Still Life Exhibition @ The Hepworth Wakefield - "Still Lives"

Still Lives 

The Hepworth Wakefield 

1 March 2024 – January 2025

Bernard Meninsky 

Lilies, 1917

Rene Matić 

Southbank Centre Dressing Room II, London, 2023 

Courtesy of The Artist and Arcadia Missa, London 

Photo: Nathan Vidler

Nicolaes van Verendael 

Still Life with a Lobster, 1678

The Hepworth Wakefield presents an exhibition focusing on the theme of still life. Still Lives will display more than 70 works by over 50 artists across two galleries, illustrating the enduring nature of the still life genre throughout different epochs in art history, including post-impressionism, British modernism, surrealism and contemporary art. The exhibition reflects upon the enduring inspiration artists have found in everyday objects, from an interest in colour and form, to a desire to capture their impermanence. While still life is traditionally associated with painting, the exhibition will feature works from a range of artistic mediums including sculpture, photography, ceramics, painting and works-on-paper.

Still Lives will display three of the oldest artworks in Wakefield’s art collection by renowned Dutch masters – Jacob Foppens van Es, Willem Ormea and Nicolaes van Verendael – that date back to the seventeenth century, highlighting the emergence of still life painting in the Netherlands. These will be presented in dialogue with contemporary artworks, proposing unlikely conversations.

Anthea Hamilton

Melon, 2017

Caroline Walker 

Noor, 3.30pm, Leyton, 2017 

© Caroline Walker. Courtesy the artist; 

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; 

GRIMM Gallery and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. 

Photo: Peter Mallet

Veronica Ryan 

Sweet Dreams are Made of These, 2021 

Photo: George Baggaley

Pivotal additions to Wakefield’s art collection during the initial decades of the twentieth century by artists such as Roger Fry, Ivon Hitchens, Frances Hodgkins, Anne Estelle Rice and Geer Van Velde will show how, through the deconstruction and distortion of familiar objects, these artists contributed to significant debates in modern art. Some works in the exhibition look beyond objects, exploring the idea of stillness within domestic settings. Artists such as Vanessa Bell, John Collier, Patrick Heron, Mabel Layng and Walter Sickert capture the silence and tranquillity inherent in interior spaces, while providing intimate glimpses into their environments. Still Lives will also include several recent artworks that have been generously donated to Wakefield’s art collection in the last year. Noor, 3:30pm, Leyton, 2017, a large-scale oil painting by Caroline Walker and three photographs from Rene Matić’s a girl for the living room, 2023 series will go on public display for the first time since their acquisition. Contemporary sculptures by Steve Claydon, Anthea Hamilton, Eva Rothschild and Veronica Ryan present incongruous arrangements of familiar objects, creating scenes that hover between the strangely ordinary and the extraordinary.

Marie-Charlotte Carrier, Curator at The Hepworth Wakefield said: ‘This thematic exhibition is timed to coincide with Wakefield’s ‘Our Year’ celebration of culture across the district throughout 2024. It showcases the breadth of Wakefield’s art collection, which was established a century ago in 1923 and continues to be developed by The Hepworth Wakefield today as a rich resource for Wakefield residents and visitors alike. While artists have been drawn to still life across the centuries, the genre has often been disregarded or considered less important in the history of art. Still Lives is a wonderful opportunity to show historic works that haven’t been displayed at The Hepworth Wakefield for a long time alongside new acquisitions that have joined the collection recently through the generosity of donors.’

THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD

Gallery Walk, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, WF1 5AW

hepworthwakefield.org

Veronica Ryan @ Spike Island, Bristol - Along a Spectrum

Veronica Ryan: Along a Spectrum 

Spike Island, Bristol 

19 May - 5 September 2021 

VERONICA RYAN 

Pouch, 2020 

Net, orange peels, black thread 

Photograph by Max McClure

© Veronica Ryan.

Courtesy Spike Island, Bristol, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 

and Alison Jacques, London

Spike Island presents a major exhibition of new works by British artist VERONICA RYAN (b. 1956, Montserrat). This is Veronica Ryan's largest and most ambitious exhibition in the UK to date.

Veronica Ryan came to prominence in the 1980s with a number of prestigious exhibitions at venues such as Riverside Studios, London (1988) and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (1989). Best known tor her sculpture that is evocative of shapes, forms and objects from the natural world, Veronica Ryan's work defies easy categorisation. Over the years, she has experimented with scale, material and technique while remaining focused on the interplay between conflicting opposites: revelation and concealment, container and contained, absence and presence. Her work sits at the intersection between materiality and idea, and enquires into the processes by which objects carry and construct meaning.

Made during an extended residency at Spike Island in Bristol, the works in Along a Spectrum examine environmental and socio-political concerns, personal narratives, history and displacement, as well as the wider psychological implications of the current pandemic. Cast forms in clay and bronze lie directly on the gallery floor; sewn and tea-stained fabrics hang loosely from the walls; and bright neon crocheted fishing line pouches filled with a variety of seeds, fruit stones and skins stretch down from the walls and ceiling to the floor. Arrangements of handmade objects lie alongside assortments of fruits and seeds on metal shelving units; contrasting elements that when brought together acquire a symbolic and

emotional dimension.

A number of clay works cast from medical foam pillows deepen Veronica Ryan's investigation into ideas of recovery, rescue and restoration. Devoid of the nurturing qualities that provide comfort to the aching body, these uncannily shaped pillows are placed on the floor or stacked to their tipping point in precarious arrangements. Throughout the exhibition Veronica Ryan alludes to earlier works in her processes of making, such as the accumulation and stacking of various food containers, resonating with some of her most emblematic works of the 1990s that were lost in the 2004 fire at the Momart warehouse in east London.

In other works, cocoa pods, soursop and orange skins, drift seeds, mango and avocado stones are cast in clay and bronze or simply left to dry. Fruits, seeds, plants and vegetables are recuring motifs in Veronica Ryan's sculpture. They show a concern whith where and how plants germinate, what conditions enable them to take root across different environments and how they travel from one location to another. They function metaphorically for Veronica Ryan's own sense of dislocation, and more widely they allude to a history of Montserrat or Alliouagana - as it was know prior to the arrival of the Europeans - and on trying to identify its early culture. As such, a group of soursop skins has been cast in clay and glazed with volcanic ash from Alliouagana.

Elusive and beguiling, the works in Along a Spectrum consider the attachments that we form with the materials and objects around us; hinting at the connections we make between the landscapes of our interior and the exterior worlds.

A new publication accompanies the exhibition, presenting an overview of Veronica Ryan's practice from the 1980s to the present day. Designed by Daly & Lyon, it features rarely seen images, a detailled biographical timeline, an interview with Courtney J. Martin and newly commissioned essays by Vanessa Boni, Dorothy Price and Natalie Rudd.

This exhibition is supported by Freelands Foundation through the annual Freelands Award.

SPIKE ISLAND

133 Cumberland Road, Bristol BS1 6UX

www.spikeisland.org.uk