LONDON EXHIBITONS
Art Licks Weekend
4 – 6 October 2013
The dominant picture of the capital’s creative sector does not represent the wealth of projects happening amongst younger artists and curators in spaces outside of central London. Art Licks launched in 2010 and has since grown to provide an essential platform and voice for the lesser-known and under-represented activities that form the grassroots of visual culture in London.
Launching this year, the Art Licks Weekend 2013 will be a three-day event for which young galleries, not-for-profit projects, artist-run spaces and independent curatorial projects will be open to the public with special events and exhibitions of work by emerging artists.
With over 70 participating spaces showcasing 250 artists, the Art Licks Weekend is a unique event that will encompass the most exciting artistic talent and innovative ideas in London; celebrating the creative energy of this young art scene.
Art Licks Annual, 2012. Photo: Mariona Otero
Sarah Lucas, Whitechapel Gallery
2 October – 15 December 2013
The bawdy euphemisms, repressed truths, erotic delights and sculptural possibilities of the sexual body lie at the heart of Sarah Lucas’s work (b. 1962). First coming to prominence in the 1990s with a show at London’s City Racing memorably titled, Penis Nailed to a Board, this British artist’s sculpture, photography and installation have established her as one of the most important figures of her generation.
This exhibition takes us from Lucas’s 1990s’ foray into the salacious perversities of British tabloid journalism to the London premiere of her sinuous, light reflecting bronzes: limbs, breasts and phalli intertwine to transform the abject into a dazzling celebration of polymorphous sexuality.
Danh Vo, PEER
4 October – 7 December 2013
Over the past two years, We The People has been Danh Vo’s continually unfolding and developing project on a massive scale. It has occupied a team of skilled craftsmen in China in the faithful reconstruction of an actual size replica of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty. Working from the sculptor’s original drawings, more than 200 elements have been beaten and welded from 2.5mm sheets of copper over plaster and metal armature, following the original construction method. As pieces are made, they are shipped off in batches to museums, galleries, biennales and art fairs. The fabrication is nearly complete – only Liberty’s great tablet still left to make, which bears the date July 4th, 1776 and marks the United States’ independence from Great Britain.
Upon completion, We The People is unlikely to ever come together as one, but instead will continue to circumnavigate the globe for long into the future while gradually being acquired into public and private collections worldwide. In this instance perhaps, the parts are greater than the whole. This dismembered Liberty munificently infuses democracy and freedom wherever she is scattered – like a virus. To date, elements of the project have been shown in major public institutions in Kassel, Paris, Barcelona, Shanghai, Chicago, Copenhagen, Bregenz, Shenzhen, Ghent, Bangkok, Porto and New York. This autumn will be the first substantial showing of Vo’s work in London when PEER will be exhibiting 26 elements.
Danh Vo at PEER, 2013
OPEN HEART SURGERY, The Moving Museum
12 October – 15 December 2013
Sam Austen, James Balmforth, Charlie Billingham, James Bridle, Broomberg and Chanarin, Stefan Bruggemann, James Capper, Shezad Dawood, Tomas Downes, Cecile B Evans, Adham Faramawy, Jess Flood-Paddock, Joe Frazer, Alistair Frost, Nicholas Hatfull, Gabriel Hartley, Celia Hempton, Lucky PDF, Florence Peake, Peles Empire, Hannah Perry, Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq, Mary Ramsden, Samara Scott, Tai Shani, Matthew Smith, Soheila Sokhanvari, Marianne Spurr, Clunie Reid, Jesse Wine.
In October 2013, The Moving Museum is coming to London to present Open Heart Surgery, an exploration of contemporary art from London. The exhibition brings together some of London’s most urgent artistic voices, contextualizing their approaches and identifying a new direction of art in a climate of rapid change. Working from an epicenter of creative, financial, technological and migrational activity, the artists methodically draw from, dissect, re-imagine, and ultimately rise above historical movements, geographies and references, displaying an extraordinary ability to absorb and reinterpret a world that is fractious and in flux.
James Capper, Midi Marker, 2012. Courtesy Hannah Barry Gallery, London and The Moving Museum London
REGIONAL EXHIBITIONS
Michael Dean: The Introduction of Muscle, Arnolfini, Bristol
28 September – 17 November 2013
Arnolfini presents an exhibition with new works by Michael Dean. Dean, born 1977 in Newcastle upon Tyne, is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists in Britain, working with sculpture, photography and drawing.
Michael Dean’s works are often made from cast concrete or other industrial materials and seek a direct physical relationship with the human body. Their rough but delicate surfaces, and sometimes monumental scale, invite touch and relate to the immediate architectural background. His sculptural works evolve from his extensive writing; and many of his works are remodelled words in the artist’s own three-dimensional fonts and are accompanied by short, poetic texts. Exploring the transmutation of language, from the word to its graphical representation and its reading, Dean’s work marks the different relationships between ideas and material form. The sculptures keep a careful balance between an autonomous presence and their quality as media of communication.
Michael Dean, The Introduction of Muscle, Installation View, Arnolfini, 2013. Photo: Stuart Whipps. Courtesy Supportico Lopez Berlin, Herald St London and Mendes Wood São Paolo.
**Last month ** Niki de Saint Phalle, The Eric and Jean Cass Gift, GoMA, Glasgow
16 November 2012 – 27 October 2013
Eric and Jean Cass have dedicated over 35 years of their lives to supporting artists. During this time they have built up an outstanding and very personal collection of over 300 colourful modern and contemporary works including sculptures, ceramics, drawings, prints and paintings, all previously housed in the interiors and gardens of ‘Bleep’, their modernist home in Surrey.
This collection includes works by Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Arp, John Bellany, Patrick Caulfield, Beryl Cook, Michael Craig- Martin, Alan Davie, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Allen Jones, L S Lowry, Joan Miro, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Victor Passmore, Pablo Picasso and Tom Wesselmann.
Recently Eric and Jean Cass decided to disperse this outstanding collection to museums across the UK through the Contemporary Art Society.
Eric Cass knew Glasgow Museums owned works by the late Niki de Saint Phalle. The mirrored tympanum and the mirrored entrance at GoMA were designed by the artist. Saint Phalle also gifted two important sculptures to the collection after her retrospective at McLellan Galleries in 1993, The Great Devil and Altar to a Dead Cat.
Eric and Jean have gifted 13 sculptures, 1 lithograph and related ephemera by Niki de Saint Phalle to Glasgow Museums through the Contemporary Art Society. They have also gifted two oil paintings by John Bellany.
GoMA Glasgow 15 November 2012. Photo: Enzo Di Cosmo
YOU ARE THE COMPANY IN WHICH YOU KEEP. An exhibition staged jointly between Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art and Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, Sunderland
NGCA, 28 September – 23 November 2013 / Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, 19 October 2013 – 23 February 2014.
Craig Ames, Ulf Aminde, Haley Austin, Natasha Caruana, Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, Melanie Friend, Gilbert & George, Julian Germain, Paul Graham, Chris Harrison, Nigel Henderson, Jeremy Hutchison, Yee I-Lann, Bob Jardine, James O Jenkins, Linder, Melanie Manchot, Daniel Meadows, Gustav Metzger, Tim Mitchell, Martin Parr, Reynold Reynolds, Reynold Reynolds with Patrick Jolley, Simon Roberts, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Daniele Sambo, Jo Spence, John Stezaker, Homer Sykes, Stuart Whipps
YOU ARE THE COMPANY IN WHICH YOU KEEP reveals the diverse ways in which photographers and artists using lens-based media have created images that map out our new social networks – observing the patterns of which structure our social existence, or forecasting what the twenty-first century has yet to bring. Many of the artists might be described as working in anthropological or ethnographic ways, observing how our experience of the world is mediated through camera lens, and asking how far photographic images structure our imagination. They ask: in the twenty-first century, are images the means by which we are socialised, and the means by which we can know ourselves? Do the images that we consume and internalise become the imaginative materials that we are made of?