyday production – wood, bricks and metals such as aluminium, copper, steel, magnesium and lead. Carl Andre selects standard, commercially available units of these materials for his sculptural arrangements without altering them. He has said, ‘my ambition as an artist is to be the ‘Turner of matter’. As Turner severed colour from depiction, so I attempt to sever matterfrom depiction.’

 

CARL ANDRE

Carl Andre, Weathering Piece, 1970 

Courtesy of stichting kröller-müller museum

Like other artists associated with Minimalism, Carl Andre is concerned with the character of different materials. The artist describes wood as ‘the mother of matter’. Bricks are as valid materials for making art for Carl Andre as oil paint or plaster. The sculptor considers bricklayers to be ‘people of fine craft’.

Carl Andre’s poetry is based on a similar process of reduction. Individual words and phrases, often taken from pre-existing sources, are arranged on the page according to certain criteria, isolated and freed from all grammar. His poems are as concerned with the visual appearance of words on a page as with the content of the language itself. Although some of his earliest poems were handwritten, most of Andre’s text works from the late 1960s were produced on a manual typewriter, which automatically sets letters down in grid-like rows and columns analogous

A number of works in the exhibition date from the 1960s - a key period of Carl Andre’s career -such as 4 x 25 Altstadt Rectangle (1967). Carl Andre has worked with bricks throughout his career and this exhibition includes the more recent 60 x 1 Range Work (1983), a single line of equilateral bricks placed together to form a triangular prism. 

TURNER CONTEMPORARY

Rendezvous, Margate, Kent CT9 1HG, UK

www.turnercontemporary.org

A programme of events will run alongside the exhibition, engaging adults and children with the artworks, materials and the artist.

Carl Andre: Mass & Matter will tour to mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art from 14 June until 19 September 2013. 

In the United States, Dia Art Foundation in New York will organize the first North American retrospective of the work of Carl Andre with the exhibition Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010, May - December 2014.

APG - Artist Placement Group 1966-1979, Raven Row, London

The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-1979
Raven Row, London
Through 16 December 2012

This is the first retrospective of the pioneering artists' organisation Artist Placement Group, or APG, conceived by Barbara Steveni in 1965 and established a year later by Steveni and John Latham along with Barry Flanagan, David Hall, Anna Ridley and Jeffrey Shaw, among others.

Between 1966 and the turn of the 1980s, APG negotiated approximately fifteen placements for artists lasting from a few weeks to several years; first within industries (often large corporations such as British Steel and ICI) and later within UK government departments such as the Department of Health and the Scottish Office. APG arranged that artists would work to an ‘open brief’, whereby their placements were not required to produce tangible results, but that the engagement itself could potentially benefit both host organisations as well as the artists in the long-term. Artists' work in proposing and carrying out placements is represented here in diverse ways, in films, photographs, texts and correspondence and sometimes in art objects.

APG was a milestone in Conceptual Art in Britain, reinventing the means of making and disseminating art, and anticipating many of the issues facing cultural workers today. It represented itself in a number of exhibitions and events, notably in the exhibition Art and Economics at the Hayward Gallery in 1971 with artistic interventions by Garth Evans, Barry Flanagan, John Latham and others. Emulating APG's emphasis on the discursive, the exhibition will host frequent public discussions relating to art and social organisation.

The exhibition is curated by Antony Hudek and Alex Sainsbury, in consultation with Barbara Steveni.


RAVEN ROW EXHIBITION PROGRAMME 2013
Běla Kolářová, 31 January - 7 April 2013
Padraig Timoney, 25 April - 16 June 2013
Iain Baxter& and Adam Chodzko, July 2013
Psychedelia Curated by Lars Bang Larsen, 26 September - 15 December 2013

Raven Row
56 Artillery Lane
London E1 7LS
Gallery's website: www.ravenrow.org

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

Sophie Ernst: Home, YSP Exhibition, UK

Sophie Ernst: Home
Bothy Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK
17 March - 1 July 2012

SOPHIE ERNST: HOME in the Bothy Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park 

Photo © Jonty Wilde - Courtesy YSP

YSP presents the first solo exhibition in the UK by Sophie Ernst. HOME is a major ongoing project confronting political turmoil and displacement with individual memories of home and ideal places. Ernst interviews people forced to leave their homes due to political upheaval, such as during the Partition of South Asia in 1947, and builds an architectural model of the houses they describe. She then projects onto this sculpture video footage of the person's hands as they describe their memory of that building, transforming the inanimate object into a virtually inhabited space, and ascribing a profound intimacy.

YSP is committed to supporting and articulating sculpture practice as well as effecting change on an individual and social level. During the exhibition, Ernst will develop a new sculpture. For this project she will work in collaboration with Taha Mehmood, the YSP Learning Team and a group of young people from YSP’s Shared Horizon initiative which works with unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the UK.

SOPHIE ERNST, Home, 2012
Published by YSP

A book documenting HOME with essays by Iftikhar Dadi, Taha Mehmood, Helen Pheby and Sophie Ernst as well as commentaries on HOME by Nazmi Al-Jubeh, Yazid Anani, Kamila Shamsi and Salim Tamari was published by YSP.

ABOUT THE ARTIST SOPHIE ERNST

Born in 1972, Sophie Ernst first trained as a industrial mechanic with BMW before graduating from the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam in 2000. She won the Golden Cube award at the 26th Kassel Dokfest awarded for best installation. Sophie Ernst works between Asia and Europe and was Assistant Professor at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore (2003-2007). The exhibition is sponsored by The Mondriaan Foundation with support from the Dutch Embassy in London. The HOME project is made possible by the support of Green Cardamom, Sharjah Foundation and the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. Sophie Ernst is represented by Green Cardamom Gallery, London and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. Sophie Ernst’s exhibitions include Presence of an Absence, (Ernst & Mehmood) at Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden; Emerging Discourse at Bodhi Art Gallery, New York; Re-Forming Landscape at the National Art Gallery, Islamabad; Best of Discovery at ShContemporary, Shanghai; The Punjab: Moving Journeys at the Royal Geographical Society, London; Sophie Ernst: Lovedolls at the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke, Munich; Along the X-Axis - video art from India and Pakistan at Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi; Touching from a Distance at Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield WF4 4LG
Yorkshire Sculpture Park's website: www.ysp.co.uk

Daniel Buren, One Thing To Another, Situated Works. Exhibition at Lisson Gallery, London

Daniel Buren

One Thing To Another, Situated Works

Lisson Gallery, London

Through 14 January 2012

Daniel Buren is one of France's most influential living artist. An exhibition of new site specific and situated works is on view in London at Lisson Gallery (29 Bell Street gallery's space). The exhibition include a large scale installation and outdoor work. For over forty years Daniel Buren has examined the role of the gallery as a supposedly neutral space. He creates works “in situ”, by working within the context of existing architectural, spatial and social elements. 

Since the 1960s Daniel Buren’s critical analysis of painting -attempting to refine the act to an elemental form - led him to find what is now a trademark “visual tool”, the use of 8.7cm wide white and coloured vertical stripes. Once chosen for its anonymity and neutral presence, the stripe has become a signature for Buren’s work. Daniel Buren explains: “The visual tool is no longer a work to be seen, or to be beheld, but is the element that permits you to see or behold something else”.

For his exhibition at Lisson Gallery, Daniel Buren developed A Perimeter for a Room (2011), a new work in situ for the gallery main space. The work traces a line following the full perimeter of the space. The horizontal transparent Plexiglas panels coloured with self-adhesive vinyl, lined up sequentially at a set height along the walls, alter our perception of space by introducing a new height within the room and by washing the walls with coloured shadows.  While the work uses a familiar vocabulary in Daniel Buren’s oeuvre: colour, light and black and white 8.7 cm stripes, A Perimeter for a Room defines an entirely new system in its treatment of interior space that opens the way for new developments. 

The gallery front rooms present a series of works based on an entirely new material made of woven fibre optics. Daniel Buren started to develop works using this technology in 2006, in collaboration with fabric specialists Brochier in Lyon, and presented it in exhibitions in Lille, Lyon and most recently as part of his solo exhibition in Kunsthalle Baden Baden earlier this year. The panels in combinations of rectangular and square shapes create a powerful visual effect, with alternating white and coloured stripes illuminating the space that surrounds them. When unlit, they present a simple surface of white, equivalent to a piece of suspended cloth in linen or cotton.  The relationship of the works to the space is architectural, with the panels placed either at the middle of the wall or defining its vertical or horizontal limits.

The exhibition extends outdoor with 4 colours at 3 metres high (2011), a variation on the theme of pergola and ‘attrape soleil’, which Daniel Buren has explored in several public works, which play with outdoor light, the movement of the sun and coloured shadows such as La Tonnelle, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2007, or the covered walkway Passages under a colored sky (2007) in Anyang, South Korea.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY: DANIEL BUREN was born in 1938, in Boulogne-Billancourt (near Paris). Today he is considered one of the most significant figures in conceptual art, pushing the once self-imposed limit and developing it into a complex and varied language. He employins the stripe across canvas, plexiglas, aluminium, wallpaper, and architectural elements, experimenting with light, colour and reflection.  Although now one of the most in demand artists by commissioning bodies across the world, in 1969 he was once arrested for covering billboards in Berne with his stripes. The occasion was Harald Szeemann’s seminal exhibition ‘When Attitude Becomes Form’, in which the artist decided to take part without being invited. In 1971, Daniel Buren created an epic installation at the Guggenheim, New York by dressing the central rotunda with a 20 metre high striped cloth. The work was so commanding that it was removed, to great outrage, after fellow artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin claimed it compromised their works in the same group exhibition. Buren was invited back in 2005, creating a reflective tower that reached the roof of the rotunda, accentuating the powerful architectural features of Frank Lloyd-Wright’s iconic building while placing no works along the ascending ramp with the exception of the projection of coloured sunlight.

Daniel Buren’s major public interventions can now be seen worldwide at locations including The Palais-Royal in Paris; Odaïba Bay, Tokyo and the Ministry of Labour, Berlin. Few artists are invited as regularly to take part in major international exhibitions as Daniel Buren. The french artist was invited three times to Documenta in Kassel and more than ten times to the Venice Biennale, being awarded the Golden Lion in 1986. Recent exhibitions include a work in situ commissioned for the opening of Turner Contemporary, Margate and his large scale retrospective of works in situ, a joint initiative between Mudam, Luxembourg and Centre Pompidou Metz, France. Daniel Buren has been commissioned to create a new permanent installation for the Oxford Street entrance and ticket hall at the upgraded Tottenham Court Road tube station, to be completed in 2016. 200,000 passengers will pass the work each day.

Daniel Buren's recent public exhibitions: Chapelle Jeanne d'Arc, Thouars, France (2011); Centre Pompidou Metz, France (2011); Mudam, Luxembourg (2011); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2011); Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany (2011); Synagogue Stommeln, Pulheim, Germany (2010); and Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany (2010).

LISSON GALLERY, LONDON 

www.lissongallery.com 

Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi, Walter Marchetti, Resonance104.4fm - Pioneers of sound art exhibition at Raven Row, London

Exhibition: Gone with the Wind 
Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi, Walter Marchetti, Resonance104.4fm  
Raven Row, London 
Through 17 July 2011 

RAVEN ROW LONDON

This exhibition brings together three pioneers of sound art, Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi and Walter Marchetti. Each artist has developed a distinct approach to the problem of representing immateriality, while sharing a lightness of touch, approaching sound with patience, restraint and fidelity. As well as presenting new and historic work, the exhibition comprise live performance, and a selection of material from the artists' substantial archives.

MAX EASTLEY (born 1944, UK) is an artist and musician whose sound sculptures play on a balance between the natural environment and human intervention. His musical collaborations include the 1975 album New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments with David Toop, produced by Brian Eno. His response to the interior of Raven Row is a meditation on the 18th century Picturesque, achieved with 21st century technology and a ‘Bergsonian’ approach to time. 

TAKEHISA KOSUGI (born 1938, Japan) is a major figure in modernist sound art. In the early 1960s his event pieces were realised by Fluxus in Europe and the USA. Kosugi pioneered the development of Japanese experimental music with Group ONGAKU and the Taj Mahal Travellers. Since 1977 he has been a composer/performer at Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and became its Music Director in 1995. As well as archival material, Takehisa Kosugi will present a number of works including the sound installation Mano-Dharma, electronic, 1967/2011.

WALTER MARCHETTI (born 1931, Italy) was a founder member of ZAJ, a recalcitrant Mediterranean parallel to Fluxus, which in the 1960s produced action-music-performances, anarchic gags, and elegant assaults on the music establishment. Marchetti befriended John Cage in 1958, and went on to collaborate with him on a number of projects. His work has often focused on the grand piano – for more than 50 years he has been preparing them like a chef intent on marinating sound. Two of Walter Marchetti's pianos, alongside works from Emanuele Carcano's Collection, are exhibited. 

WALTER MARCHETTI

Walter Marchetti, Musica da camera n. 182

Milano, Pianofortissimo, 

Fondazione Mudima, January 1990. 

Photograph by Fabrizio Garghetti 

Courtesy of Raven Row, London

Alongside these positions, RESONANCE104.4FM is installed at Raven Row for the duration of the exhibition, broadcasting, and hosting workshops and live events, as well as presenting an 'overhung' sound installation – the Resonance Open – with contributions solicited from local and international sound artists. Resonance104.4fm is the world’s first radio art station, established by London Musicians’ Collective, it started broadcasting on May 1st 2002. Its brief is to provide a radical alternative to the universal formulae of mainstream broadcasting.

The exhibition is curated by ED BAXTER, director of Resonance104.4fm.

RAVEN ROW, LONDON, UK
56 Artillery Lane
London E1 7LS

www.ravenrow.org

Resonance104.4fm website: www.resonancefm.com

Eileen Cooper, Collages - RA exhibition

Exhibition: Eileen Cooper RA, Collages

Royal Academy of Arts, London 

Until 16 March 2011 

The Royal Academy of Arts presents a collection of previously unseen works on paper by EILEEN COOPER RA. All of the works are unique and made during 2009 or 2010, they share an experimental quality linking together Cooper’s experience as a painter and printmaker. The works are created using assembled fragments of drawing, print and Japanese paper and  include lino-cut, painted and charcoal-drawn components. A group of larger collages with gouache are shown alongside smaller works made during a residency in Alayrac, Tarn, France. It is the first time that Cooper has exhibited work of this nature. 

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY EILEEN COOPER was born in Glossop, Derbyshire and studied at Goldsmith’s College and the Royal College of Art. She is Head of Printmaking at the RA Schools. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1979 at the Air Gallery, London and she has extensively exhibited her work both nationally and internationally in group and solo shows since. 

Her work is held in public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Council.  Eileen Cooper was elected as a Royal Academician in 2001 and is a regular contributor to the Summer Exhibition. In 2008 she was one of the Summer Exhibition Co-ordinators and in 2009 was Curator for the Print Room.  

Works in the exhibition are available for sale.

EILEEN COOPER RA

COLLAGES

RA Friends Room

3 December 2010 - 16 March 2011

Admission Free

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS

www.royalacademy.org.uk    

Carl Andre Exhibition in London at Sadie Coles HQ - Sculptures in basalt and in tavertine

Exhibition: Carl Andre 

Travertine / Basalt 

Sadie Coles HQ, London 

19 January - 5 March 2011 

An exhibition of stone sculptures by CARL ANDRE is on view at Sadie Coles HQ in London. TRAVERTINE / BASALT comprising a sequence of works in Icelandic basalt and two major works in travertine.

Throughout his fifty year career, Andre has created sculptures by placing standard units of stone, metal or wood in simple geometric arrangements. In early works such as Equivalents (1966; eight different configurations of 120 bricks) and Cuts (1967; a negative variant in which eight voids were made by removing combinations of blocks from a grid), Andre articulated the concepts of horizontality, repetition and implied extension that have remained central to his methodology.

Andre’s ALTBASE series of floor sculptures, made in Reykjavik in 1996, consists of differently sized groups of basalt squares (12, 15, 21, 24), variously stepped and layered in order to occupy the same three-by-three grid. GRECRUX (Rome, 1985), one of Andre’s earliest works in travertine, uses fifty-three blocks to form a square-shaped Greek cross or crux quadrata. Its intersecting lines accord with the artist’s famous statement in 1970 that “my ideal of sculpture is a road. That is a road doesn’t reveal itself at any particular point or from any particular point … I think sculpture should have an infinite point of view.” SUM ROMA (Marseille, 1997) arranges the same material in a thirty-unit solid triangle whose stepped form recurs throughout Andre’s oeuvre.

Eschewing metaphorical connotations, the sculptures draw attention to their essential materiality and to the stone’s intrinsic aesthetic qualities. The travertine works recall the material’s use in iconic Modernist buildings and in Roman art and architecture – an association underscored by the title of SUM ROMA. Andre was indeed originally inspired to use travertine by a trip past the quarries on the road to Tivoli. In common with the majority of Andre’s work, these pieces also foreground the dynamic between work, viewer and architectural context. The artist has tellingly described the progression of his own work, and twentieth century sculpture in general, as a shift in emphasis from ”sculpture as form” to “sculpture as structure” and finally “sculpture as place”. 

Along with Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre emerged in the 1960s as one of the key exponents of Minimalism. In the late 1950s he shared a studio with Frank Stella, whose minimal black paintings of that period provided a formative influence, and in the 1960s he worked as a freight brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad – an experience that shaped his interest in linear forms and materials excised from pre-existing masses and contexts. A similarly significant episode was his realisation during a canoeing trip that sculpture could be “as flat as water”.

Carl Andre’s work has been the subject of a number of museum retrospectives, notably at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1970; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas, in 1978; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1978; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1987; the Haus Lange und Haus Esters, Krefeld; the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, in 1996; and the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1997. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘@’, Alfonso Artiaco, Naples, Italy, and ‘Carl Andre’ at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. In 2013, Dia Art Foundation, New York, will host the first major retrospective of his work in North America.

Books available at Sadie Coles HQ Bookstore: 

James Meyer ed., Cuts: Texts 1959 - 2004, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2005

Paula Feldman, Alistair Rider and Karsten Schubert, About Carl Andre: Critical Texts since 1965, Ridinghouse, London, 2006

SADIE COLES HQ 

4 New Burlington Place 

LONDON W1 

www.sadiecoles.com

This month Sadie Coles HQ also exhibited work of TJ Wilcox (Through 22 January)

Designer Wim Crouwel retrospective. London Design Museum celebrates the prolific career of the Dutch graphic designer

Exhibition: Wim Crouwel

A Graphic Odyssey

Design Museum, London

30 March - 3 July 2011

The DESIGN MUSEUM in London celebrates the prolific career of the Dutch graphic designer WIM CROUWEL in this his FIRST UK RETROSPECTIVE.

WIM CROUWEL
New Alphabet, 1967
© Wim Crouwel - Courtesy Design Museum, London 

Regarded as one of the leading designers of the twentieth century, WIM CROUWEL embraced a new modernity to produce TYPOGRAPHIC DESIGNS that captured the essence of the emerging computer and space age of the early 1960s.

 

  

WIM CROUWEL
Exhibition Poster Architect Gerrit Rietvel,
Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam 
Museum Boymans Beuningen, 1959
© Wim Crouwel - Courtesy Design Museum, London  

This exhibition, spanning over 60 years, will cover Crouwel’s rigorous design approach and key moments in his career including his work for design practice ‘Total Design’, the identity for the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, as well as his iconic poster, print, typography and lesser known exhibition design. The exhibition will also highlight Crouwel’s rigorous design approach exploring his innovative use of grid-based layouts and typographic systems to produce consistently striking asymmetric visuals.

 

WIM CROUWEL BIOGRAPHY

          

WIM CROUWEL
Leger Exhibition Poster, Van Abbe Museum,
Quadrat-Print, Dejong & Co, 1957
© Wim Crouwel - Courtesy Design Museum, London

Born in 1928, Wim Crouwel studied fine art in Groningen before moving to Amsterdam in the early 1950s where he initially worked for an exhibition design company. Heavily influenced by architecture, Crouwel’s sense of spatial awareness and identity led to commissions for cultural institutions, most notably in 1956 for the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven. Commissions for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam followed leading to Crouwel taking sole responsibility for the museum’s identity, posters and catalogues.

 

WIM CROUWEL
Beelden in het heden (Sculptures Today),
Exhibition Poster, 1959
© Wim Crouwel - Courtesy Design Museum, London  

Whilst at the Stedelijk, Crouwel developed his unique grid system which acted as a museum template for its graphic identity, an approach which realised a visual consistency for the museum and in doing so defined a turning point for the world of graphic design.

The dawn of the space age and computer technology throughout the 60s encouraged new approaches and possibilities for typeface design. Embracing the mood of modernity, Crouwel designed a radical ‘NEW ALPHABET’ TYPEFACE, especially for the use in emerging computer systems. The ‘New Alphabet’ designed in 1967 appeared almost alien, a cipher script of vertical and horizontal lines. This Illegible font challenged the design establishment and provoked debate, a debate which Crouwel was happy to engage and openly admitted to placing visual aesthetics above function.

WIM CROUWEL
Exhibition Catalogue, Jackson Polock, 
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1980
© Wim Crouwel - Courtesy Design Museum, London 

The ‘New Alphabet’ was redrawn by Brett Wickens and Peter Saville for the Joy Division album, ‘Substance’ in the late 80s and then digitized and made available for use in 1997 by The Foundry. Crouwel designed a number of other fonts including Gridnik, an appropriate reference to his use of grid systems and Mr. Gridnik became Crouwel’s endearing nickname.

 

 

WIM CROUWEL

Exhibition Poster, De Stijl,

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1983

© Wim Crouwel - Courtesy Design Museum, London  

In 1963 Crouwel founded the multi-disciplinary design agency TOTAL DESIGN creating the identity for numerous Dutch companies. Together with the founding partners, Crouwel shaped the visual landscape of the Netherlands throughout the 60’s and 70’s, working for clients such as IBM, and typeface commissions for Olivetti. In the 1970s Crouwel was part of a team of four designers who designed the Dutch Pavilion for the Osaka World Fair. Crouwel also designed numerous postal stamps for the Dutch post office and a controversial redesign of the telephone book using only lowercase letters.

 

Original sketches, posters, catalogues and archive photography will be on display alongside films and audio commentary. In addition to celebrating Crouwel’s career this exhibition will also explore his legacy and influence on contemporary graphic design with commentary from leading industry figures including PETER SAVILLE and STEFAN SAGMEISTER. In addition six designers will take inspiration from Crouwel’s career to produce a series of limited edition prints, a unique Wim Crouwel inspired wallpaper will also be sold exclusively in the Design Museum Shop.

Exhibition guest curated by TONY BROOK, Creative Director, Spin.

This exhibition at the Design Museum is upported by The Mondriaan Foundation

DESIGN MUSEUM

Shad Thames

LONDON SE1 2YD - UK

www.designmuseum.org