34/35 Hatton Garden, London EC1N 8DX

Open Wednesday – Friday 11.00 – 18.00, Saturday 11.00 – 16.00, or by appointment – 07531 342 128

www.wilsonwilliamsgallery.com

WW Gallery has recently opened a new space in a former jewellery workshop in the heart of the historic jewellery quarter, Hatton Garden with an inaugural show by British artist, Phil Illingworth.  The exhibition brings together a group of sculptural works that explore the conventions and possibilities of paintings.  Entitled ‘Frightening Albert’ it refers to the infamous psychological experiments conducted by behaviourist John B Watson which involved exposing a nine month old child Albert B to a series of stimuli including a white rat, a rabbit, a monkey, masks and burning newspapers, observing the boy’s reactions before introducing disturbing noises to condition an emotional response.  The exhibition takes unguarded curiosity as a point of departure, exposing the viewer to a series of works which are playfully attractive and intriguing but, in some cases, generate a form of low-grade anxiety in their materiality and format.  All of the works tread a careful but attention-seeking line between sculpture and painting and return to Modernist agendas around the conventions of specific media. Canvas-like sculptures punctuate their flatness, turning their backs to the viewer to reveal their supports and become objects through a variety of formal and conceptual strategies, whilst signalling an overt desire to stimulate the sense in seductive combinations of materials, primary colours and perceptual tricks. A quirky body of work, with a sense of humour and child-like invitation to be surprised – but if you’re going to visit, the show closes this weekend!

Image: Phil Illingworth, 84% agree, dyed cotton, chenille, lime wood, enamel paint, varnish, wadding, plywood, 2011. Courtesy the artist and WW Gallery

Let us know what you think at membership@contemporaryartsociety.org

Elizabeth Price, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 at MOT International

25 April – 26 May 2012

First Floor, 72 New Bond Street, London
W1S 1RR

Open Wednesday – Saturday, 11am – 6pm or by appointment.

www.motinternational.org

Elizabeth Price’s new video ‘The Woolworths Choir of 1979’ – just opened at the new MOT gallery in New Bond Street – is immediately absorbing.  The work is composed in three parts and staged within a precise sculptural environment.  The parts are seductively linked by a powerful and visceral hand gesture twisting upwards (a gesture associated with performance, slinky and aspirational) and a snapping rhythm of clicks and sharp claps.  The first part examines the word ‘choir’ as the site in a church designed to house and arrange a bank of singers.  A strong sense of physical place and an outline of the architecture of an ecclesiastical auditorium is built through archival photographs and diagrams, fragments of choral song, close up’s of gargoyles, trefoils and text drawn from historical documents.  At once visual and acoustic it is a testament to Price’s characteristically intelligent handle on the medium of video and language of editing, which has resulted in her being nominated for this year’s Turner Prize.  The second part of the film sweeps over you.  Price builds a fictional choir of women from grainy 70’s footage of singers and choruses, twisting on a stage with arms curling up-wards, low voices and faces never quite seen.  They sing “We know. We are chorus” and block printed words in bright colours flash on the screen.  Thus the traditional components for theatre are set, there is a stage and a chorus and both build up to an event…  The event is a fire: shots of old documentary footage of savage flames spilling out of a furniture stock room in the Manchester branch of Woolworths and news interviews with survivors are layered alongside the rhythm of clicks, curling hand gestures – the survivors and passers-by interviewed are all pointing upwards in recounting the drama- and the film ends.  Elizabeth Price is an important artist of the current generation.  Do not miss this show.

Image: Elizabeth Price, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (video still), 2012. HD video. Courtesy the artist and MOT International

Let us know what you think at membership@contemporaryartsociety.org

To read their article go to: http://www.a-n.co.uk/an_docs/2012_degrees.flip/

We are delighted to have closely supported three of the nominees as part of our important mission to develop public collections of contemporary art across the UK.

Elizabeth Price’s User Group Disco (2009) was recently gifted to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and was the charity lot at this year’s Contemporary Art Society Fundraiser LEAP! The work is currently on display in The Sculpture Show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (26 March – 24 June).

The winners of the 2010 Contemporary Art Society Annual Award were The Hepworth Wakefield and Wolverhampton Art Gallery in association with Film and Video Umbrella for their proposal with artist Luke Fowler. The award of £60,000 enabled the two museums to commission the artist to make a new work that will be acquired jointly for their collections. This major new film commission will be exhibited at the Hepworth Wakefield in a special display this summer (23 June – 14 October).

As part of the Contemporary Art Society Society’s Special Collection Scheme, Middlesbrough Institute of Art (mima) was gifted Paul Noble’s work Unified Nobson (2001) in 2007.

More information can be found here.

Image: Elizabeth Price, User Group Disco (still), 2009, HD Video, 15 min, courtesy the artist and MOT International

Hans-Peter Feldmann, Serpentine Gallery

11 April – 5 June 2012

www.serpentinegallery.org

For his Serpentine exhibition, Hans-Peter Feldmann presents works from throughout his career. Among the earliest works is a series of booklets titled Bilder (Pictures), each consisting of a collection of photographs of everyday subjects or situations. His Time Series, produced during the mid-1970s, expanded upon this, chronicling the most banal events frame by frame, thereby effectively slowing down the passage of time.

Feldmann’s appetite for amassing cultural artefacts is demonstrated in a new work presented for the first time at the Serpentine. The artist purchased a number of ladies’ handbags along with their entire contents, filling museological vitrines with credit cards, mobile telephones and address books, making passing fashions and lifestyle choices the object of display and public discussion. Also seen for the first time at the Serpentine is Seascapes, a collection of 15 traditional oil paintings in conventional frames shown as a group.

Image – top: Hans-Peter Feldmann.  Installation view, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Serpentine Gallery, London
(11 April – 5 June 2012). © 2012 Jerry Hardman-Jones

Bob and Roberta Smith (in collaboration with Tim Newton): Who is Community?, Central Line Series- Art on the Underground

May 2012

www.art.tfl.gov.uk

Who is Community? is a new commission by artist Bob and Roberta Smith and film director Tim Newton. The project will bring together a number of different elements, including reproductions of paintings made by Bob and Roberta Smith for Stratford Underground station and a film that tells the story of an extraordinary fictional meeting between Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympics, and the German theorist Hannah Arendt. Considering the context of Stratford as the main site of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Who is Community? will explore themes of public space, social interaction and well-being, as well as the democratic values that Coubertin hoped to advance through sport, and the revival of the ancient Olympic games.

Image: courtesy Bob and Roberta Smith and Art on the Underground.

Sarah Pierce: The Artist Talks, The Showroom                                               

18 April – 2 June 2012

www.theshowroom.org

The Artist Talks is an exhibition of new work by Dublin-based artist Sarah Pierce, co-commissioned by Book Works and The Showroom. It is the final part of a year-long project undertaken by the artist as part of Book Works’ tour of new commissions and archival presentations, Again, A Time Machine.

Pierce repositions the convention of the artist’s talk as an open system with the potential to disturb or re-invent past artworks and received ideas. Using new video work, photographs, sculpture and performance, the exhibition contains a range of material and references that open up the relation between speech and archives.

Image: Sarah Pierce: The Artist Talks, 2012. Photo by Mariona Otero. Courtesy the artist and The Showroom.

Richard Slee: Camp Futility and Jimmy Merris: Deep Joy on Home Soil, Studio Voltaire

25 April – 26 May 2012

www.studiovoltaire.org

Central to Richard Slee’s exhibition at Studio Voltaire are a number of works based on vernacular objects such as wood saws, hammers, pick axes and camping equipment.  Inspired by a recent residency at Alfred University, in upstate New York, the works investigate particular myths and the symbolism of our ideas of America such as the great outdoors and the pioneer spirit. Lashed together workbenches that refer to old mining equipment, various scattered tools and an abandoned camp-fire can be read as an allegory to abandoned industries where whole communities move on to find employment elsewhere.

Studio Voltaire presents a solo exhibition by Jimmy Merris featuring a new single channel video piece displayed across a bank of monitors. Merris’ video works are heavily constructed, utilising a number of disruptive devices such as collaged sound and music, animated text cut from email exchanges and mixing found and made video footage.  There is a particular sense of economy within the practice, both in its lo-fi production values and an overriding concern with (un)employment and down-at-heel consumerism.  A number of works document the process of making, whether filming the actual production process or including references to certain prevalent forms of technology such as the Internet and desktop editing.

Image: Richard Slee, Camp Futility. Courtesy of Richard Slee and Hales Gallery, London

REGIONAL EXHIBITIONS

Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction, Arnolfini , Bristol                           

5 May – 1 July 2012

www.arnolfini.org.uk

João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Kiluanji Kia, Henda, Luis Dourado, Mark Aerial Waller, Neïl Beloufa, Neill Blomkamp , Omer Fast, Pawel Althamer, The ARPANET Dialogues, Wanuri Kahiu

Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction surveys the recent tendency for artists and filmmakers to apply the forms and concerns of science fiction to narratives situated in the African continent. It considers the complex undercurrents for this occurrence in art today, and posits other and possible realities existing simultaneously, via careful re-orientations of tense; elevating the need for vigilance towards the present and future over a concern for the past.

Africa has had a rare yet distinct place in popular science-fiction, from the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey, depicting the mysterious appearance of a black monolith in the cradle of civilization, to the recent success of Neill Blomkamp’s debut movie District 9, a multi-layered allegory on South Africa’s recent internal and external tensions. Imagining a new space-time to the typical “third worldist” representations of the African continent, caught in a perpetual state of crisis, the works in Superpower project an alternative landscape of possibilities.

THE COSMOS, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge                                                                              

12 – 27 May 2012

www.wysingartscentre.org

With Salvatore Arancio, Flora Parrott, Nilsson Pflugfelder, Stuart Whipps and Escalator Artist-in-residence Patrick Coyle.

The Cosmos, the first of Wysing’s series of artist residencies for 2012, launches with a series of talks and events by artists, experts and enthusiasts from organisations ranging from the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University to the Pumpkin Patch Observatory in Bourn village.

Four artists and artist groups, Salvatore Arancio, Flora Parrott, Nilsson Pflugfelder and Stuart Whipps, are in residence at Wysing Arts Centre in rural Cambridgeshire for six weeks from 1 April, where they have developed new work taking The Cosmos as a starting point, culminating in a public presentation in Wysing’s gallery.   In addition, and reinforcing the literary influences on the residencies, Escalator artist-in-residence Patrick Coyle will document the year long programme of residencies through creative writing.

Image: Salvatore Arancio, le Recul Du Glacier, 2010, courtesy of Federica Schiavo Gallery

Giorgio Sadotti: THIS THIS MONSTER THIS THINGS, Focal Point Gallery (Project Space), Southend-on-Sea

16 April – 30 June 2012

www.focalpoint.org.uk

Includes work by Shahin Afrassiabi, Fiona Banner, Mark Beasley, Vanessa Billy, Roxane Borujerdi, Eleanor Brown and Loolie Habgood, David Burrows, Denna Cartamkhoob, Rachael Champion, Steven Claydon, Kelly Eginton, Laura Eldret, Graham Fagen, Karin Felbermayr, Ella Finer, Ceal Floyer, Freee, Neil Gall, Anya Gallaccio, Liam Gillick, Matt Hale, Matthew Higgs, The Hut Project, Alan Kane, Lisa Kirk, Elise Lammer and Lawrence Leaman, Mikael Larsson, Simon Liddiment, Raphael Linsi, Simon Martin, Fraser Muggeridge, Paul Noble, Carlos Noronha Feio, Stefano W. Pasquini, Elias Rediger, Audrey Reynolds, Sarina Scheidegger, Dina Schuepbach, Georgina Starr, Alexandra Stähli, Jemima Stehli, Jack Strange, Milly Thompson, Chris Watts, and Elizabeth Wright.

Since 2010, Giorgio Sadotti has been assembling THIS THIS MONSTER THIS THINGS, an exquisite corpse made from objects produced by fifty-one artist friends and acquaintances, most of whom have had an impact on Sadotti’s identity as an artist. This process of gradual accumulation has resulted in a meta-artwork, a bastard object or a curatorial monster that mockingly presents a ‘complete’ entity, a Frankensteinian self-portrait drawn from people who have become familiar with Sadotti and his work over a twenty-five year period.

Bedwyr Williams: My Bad, IKON, Birmingham

16 May – 08 July 2012

www.ikon-gallery.co.uk

Bedwyr Williams observes the world with a sharp eye and wry humour. His work includes a wide range of media, including performance, sculpture, painting and photography, and explores such things as what it means to be an artist living in his native Wales with big feet and a sense of the absurd. Through the flamboyant costumes of his multiple artistic personae, we catch a glimpse of self-revelation, a command of cultural and art-world mythology, as well as a gentle reflection on the human condition. This is the most comprehensive presentation of Williams’ work to date in the UK.

Image: Bedwyr Williams, Liebesgarten, 2012. Two electric toothbrushes, sink and audio. Courtesy of the artist and Ceri Hand Gallery 

Tatton Park Biennial: Flights of Fancy, Tatton Park, Cheshire

12 May – 30 September 2012

www.tattonparkbiennial.org

Charbel Ackermann, Brass Art, David Cotterrell, Tom Dale, Simon Faithfull, Tessa Farmer, Jem Finer, Olivier Grossetete, Hilary Jack, Juneau Projects, Dinu Li, Pointfive, Aura Satz, Ultimate Holding Company, Sarah Woodfine.

This third edition of the Biennial considers the human urge to fly, to accomplish the impossible in fragile times. Its artists are considering the impact of experimentation on delicate eco-systems, looking backward and forward for guidance, wisdom and/or humour. Their proposed results are experiments in time and space.

Image: Olivier Grossetete, ‘Pont de Singe’ proposal, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Tatton Park Biennial.

Michael Dean’s hermetic practice, which examines the relationship between language and object, is primarily sculptural and encourages physical contact with the viewer. The artist creates publications, photographic works, text and performance.

Dean’s recently opened exhibition Government, at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, explores the space where the personal and the anonymous meet. The gallery floor has been covered with a deep, wool carpet. At one edge, two door sized concrete panels lean across a passageway into a second gallery space. On closer inspection these are marked with fine, veined, organic textures resembling bark or stone. The same panels are marked by diagonal folds which are associated with the artist’s long standing interest in the written word and typography. At the entrance four arm-length panels suggesting door handles and necessitate physical human contact as the viewer passes into the gallery.

The titles of Dean’s works in this exhibition – government, education, health and home – refer to impersonal systems which become personal when they interact with their human subjects. The exhibition title – Government – more specifically alludes to political policy and communication within society. Dean views his works as subjective documents or proposals which must be interpreted and, in many cases, enacted to achieve their desired potential.

In September 2011 the artist staged Acts of Grass involving 50 actors and 50 Members of the public in Peter Zumthor’s Summer Pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery. The actors were instructed to mimic the movements of their audience member counterpart, while reading aloud a text that included repeated references to nature and human limbs. Like his sculptural works which the artist invites us to touch, Dean examined the potential for multiple meanings at the moment of exchange between art work and viewer

Michael Dean was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and lives and works in London. His solo show Government continues at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, until 17 June. Other solo presentations include State of being apart in space, Kunstverein, Freiburg (2011), The Colour of Public, Kim? Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga (2011) and Symmetry of Intimacy, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle (2010).

The artist created a special limited edition which was given to new Contemporary Art Society members during WORKS | PROJECTS Rotate exhibition at the Contemporary Art Society offices (5 October 2009 – 8 January 2010).

Click here to go to the Herald Street website

Image: Michael Dean, installation view, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2012.  Image courtesy Herald St, London and Supportico Lopez, Berlin. Photo: Jerry Hardman-Jones.

]]> http://membership.contemporaryartsociety.org/news/artist-to-watch/artist-to-watch-michael-dean/feed/ 0 http://membership.contemporaryartsociety.org/news/hobsons-choice-ben-rivers-at-kate-macgarry/ http://membership.contemporaryartsociety.org/news/hobsons-choice-ben-rivers-at-kate-macgarry/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:04:10 +0000 teamcas http://membership.contemporaryartsociety.org/?p=2902 Paul Hobson, Director of the Contemporary Art Society, recommends his favourite exhibition of the week.

21 April – 26 May 2012

27 Old Nichol Street, London E2 7HR

Open Wednesday – Saturday, 12.00-18.00 or by appointment

www.katemacgarry.com

Rivers has a long-term, almost anthropological interest in those who live in isolated locations, outside of civilisation and within hermetic or utopian worlds.  His new body of work, Phantoms of a Libertine now showing at Kate MacGarry – a 16mm film and a series of black and white photographs- marks a slight shift, a re-visiting of earlier lines of enquiry into the power of once occupied places and the unfolding process of abandonment which renders the remains of a once animated histories into remnants of experience, mysterious and incomplete.  It is a pared down show, one enters the dimmed gallery to the whir and click of a rickety projector casting footage, flickering and granular, on to a seductively ‘home-movie’ scaled screen. It shows photographs of travel pinned in yellowing albums with handwritten place names and notes and unfamiliar people mostly from the knees down. Rivers documents the life of an anonymous subject, a friend, through the articles left in his flat a year after his death, an obscured yet oddly plain and fond presentation of a well-recorded life and what remains: a flat replete with artefacts, books and stone figurines now dominated by dust. Rivers gaze is directed at the details of a life, the small physical tokens that are left behind- a really beautiful show.

Image: Ben Rivers, Phantoms of a Libertine, 2012, image courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry

Let us know what you think at membership@contemporaryartsociety.org

Thomas Demand at Sprüth Magers London

14 April – 19 May 2012

7A Grafton Street, London W1S 4EJ

Open Monday – Friday, 10am – 6pm

www.spruethmagers.com

Acclaimed German artist Thomas Demand is best known for his photographs of meticulously recreated places, public and private spaces and other locations loaded with social and political meaning.  Trained originally as a sculptor, in the early 1990’s Demand began to use photography to record his elaborate and ephemeral, life-sized paper and cardboard constructions of existing or formerly existing environments and interior spaces, and soon started to create constructions for the sole purpose of photographing them.  Describing himself not as a photographer but as a conceptual artist for whom photography is an intrinsic part of his creative process, Demand’s work challenges photography’s claims to verisimilitude and disrupts notions of authenticity and artifice by questioning the medium as a faithful record of reality.  This recent body of work, just opened at Sprüth Magers in Mayfair, was begun in 2008 and is titled ‘The Dailies’, making reference to the daily rushes from film and the leftover images from the cutting room floor.  Demand began the series by using the camera on his phone to take images of everyday objects and situations which captured his attention, which he then translated into paper sculptures.  A washing line with clothes pegs against a pale blue sky, a brightly patterned stool, two paper-cups wedged into a wire fence, an office grill with a ball of paper secreted into it – banal, easily overlooked moments in office and urban environments – Demand’s reconstructions are deliberately close to, but purposely not, perfectly realistic in order to allow the gap between truth and trickery to show in subtle and arresting ways.  Photographs can been strangely convincing or oddly artificial; Thomas Demand achieves a disquieting balance between the two.

Image: Daily #17, 2011, Framed Dye Transfer Print, 58,5 x 82,3 cm

© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / DACS, London

Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery New York, Esther Schipper Gallery Berlin and Sprüth Magers Berlin London

Let us know what you think at membership@contemporaryartsociety.org

Stuart Brisley – Next Door (the missing subject) at PEER

29 February to 28 April 2012

97 & 99 Hoxton Street, London N1 6QL

Open Wednesday to Saturday, 12 – 6pm

www.peeruk.org

For those disbelievers who need evidence that art can sometimes be a form of magic, you should pop into the current show at PEER in Hoxton.  In May 2010, when the opportunity arose for the tiny gallery to extend into the abandoned shop next door, PEER’s Director, Ingrid Swenson not only jumped at the chance but decided to invite acclaimed British artist Stuart Brisley to take up temporary residence for ten days amongst the accumulated detritus left by the previous three occupants – a bookseller, a sign-maker and a dealer in electrical supplies– as the beginning of a new art work, which two years on is now being shown in the space.  Not perhaps the most practical approach to a refurbishment and renovation, but who cares when the resulting piece is such a strangely powerful and mysterious site-specific work, layered with meaning and extending out through formal references to Modernism and the ideologies of Romanticism.  Entering into the gallery there are a series of quite beautiful photographs taken from outside the shop window looking in as Brisley – hermit-like – randomly constructs and re-orders, dismantles and re-locates heaps of debris within the space.  Reflections of trees and passers-by caught in the filthy shop window overlay the makeshift and ever shifting accumulations of jagged, geometric architectures Brisley forms from shop panels and furniture in the space, where flat red, yellow and purple panels and Perspex sheets evoke Modernist legacies.  The photographs are shown in the original PEER gallery, and in the room next door – where Brisley’s intervention took place two years earlier – a 30 minute film, edited down from the many hours of footage filmed over the ten day period, is shown in a blacked-out space.  The film is quietly unsettling.  The camera’s eye-view pans across the terrain with mesmeric intensity, heightened by a sound-scape created from the original audio soundtrack where crashing objects, screeching metal and the ambient or accidental noise of Brisley negotiating the terrain is subtly manipulated to intensify the film’s brooding sense of ill ease and menace.  For those people who think art is rubbish, this could arguably be the show for them.  But for those like me, who see the potential for artists to transform the most humble and modest of situations into something magical and affecting, this is absolutely the perfect show!

Image: Stuart Brisley, Next Door (the missing subject), 2010. Performance at PEER. Photo: Maya Balcioglu. Courtesy the artist and the Gallery.

Let us know what you think at membership@contemporaryartsociety.org

Kura Shomali at Jack Bell Gallery

5 April to 6 May 2012

13 Mason’s Yard, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6BU

Open Tuesday to Friday 10am – 6pm, Saturday 12 – 5pm or by appointment.

www.jackbellgallery.com

Jack Bell Gallery – for those of you who have not yet made a visit – overlooks the White Cube gallery in Mason’s Yard, St James’s and has a great programme focused on artists across the world but with a strong commitment to contemporary African artists.  It is always well worth a visit if you are in the area, offering something quite particular and often unexpected in the mix of commercial galleries in the West End.  Last night, the gallery opened the first solo exhibition in London of new works by a young artist from Congo, Kura Shomali.  Working across charcoal, gouache, ink, felt and collage, Shomali’s dynamic works on paper directly reference images created by well-known African photographers – Sammy Baloji, Samual Fosso and Seydou Keita – in a bristling, energetic style which reflects the chaotic street culture of Kinshasa, the hustling and bustling Congolese capital.  Stylised figures drawing on densely patterned African clothing and emblems – reminiscent of Ofili – some sporting globe-like heads, are rendered in part through collaged elements but  dissolve into patterned stains and flat abstracted forms, where different media contest representation.  Splashes of ink, dribbles and spattering of watercolour both obscure and are incorporated within the making of the image, whereas hand-written fragments of text – with political undertones – and scribbles of ball-point pen generate an urban, graffiti style aesthetic which reminds one of artists like Basquiat but has a distinct and unique personality.  A refreshingly different and highly enjoyable show from a gallery to watch.

Image: Kura Shomali, CASSIUS CLAY ALI BOOM BOOM YE, installation view, in collaboration with André Magnin. Courtesy the artist and Jack Bell Gallery.
Let us know what you think at membership@contemporaryartsociety.org