Graduate shows are *the* way to learn about the work of the latest up and coming artists and see original art by future stars. If you’re in London or Manchester, pop along to these shows by recent grads of Blackpool & The Fylde College BA Photography.
By Susie Brady
Illume:
Illume is an exhibition featuring the photography of this year’s graduates of Blackpool & The Fylde College. Over 40 students have been working hard to produce their very best work for the show. The students’ work covers many different genres of photography, so there will be something to interest every visitor. From experimental to documentary, Fashion to Fine Art, this work represents emerging photographers from the North West and should not be missed.
Hosted in the recently refurbished Hoxton Gallery in London over a week in June 2012, visitors can expect an exciting selection of photographs, presented in a wonderful location, and of course a warm welcome from the students.
‘Illume’
Hoxton Gallery, London
12-18 Hoxton Street
London
N1 6NG
June 26th – 29th
Tue-Thu 10-5, Fri 10-2.30
Industry Private Viewing on Tuesday 26th, 6-8pm.
Infectious is a show highlighting the work of the graduates of the Creative Arts Department of Blackpool & The Fylde College. The students in the final year of BA(Hons) Photography have created their best work and are excited to present it at Cube Gallery.
Cube Gallery is in the centre of Manchester and is the perfect space for showcasing the work. Visitors can expect to see a selection of the best work of the emerging photographers of the North West.
‘Infectious’
Cube Gallery, Manchester
113-115 Portland Street
Manchester
M1 6DW
June 16th – 21st
Sat 12-5, Mon-Thu 12-5.30
Industry Private Viewing on Tuesday 19th, 6-8pm.
Love or hate Picasso’s work, he achieved something remarkable as a figurehead of a movement which completely changed the nature of modern art. The Tate Britain’s exhibition will focus on this particular aspect of his legacy – that is, his influence on Western art as a whole, and the vast changes in societal structure and modes of living that informed such a paradigm shift in visual representation. To demonstrate a little of Picasso’s impact, the exhibition will include works by some of his biggest-name UK artist admirers, including Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney.
Tate Britain is open every day, 10.00-18.00
Last admission to special exhibitions at 17.15
£14 (£12.20 concessions)
Free for Tate Members
Book online with Tate or call 020 7887 8888.
Another great who you’ll either love or hate, Damien Hirst, like Picasso, became known as a representative of a movement which took the fine art world by storm. Along with Tracy Emin, he is regarded as the figurehead and epitome of the Young British Artist movement, which challenged the established art work back in the late 80s and early ’90s. Fast forward just a few years, and the YBAs had been assimilated and became a firm and highly-lucrative fixture of the established art world.
Exhibition Hours
Sunday to Thursday, 10.00–18.00. Friday and Saturday, 10.00–22.00. Last admission into exhibitions 17.15 (Friday and Saturday 21.15).
£14 (£12.20 concessions)
Free for Tate Members
Book online with Tate or call 020 7887 8888.
While best known for his swimming pools and portraiture, it’s really no secret that the prolific David Hockney has created notable works in just about every representational genre. The RA’s A Bigger Picture focuses on his landscape works, with depictions spanning a 50 year period.
‘I’ve always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It’s people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.’
– Lucian Freud
Portraits were Lucian Freud’s defining genre, and this exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery concentrates on specific periods of work which demonstrate his stylistic development and technical virtuosity. The exhibition will feature over 100 works from international galleries and private collections, and represents a chance to see works never before on public display.
Known best for his painting The Scream, which has transferred over from fine art into popular culture to become a universally ubiquitous and recognised poster piece, Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter working from around 1880-1942. The Modern Eye shows Munch as a 20th Century Artist, representing the details of everyday, modern life within the times he lived and worked.
Exhibition Hours
Sunday to Thursday, 10.00–18.00. Friday and Saturday, 10.00–22.00. Last admission into exhibitions 17.15 (Friday and Saturday 21.15).
£14 (£12.20 concessions)
Free for Tate Members
Book online with Tate or call 020 7887 8888.
Outside of the main London galleries, there are plenty of exciting and big name exhibitions going on in the rest of the UK. One such show, at the Tate Liverpool, focuses on J.M.W Turner (1775-1851), Claude Monet (1840-1926) and Cy Twombly (1928-2011), exploring similarities in their styles, approaches and inspirations. It’s a chance to see some iconic pieces such as Monet’s Waterlilies and Turner’s romantic landscapes and seascapes.
17 October – 23 June
Open Tuesday – Sunday, 10.00–17.50
Closed Mondays (except Bank Holiday Mondays).
24 June – 16 October
Open Monday – Sunday, 10.00–17.50
Closed on Good Friday and 24–26 December
£12.20 (£9 concessions)
Free for Tate Members
Book online with Tate or call 0151 702 7400.
Now that the children are on holiday, a great activity to do during the break is an art gallery visit. Most art galleries nowadays welcome children and have special facilites for them, meaning that a visit is both fun and educational. Here’s my rundown of the best UK art galleries to take the kids to this Christmas break.
The Tate Modern.
A favourite of many adults, this architectural spectacle of a gallery also offers interactive guides specifically for children, along with family trails and children’s art workshops. There’s even a whole website dedicated to art for children at Tate Kids. Every Saturday and Sunday, the gallery hosts “Weekend Sessions“, where kids can play and create with art materials after visiting the related artworks in the free collection displays.
The other Tates, that is, the Britain, Tate Liverpool, and Tate St Ives, aren’t short on children’s activities either. The Tate Britain’s Art Trolley Weekend Sessions are a simliar opportunity for kids to create their own work inspired by the greats, while Tate St Ives’ offers the Hepworth Family Activity Trail, which is only £2 including a sketchbook and simple art materials. The Tate Liverpool has lots of imaginative activities to offer, including the “Journey into Wonderland“, based on Sophie Cullinans’ Wonderland installation. There are a few days left to catch this particular event – the last day being on the 2nd of January.
Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art
For art lovers north of the border, the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art runs a Saturday art club for children aged 3-11, along with story sessions and family art days. The Saturday art club is a drop in session which encourages you to get creative and messy! The sessions are popular, so there may be a short wait to join in.
Another great UK art gallery destination, the Wolverhampton Art Gallery is family-friendly as a whole. Along with drop in workshops and family art trails, the gallery offers a host of useful features such as high chairs, buggy parks, and even Hippychick hip seats, giving you an easy way to carry your little one around as you explore the gallery.
Source: http://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/wolves
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
For my final family-friendly UK gallery pick, I’m featuring Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. With its very fantastically illustrated kids’ website. The museum runs a non-stop calendar of family activities throughout the city, including art and craft workshops taking place every Saturday and Sunday and during school holidays. Visit their main website for more information.
Wishing you a happy and art-filled New Year from me and all at Art2Arts!
Time off over Christmas? I hope so. The time between Christmas and New Year is the ideal chance to get out and about and see a few of the many exhibitions that London’s art galleries have to offer. We’ll start with…
Alex Hartley Clearing, 2011. Constructed mixed media on C-type photograph 90 x 72 x 7 cm 35 3/8 x 28 3/8 x 2 3/4 in
Source: http://www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/_426/
This is an exhibition of Hartley’s large-scale photos with scale-models of architectural structures painstakingly build into the surfaces of the prints. Somewhere between a steam punk inventor, an early 20th Century mustachioed explorer, and a tree-house dwelling earth child, Hartley creates images dystopian architectural pieces – scale models of super-villan hideaways in remode desert landscapes. True to the explorer archetype, Hartely has gone on intrepid expeditions into the high arctic, and the gallery show includes objects and artefacts from his expeditions.
Coca-Cola vase, Ai Weiwei, 1997, Neolithic vase (5000-3000 BC) and paint. Courtesy of André Stockamp & Christopher Tsai collection, Ancram, New York
Source:http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/ai-weiwei-dropping-the-urn-ceramic-works,-5000-bc-ad-2010/
Ai WeiWei is a conceptual artist who I can really get excited about. He creates pieces that are truly thought-provoking, and does so with a light touch. His works are often almost visual jokes, but in a way which is subtle and doesn’t shout its message. “Dropping the Urn” includes the use of Neolithic and Han Dynasty Ceramics transformed and reinterpreted. For example, the Coca-Cola urn above has been repainted, and the exhibition features an original Han Dynasty figurine contained in a Johnnie Walkey whiskey bottle.
Hokusai’s Great Wave is one of the most recognisable, reproduced and popular images in the whole of international art history. It’s even been reinterpreted as a mural on a house in Camberwell, South London. This exhibition presents a unique opportunity to learn about the history and context behind this iconic piece.
Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), Under the Wave off Kanagawa (detail). Colour woodblock print. Japan, Edo period, c. 1831. Acquired with the assistance of The Art Fund.
Source: http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/hokusais_great_wave.aspx
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition attracts amateur and professional entrants of all ages from around the world. The best entrants are chosen for exhibition, and this is a show that will astound and amaze, and give you a fresh perspective on animals and the natural world. Photographers go to extraordinary lengths to get these images – for “Pester Power”, pictured below, Mateusz Piesiak wrapped his camera in a plastic sack, lay down on his front and dragged himself across the wet sand to get these detailed shots of oystercatchers feeding on Long Island, New York.
Mateusz Piesiak
Pester power
Source: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/wpy/photo.do?photo=2794&category=57&group=4
The library might not be the first place you think of when you want to see an art exhibition, but the British Library’s latest exhibition is well worth drawing attention to. It’s a chance to see the Library’s collection of illuminated manuscripts – illustration from the medieval period, many of which are in amazing condition and are executed in stunning colour. According to the Library, the manuscripts are
our most vivid source for understanding royal identity, moral and religious beliefs, learning, faith artistic trends and the international politics of the period.
The Shrewsbury Book
Rouen, 1444–45
British Library, Royal 15 E. vi, ff. 2v
Source: http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/royalman/about/index.html
From me and everyone at Art2Arts, have a fabulous festive season and a colourful New Year!
Most people will be familiar with art from the Tate Modern’s Unilever Series whether they have seen them up close or not - pieces on a grand scale like Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project and Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds tend to make the national news and claim a space in the public consciousness.
As such, any artist taking on the task of creating the next gargantuan artwork in the Unilever series has some big boots to fill, and will be quite aware that this may be the defining piece of their career. The most recent artist to step up to the stage is Berlin art filmmaker Tactia Dean. So how to use film to complement and comment on this big space? How to do so in a way that will make people think?
Dean has gone about the task by projecting a recording onto a gigantic white monolith, standing 13 metres high, at the end of the Turbine Hall. The hall is darkened to ensure that the piece, entitled FILM is the main focus of attention. FILM can be seen a a portrait of the whole concept of analogue film making. Made using a Cinemascope lens turned at a 90 degree angle, the recording uses many of the techniques pioneered by early cinema, such as glass matt painting, mirroring, and masking. The effect is one of striking colour and strong sense of layered imagery.
Recent controversy over the reselling of tickets for this exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s surviving paintings at the National Gallery in London, which have been re-selling at an eye-watering £300 (18 times their original price) is an indication of the appeal that this paragon of ‘Renaissance Man’ still has for the public in general and art lovers in particular. The Renaissance ‘Rock-Star’ is famous for being an engineer, scientist, inventor and polymath but this exhibition is the first to concentrate on his technical development and artistic aims as a painter.
The exhibition, which opened on November 9th and runs until February 5th 2012, was a sell-out and has been a critical and financial success for the gallery, despite the fact that there are only nine paintings on display from a total of around 16 known to have been painted by Leonardo. However, there are also numerous drawings and sketches giving an insight into the thought process behind the creation of each painting.
The works cover the period of approximately 17 years, between 1482 and 1499, when Leonardo was in the paid employ of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan and a patron of the arts during the Milanese Renaissance. The most famous paintings of the period ‘The Last Supper’, which was commissioned by Sforza, and the iconic ‘Mona Lisa’ are not in the exhibition but, despite the absence of arguably the two most famous paintings in the history of art, the exhibition is considered as a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity to see ‘the most complete display of Leonardo’s rare surviving paintings ever held.’
Indeed, one of the paintings “Christ as Salvator Mundi”, was originally attributed to one of da Vinci’s pupils. It’s provenance is still disputed by some critics but a later revaluation saw the value of the painting inflate from a trivial £45 to a staggering $200 million – an inflation rate even higher than that of the exhibition tickets!
During this period of Leonardo da Vinci’s life he was able to concentrate almost entirely on developing his painting technique. Thanks to the Duke’s patronage he had the time and the resources to develop his skills to the point where he could blend an almost photographic realism with a deeper sense of mystery and idealism, creating icons of beauty which still leave us breathless more than 500 years later.
The paintings on display include ‘La Belle Ferronière’ , ‘Madonna Litta’ , ‘Saint Jerome’ and two versions of ‘Virgin of the Rocks’, one owned by the gallery and recently restored. Although the ‘Last Supper’ itself is absent, there is a copy of the painting made by his contemporary Giampietrino, together with sketches and the preparatory drawings Leonardo made for the original.
So if you feel compelled to join the carefully controlled crowd flocking to this exhibition try not to pay £300 for the privilege, although if the hype and the critics are to be believed, and this really is a unique and not-to-be-repeated-in-our-lifetime opportunity to see some of the most beautiful paintings ever created, it may just be worth it.
Leonardo Da Vinci, Painter at the Court of Milan runs until 5th February. Ticketing and opening time information are available at the National Gallery Website.
Until the 2nd of January, Tate Britain is showing a retrospective of Barry Flanagan’s early works. Best known for his leaping hare pieces, Flanagan studied at St Martin’s School of Art from 1964 -66, and the exhibition covers his progress from 1965 -1982. Flanagan was a pioneer – as one of the first scultptors to use unconventioal matierals such as sand, sticks, and hessian rags, he created controversy and paved the way for a new generation of sculptors who would look for the physical and emotive qualities in ungalmorous materials, including waste materials.
“Time and again, we see Flanagan bringing the best out of his unpromising materials, shedding new light on traditional sculptural concerns such as weight and matter, surface and space.”
- Evening Standard
As Flanagan’s career progressed, he began to work increasingly in the far more traditional medium of bronze. These bronzes include depictions of elephants, cougars and horses, as well as hares. These sculptures seem to have fairy-tale like qualities; they echo human feelings, but never in a sentimental or truley anthrompommorphsied way. Flanagan’s particular focus on hares began when he saw a hare in a butcher’s and was struck by its appearance. He said that hares are
“rich and expressive,” with “the conventions of the cartoon and the investment of human attributes into the animal world”, both of which are “very well practised devices in literature and film… If you consider what conveys situation and meaning and feeling in a human figure, the range of expression is, in fact, far more limited than the device of investing an animal – a hare especially – with the expressive attributes of a human being. The ears, for instance, are really able to convey far more than a squint in an eye of a figure or a grimace on the face of a model.”
I personally find Flanagan’s work most interesting when considered side-by-side with his interesting bohemian character and lifestyle. He was a true and uncontrived eccentric, who regularly wore tweed suits paired with sandals, regardless of the weather, and late in his life, played out an itinerant existence in a vintage camper van, with his partner Jessica Sturges.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster create assemblages from rubbish, discarded items, and taxidermy animals which when light is cast on them from the right direction, reveal a meticulously considered shadow image.
The artists’ earlier work from the 1990s mostly works with rubbish, as shown in “Dirty White Trash” from 1998.
Noble and Webster - DIrty White Trash. Source: Wikipedia
Over time, their work has evolved, with the assemblages themselves becoming increasingly sophisticated, and incorporating found dead animals. “Dark Stuff”, made in 2008, is one such example. Sue Webster said :
“‘Tim’s mum bought some kittens three years ago. The cats started bringing in their prey almost every day. We collected their remains in a box marked with a skull and crossbones, which we called ‘Dead Things’. Soon we had a few hundred rotting creatures – mice, rats, voles, even a squirrel and a toad. Walking through the British Museum, we were struck by the Egyptians’ use of mummification, their obsession with animals and animal parts, and how good at sculpture they were. And suddenly we knew what to do with our mummified animals!’”
Noble and Webster- Dark Stuff. Source: britishmuseum.org
The work “British Wildlife” used taxidermy animals rather than rubbish. In this highly personal piece, the taxidermy animals used to belong to Tim Noble’s father, who died in the 1990s. The piece was unveiled in 2000.
The pair met while studying art at Nottingham Trent university in 1986, and in 1989 worked as aristits in residnece at Dean Clough sculpture studios, a former factory building in Halifax. They later moved to London and worked for Gilbert and George, as well as being involved in a number of important exhibitions, including Statuephilia at the British Museum in 2009. Their work has also been bought by Charles Saatchi.
British Wildlife by Webster and Noble/ Source - The Telegraph
