Dear Members,
October is always a period of furious activity in the contemporary art calendar and there are a lot of excellent exhibitions opening as we speak.
As always, we strongly advise you to visit the shows below and look forward to hearing what you think of them.
Happy visiting!
The Membership Team
LONDON EXHBITIONS
Gerhard Richter: Panorama,Tate Modern
6 October 2011 – 8 January 2012
www.tate.org.uk/modern
Spanning nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective exhibition that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career. Gerhard Richter: Panorama highlights the full extent of the artist’s work, which has encompassed a diverse range of techniques and ideas. It includes realist paintings based on photographs, colourful gestural abstractions such as the squeegee paintings, portraits, subtle landscapes and history paintings.
Haroon Mirza: I saw square triangle sine, Camden Arts Centre
7 October 2011 – 08 January 2012
www.camdenartscentre.org
Using an eclectic range of objects and elements including used furniture, outdated electric appliances, electronic materials, light and the appropriated work of other artists, Mirza creates complex audio installations which investigate the moment where noise becomes music. In Mirza’s assemblages each element plays a specific part; objects affect each other and are reconfigured in different ways.
George Condo: Mental States, Hayward Gallery
18 October 2011 – 8 January 2012
www.southbankcentre.co.uk
This is the first major retrospective of the American artist George Condo. Focusing on his ‘imaginary portraits’, which conjure varied mental states with a mixture of comic absurdity and the heart-rending pathos, and incorporating sculpture as well painting, the exhibition offers a comprehensive survey of three decades of his art.
Wilhelm Sasnal, Whitechapel Gallery
14 October 2011 – 1 January 2012
www.whitechapelgallery.org
The paintings of Wilhelm Sasnal chronicle the complex experience of life today. Mixing art historical references with images taken from the internet, their subject matter knows no limits: from icons of popular culture such as Roy Orbison to much admired paintings of the past such as Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884), from the lonesome cowboys in a Steven Spielberg film, to the shocking photographs of Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides.
Mathias Poledna / Florian Pumhösl, Raven Row
22 September 2011 – 20 November 2011
www.ravenrow.org
For this exhibition Mathias Poledna and Florian Pumhösl have each created a single expansive new work. Poledna has produced a 35 mm film for Raven Row’s ground floor, and Pumhösl has made a series of 54 glass paintings for its panelled upper galleries. The interaction between these works and their spatial implementation plays a key role in the exhibition, addressing Raven Row’s distinct architecture, and the potential for dialogue across different conceptual frameworks.
REGIONAL EXHIBITIONS
Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Site Gallery and S1 Artspace, Sheffield
23 September 2011 and 5 November 2011
www.newcontemporaries.org.uk
While in its history New Contemporaries has travelled the length and breadth of the country, it hasn’t been in Sheffield since 1993. In a particularly vibrant and active time in the city’s history, it is the perfect moment for this show of radical, bold and experimental art.
Dark Matters, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
24 September 2011 – 15 January 2012
www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk
Encounter phantoms in the mirror, captured spirits and playful shadows as the Whitworth’s spaces become populated by works of darkness and wonder.
Exploring the impact of scientific, digital and mechanical invention upon visual culture, Dark Matters brings together the work of ten internationally acclaimed artists from across the globe who engage with ideas of darkness and shadow through a range of technologies.
Rachel Goodyear, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield
1 October 2011 – 3 January 2012
www.ysp.co.uk
This autumn, YSP presents an exhibition of new and recent work by Rachel Goodyear. Tipped as one of Art Review’s Future Greats in 2008 and nominated for the Northern Art Prize in 2009, Goodyear’s compelling cast of characters inhabit a strange and complex world of contradictions, existing somewhere between the macabre and mundane. Exploring themes of fear, desire, vulnerability and isolation, Goodyear invites the viewer into a dark place where human psychologies and animal behaviour collide and merge.
Shezad Dawood: Piercing Brightness, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston
17 September 2011 – 26 November 2011
www.harrismuseum.org.uk
Piercing Brightness is an exhibition of new work by international artist, Shezad Dawood, which is being premiered at the Harris, before touring internationally.. Much of the work was developed during a two-year research period, in which the artist explored Preston’s social and political history and met various community and faith groups in the city. Dawood’s practice explores patterns and synchronicities between different locations, subcultures and cultural narratives.
Jamie Shovlin: Thy will be done, Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery, Cumbria
1 October 2011 – 27 November 2011
www.tulliehouse.co.uk
Thy Will be Done is a major exhibition which combines objects from Tullie House’s diverse collections with new and existing work by Jamie Shovlin. It presents a collaborative investigation between artist and museum into the representation of past and living cultures through the objects we collect, conserve and exhibit – highlighting the role of memory and subjectivity in the stories they are used to tell.
Image credit:
Bathers at Asnières
© Wilhelm Sasnal
Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.