LONDON EXHIBITIONS
Abstract Drawing, Drawing Room
20 February – 19 April 2014
Artist Richard Deacon has selected a broad range of works by over 30 artists spanning the last 105 years on the idea of ‘abstraction’ in drawing.
Artists include: Tomma Abts, Roger Ackling, Anni Albers, David Austen, David Batchelor, Victor Ciato, Garth Evans, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, John Golding, Lothar Götz, Frederick Hammersley, Victoria Haven, Susan Hefuna, Eva Hesse, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Anish Kapoor, Hilma af Klint, John Latham, Bob Law, Sol LeWitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Kazimir Malevich, Emma McNally, Sam Messenger, Nasreen Mohamedi, Jackson Pollock, Dorothea Rockburne, Mira Schendel, Richard Serra, Kishio Suga, Darrell Viner, Alison Wilding, Richard Wright.
Richard Deacon CBE is one of the most important British sculptors of his generation and has exhibited internationally since the early 1980s. He won the Turner prize in 1987, and a major retrospective exhibition of his work will be presented at Tate Britain in 2014 (5 February – 27 April). The activity of drawing is crucial to his work as a sculptor, which engages with processes and means of manufacture. This deep interest in making as an activity is evident in his selection of works for Abstract Drawing.
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Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmain, Geometric design with mirror, 2000 Coloured inks and mirror, 67 x 97cm, Abstract Drawing on at Drawing Room until 19 April 2014. Courtesy of Drawing Room, 2014. Photographer Dan Weill
Camille Henrot, The Pale Fox, Chisenhale Gallery
28 February – 13 April 2014
Chisenhale Gallery is pleased to present an ambitious new commission and the first UK solo exhibition by French, New York-based artist, Camille Henrot (b. 1978). Entitled The Pale Fox, this new installation develops from Grosse Fatigue, 2013 – the film Henrot presented at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013, for which she was awarded the Silver Lion for most promising young artist. Demonstrating the breadth of Henrot’s output, this exhibition comprises an architectural display system, found objects, drawing, bronze and ceramic sculpture and digital images.
The Pale Fox articulates our desire to make sense of the world through the objects that surround us. Unfolding like a frieze across the four walls of the gallery, a polymorphous aluminium shelf provides a structure wherein the four points of the compass are aligned with stages in an individual lifecycle, the evolution of technology, philosophical principles of Leibniz and the four Classical elements: fire, water, earth and air. This highly personalised aggregation of distinct systems of thought is presented through an intense accumulation of objects and images encountered within a highly constructed, meditative environment.
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Camille Henrot, The Pale Fox, 2014, installation view, Chisenhale Gallery. Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery in partnership with Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris and Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster. Courtesy kamel mennour, Paris and Johann König, Berlin. Photo: Andy Keate. © ADAGP
Silke Otto-Knapp, Monday or Tuesday, Camden Art Centre
17 January – 30 March 2014
Silke Otto-Knapp (b. 1970) makes paintings of performance and landscape, approaching the canvas as a stage and a site of orchestrated scenarios. Gouache and watercolour are applied in delicate layers, depicting scenes of a fugitive beauty and imbuing the works with an ethereal magic.
In Monday or Tuesday, Otto-Knapp’s subjects are rendered almost entirely in black and silver pigments which appear to bathe the works in moonlight, the source of which at times looms in the distance, ambiguously appearing as a stage instruction or theatrical lighting device. The works bring together the reality of landscape with the pretence of stage design to raise questions around decorative surface, spatial depth and pictorial construction.
The central motif of performance will be expanded in the supporting public programme which includes a new performance in the gallery spaces by LA based dancer-choreographer Flora Weigmann, a salon afternoon featuring dancer Kate Coyne and a dance masterclass led by Nissa Nishikawa.
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Silke Otto-Knapp, Monday or Tuesday, Camden Art Centre, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Marcus J Leith.
Benedict Drew, Heads May Roll, Matt’s Gallery
19 February – 20 April 2014
For his first solo commission at Matt’s Gallery, Benedict Drew presents a large-scale installation. The work scrutinises the effect and intent of mediated images, synthesised voice and the fractured narrative of instructional speech.
This immersive exhibition attempts to make sculptural the absurdity of a life spent staring into a screen and the social anxiety induced by ‘smart’ objects via an alternative sci-fi stage set comprising of a landscape of objects, sound and projection. Its content responds to the super saturated, psychedelic properties of LCD technology and the disorientating potential of electronic sound. Drew critiques contemporary consumption via a fantastical future world in which the image, word and body are exhausted.
Referring to Henri Chopin’s essay Why I Am The Author of Sound Poetry and Free Poetry (1967) where the “all-powerful Word, the Word that reigns over all…(we) listen to it everywhere describe us and describe events, tells us how to vote, and whom we should obey”; Drew acknowledges society’s increasingly passive digestion of the subliminal voice of consumerism and offers a noisy palate cleanser, an escape route, a portal to an alternative world.
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Benedict Drew, Heads May Roll, 2014. Installation photograph by Peter White courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
REGIONAL EXHIBITONS
Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Photographs 1975 – 2012, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield
14 February – 1 June 2014
American artist Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951, Connecticut) is one of the most important photographers working today. This is the first UK exhibition to show works spanning his career, offering an opportunity to appreciate the development of diCorcia’s work. This large-scale survey contains over 100 photographs from six major series.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia lives and works in New York and teaches at Yale University, Connecticut. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston until 1975 before receiving his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1979. His first solo exhibition took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1993, followed by others at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2007 and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. His work is held in numerous public collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
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Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Roy, “in his twenties”, Los Angeles, California, $30, 1990–92. Courtesy the artist, Sprüth Magers, Berlin/London and David Zwirner, New York/London
David Batchelor: Concretos, New Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury
8 February – 16 March 2014
David Batchelor‘s first exhibition in the gallery at Roche Court will focus on the Concretos, a body of new work which reveals his interest in Brazilian concrete art. The exhibition will also include recent Blob paintings and works on paper.
The title for this series of new work is an admiring nod in the direction of the great Brazilian Concreto and Neo-Concreto movements of the 1950s and 1960s. The inspiration for them comes from the jagged cement-and-broken-glass compositions that often adorn the top of brick walls in towns and cities. This improvised and emphatically hostile kind of urban decoration might be thought of as a widely practiced form of anti-social sculpture.
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David Batchelor, Concretos, installation view, courtesy of Artist and New Art Centre
AV FESTIVAL 14: EXTRACTION, North East England
1 – 31 March 2014
AV Festival is a leading international Festival of contemporary art, film and music, based in North East England. A biennial event, the Festival is thematically curated to engage audiences with current ideas across contemporary artistic practice and wider society.
AV Festival 14: Extraction explores the raw materials that create our experience of the world, from their origins deep in the ground, to their extraction, transformation and global exploitation. Everything comes from the ground, digging the earth, pulling out material through mining or quarrying. Extraction creates new landforms, substances and residues, making visible hidden geological strata across vast time periods.
Over a month the Festival re-imagines the geologic, with artists responding to the natural landscape of North East England and beyond. The curated programme features 11 exhibitions, 36 film screenings, 10 concerts and 11 new commissions. Each weekend has a specially curated focus, from postcolonial cinema to digging for sound. The dramatic end to the Festival is an unmissable large-scale event on the River Tyne with seminal music group Test Dept.
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Lee Patterson at Killhope Lead Mining Museum, 2013. Photo © Rebecca Shatwell
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and Tala Madani, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham
www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
25 January – 23 March 2014
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s sculptures and installations often start as handmade props, costumes and sets for her joyful, anarchic performances. They acquire an afterlife in exhibition spaces, occasionally animated by amateur actors and professional dancers, as they will be at Nottingham Contemporary.
Chetwynd is influenced by popular performing traditions such as medieval mummer plays, carnivals, communes, drag acts and political demonstrations, as well as the history of performance in avant-garde art. She is at home with the classics and with popular culture – and she uses one to give new meaning to the other. Her performances have referred to the ideas, images and storylines of Giotto, John Milton, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx and Dante, for example, but also Meatloaf, The Addams Family, Star Wars and Starship Troopers. Brought up on film sets (her mother is an Oscar-winning production designer), and studying both anthropology and fine art at university, Chetwynd moves easily between folk traditions, sci-fi, 60s Happenings and contemporary moral issues.
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Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Diorama, 2012. Nottingham Contemporary, 2014, installation shot. Photography David Sillitoe. Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ
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Tala Madani is one of the most original painters to have emerged in recent years. Her work reflects on masculinity, group dynamics, sexuality and power play – topics that are explored with humour, as well as impossible cartoon violence.
Madani imagines the bizarre and purposeless rituals of a male-only domain. An absurd and nightmarish sense of exposure pervades her paintings of groups of men in underwear or sleepwear, blissfully unaware – and evidently enjoying – their own predicaments, and each others’ company.
Bodily functions appear in her paintings and digital animations, creating intensely private moments that are strangely shared. Moving outside the body, she describes some of her works as speaking of a sexual, religious or spiritual ecstasy. These are inextricably and disturbingly tangled, critiquing male power cliques.
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Tala Madani, Nottingham Contemporary, 2014.
Chiharu Shiota, New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall
www.thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk
17 January – 30 March 2014
Chiharu Shiota is renowned for her dramatic, immersive installations which frequently utilise found objects such as clothing, shoes, old furniture, vintage suitcases and doors and windows from demolished and derelict buildings. Such items resonate with personal and emotional if elusive histories. Chiharu’s installations alter and energise the physical and architectural space, challenging our perceptions of the immediate environment and embracing the viewer as an integral part of the experience.
For her solo exhibition in Walsall, Chiharu will create two spectacular site-specific installations, shown alongside a selection of drawings and films by the artist.
This exhibition is generously supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.
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Chiharu Shiota, Accumulation- Searching for the Destination (detail), 2014, © DACS 2013, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Photograph by Jonathan Shaw
