LONDON EXHIBITIONS
Martin Creed, What’s the point of it?, Hayward
Gallery
29 January – 5 May 2014
A survey of Martin Creed’s playful, thought-provoking art.Over the past two and a half decades British artist Martin Creed has pursued an extraordinary path by confounding the traditional categories of art.Winner of the 2001 Turner Prize, Creed is recognised around the world for his minimalistic approach that strips away the unnecessary, but preserves an abundance of wit, humour and surprise.Crossing all artistic media and including music, his art transforms everyday materials and actions into surprising meditations on existence and the invisible structures that shape our lives. This exhibition will be the first major survey of Martin Creed’s work, from its most minimal moments and extravagant room-sized installations. Martin Creed was born in Wakefield in 1968 and currently lives and works in London.
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Martin Creed, Work No. 629
Mark Titchner, Cafe Gallery & Dilston Grove
2 April – 4 May 2014
In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the opening of Cafe Gallery and the 15th anniversary of the opening Dilston Grove, CGP London has, for the very first time, commissioned a single artist to present works across its two venues. Mark Titchner’s practise spans a number of media including digital print, wall drawing, video, sculpture and installation.At Dilston Grove Mark Titchner will present Rose (2014), an immersive four channel video work specially commissioned for the space.The work combines large format text with fast cut images relating to the four elements; water, fire, air and earth. Moving through three increasingly unsettling hypnotic sections, affirmative texts of the kind encountered in self-improvement manual and corporate speak, creep gradually towards something more sinister. This seemingly affirmative, commonly used language contrasting the imaginary landscape of individual aspiration with our real conditions of flawed existence.The work was influenced by interrogation techniques found in the declassified CIA Kubark manual.Titchner will also present a new series of wall drawings specifically conceived for Cafe Gallery. On leaving Central St Martins School of Art in 1995, Titchner’s earliest projects were focused on wall drawing and these were included in exhibitions at City Racing, the ICA and the Royal College of Art. Originally based on Op Art wallpaper designs from the artist’s childhood home, the works moved through an exploration of diagrammatic and modernist design motifs to the artist’s first works with text.
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Mark Titchner, Preparations 2, Cafe Gallery & Dilston Grove, 2014.
Infinite City and Zabludowicz Collection Invites: Stuart Whipps, Zabludowicz Collection
Infinite City, 27 February – 12 May 2014 / Zabludowicz Collection Invites: Stuart Whipps, 10 April – 11 May 2014
Infinite City is an exhibition exploring the city as material, site and situation for the contemporary lived experience. Curated by Elizabeth Neilson, Director, Zabludowicz Collection and Joseph del Pesco, Director, Kadist Art Foundation, the project was initiated as a collaboration between two significant international contemporary art collections.Works by nine international artists are drawn in equal measure from the two collections, encompassing a diverse range of media and approaches. Linking these artworks together is the question of whether cities are shaped by their inhabitants, or if inhabitants are shaped by the cities in which they live.
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Enrique Metinides, Mexico City, 1971
Stuart Whipps presents an installation of three new works that bring together disparate strands of his ongoing research into the history of monuments, and the relationship between photographic processes and physical materials. The specific focus here being connections between dead architecture and dead architects.
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Stuart Whipps, A System For Communicating With The Ghost Of Sir Christopher Wren, 2014 (detail)
Cynthia Maughan with Ben Kinmont and Wu Tsang, Cubitt
10 April – 25 May 2014
The Shape of a Right Statement brings together works by Cynthia Maughan with Ben Kinmont and Wu Tsang – works returning to a sense of impotence coupled with a stubborn and at times spiteful desire to continue, and carve out a space anyway.Between 1973 and 1980 Cynthia Maughan produced nearly 300 self-directed performances for the camera, staged and recorded in her studio. In these videos, a low-fi aesthetic and affection for the absurd gain conceptual focus through her careful use of language as a framing device and self-fulfilling speech act.
The piece of Wu Tsang, from which this exhibition takes its name, draws on Tsangʼs performance technique of the ʻfull body quotationʼ. Working as a proposition for how citing can be an embodied, and invested form of making work, Tsang mimetically steps into an original speaker’s tone, breath, accent and idiom. The approach seeks to insert a question mark into notions of authenticity and the intention of the speaker – a process of understanding content differently, out of its original context.
Ben Kinmontʼs presence in The Shape of a Right Statement takes the form of his 1988 piece Carl Andre killed his wife, realised in the year Andre was acquitted. The work is an unnerving double-act, at once a slap-in-the-face proclamation of ‘truth’ and yet, also a complex grappling with language, and the shape and responsibility of a statement of weight.
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Cynthia Maughan, installation view, The Shape of a Right Statement, 2014, Cubitt. Photography by Plastiques photography
REGIONAL EXHIBITIONS
Hannah Rickards, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford
15 February – 21 April 2014
To enable me to fix my attention on any one of these symbols I was to imagine that I was looking at the colours as I might see them on a moving picture screen.
Hannah Rickards’ meticulously researched and executed works explore the elusive landscape of perception, language and translation. Her attention is particularly drawn to natural phenomena such as thunder, mirage and the aurora borealis. She closely examines these occurrences – and how we experience them – through moving image, sound and installation works.This absorbing exhibition presents an artist whose work is resolutely and appropriately difficult to categorise. It brings together Rickards’ most recognised pieces alongside a new work exhibited here for the first time, inviting us to encounter and enjoy the complexity, limitations and intense beauty of language.
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Hannah Rickards, …a legend, it, it sounds like a legend… , Three-channel video installation, triangular room, 2007, courtesy of the artist, commissioned by The Showroom, supported by Arts Council Grants for the Arts.
Jamal Penjweny, Saddam is Here, Ikon, Birmingham
19 February – 21 April 2014
Ikon presents the first solo exhibition of Jamal Penjweny, including photography and video works reflecting on life in Iraq today. Born in Sulaimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan, in 1981, Penjweny started his artistic career as a sculptor and painter, moving into photography whilst supporting himself by working as a shepherd and, latterly, a café proprietor. His work has been the subject of international attention following its inclusion in Welcome to Iraq, the Iraqi pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, curated by Ikon Director Jonathan Watkins.
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Jamal Penjweny, Photograph from the series Iraq is flying (2006-10), Courtesy the artist
I Cheer a Dead Man’s Sweetheart, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill On Sea
15 March – 29 June 2014
Frank Auerbach | Frank Bowling | Jeffery Camp | William Daniels | Jacqui Hallum | Sophie von Hellermann | Andrew Kerr | Katy Kirbach | Leon Kossoff | Henry Krokatsis | Bruce McLean | Christopher Le Brun | Lisa Milroy | Alessandro Raho | Hayley Tompkins | Phoebe Unwin | Joella Wheatley | Adrian Wiszniewski | John Wonnacott | Jessica Warboys| Gary Wragg
I Cheer a Dead Man’s Sweetheart is both a celebration and an exploration of painting in Britain today, presenting the recent work of twenty-one living artists whose practices span six decades. Iconic figures such as Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff are presented next to other established, mid-career and emerging artists such as Gary Wragg, Phoebe Unwin and Joella Wheatley revealing intriguing, surprising connections, contrasts and underlying preoccupations.The exhibition brings together a diverse range of artists whose achievements arise from protracted periods of time spent in their studios, looking, considering, making, revising and finally producing richly complex works of art. It aims to highlight the concerns, challenges and desires – both formal and conceptual – which preoccupy the artists or energise a body of work – and which are of evolving significance to contemporary painting.
Exhibition co-curated by Dan Howard-Birt
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Adrian Wiszniewski, The First Anachronism of the Day, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 180 cm, photo courtesy of artist and De La Warr Pavilion
Photographing Sculpture: How the Image Moves the Object, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
20 March – 22nd June 2014
Photography has made sculpture mobile since the birth of the medium. Presenting vintage prints from the late-nineteenth century to the present day, Photographing Sculpture looks at the ways in which photographs move objects, charting their travels across time and space. The selection is drawn entirely from the Henry Moore Institute Archive, a part of the sculpture collections of Leeds Museums and Galleries, which are developed in a unique partnership with the Henry Moore Institute. Some photographs visualise the physical movement of objects, documenting monumental statues on their journey from the studio to the pedestal. Others show installations in different configurations and performance pieces in progress. Often series are used to record the same sculpture in different locations and contrasting environments, exploring relationships between context and perception. In some cases photographs represent a concerted investigation by the artist to test ideas, while in others images record a work’s history and, sometimes, are the only traces of lost sculptures.
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Arthur Fleischmann (1896-1990),‘Miranda’, (1951), Image of the artist in the studio with the work and model, Vintage print, Courtesy Leeds Museums and Galleries (Henry Moore Institute Archive) and the family of the artist
