Welcome to Contemporary Art Society Recommends!
With the summer drawn to a close we are busy working on the delivery of our Autumn programme- packed full of artist’s talks, curator-led gallery visits, private collection visits and our new education courses- but we aren’t too busy to bring you our brand new initiative… Contemporary Art Society Recommends.
Each month we will highlight ten important public exhibitions across the UK. We hope you will find it to be an insightful and useful tool with which to navigate the many amazing upcoming shows.
As you may know our loose curatorial theme this year across the organisation focuses on the archive. Throughout our trips, visits, seminars and events we will be be exploring the significance of the archive to the collection, the importance of the store to the museum and the maverick assembling of objects and things that generate inspiration. For this reason we are especially keen to draw your attention to the fourth installment of Again, A Time Machine a tour of new commissions and archival presentations at Spike Island.
Best wishes and we hope to see you at some of our events this Autumn.
The Membership Team
LONDON
Jessica Warboys: Victory Park Tree Painting, Cell Project Space
15 September – 30 October
www.cellprojects.org
Jessica Warboy’s solo commission is the first in Cell Project Space’s CYcLORAMA series. Presenting a translation of the artist’s imagination into perceptible experience through a combination of moving image, performance, and painting, Warboys’ practice spans across a range of media and, intentionally, she has not settled on one fixed mode of working.
Her selected materials are often partnered with a natural element, such as the sea or the sun. The action itself is closely linked to performance, with the traces of movements and the disparate and free elements that appear on the canvas.
James Richards, Chisenhale Gallery
22 September – 20 November
www.chisenhale.org.uk
James Richards investigates the mechanics of looking, reading and listening. His installations and video collages offer an insight into how perception and personal expression are affected by today’s digital culture.
Chisenhale Gallery presents a solo exhibition comprising a series of newly commissioned video works and a programme of events devised by the artist.
The exhibition will feature a suite of videos collaged from a collection of found audio-visual footage as well as material recently filmed by Richards. Working primarily between moving image, sound and sculpture, Richards often merges these forms within individual works to interrogate the experience of what it is to view and be viewed.
The Peripatetic School: Itinerant Drawing from Latin America, The Drawing Room
22 September – 13 November
www.drawingroom.org.uk
Brigida Baltar, Jose Tony Cruz, Andre Komatsu, Mateo Lopez, Jorge Macchi, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Nicolas Paris, Ishmael Randall Weeks
The Peripatetic School: Itinerant Drawing from Latin America is the opening exhibition at the Drawing Room’s new home at 12 Rich Estate, Crimscott Street, London SE1 5TE.
Featuring artists from across Latin America who share an engagement with the landscape, whether urban or rural, are concerned with travelling or moving through the landscape, and frequently with walking, which is combined in their work with diverse approaches to drawing.
Images that are the result of itinerancy or nomadism, places, scenes and things observed along the way, abound. They journey out of the studio, into the neighbourhood, the city, the territory or entire continent beyond, in a manner that evokes by turns Surrealist, Borgesian or Situationist metropolitan perambulation, or exploration in wilderness spaces nature and culture.
Emma Hart: TO DO, Matt’s Gallery
28 September – 20 November
www.mattsgallery.org
In a new piece for Matt’s Gallery Emma Hart calls on the potential for a camera to precipitate an event, and not simply record it. Developing previous live works into a sculptural video installation that performs itself, Hart requests the audience to do likewise: to step up, instead of hanging back in contemplation.
Emma Hart believes that we use the camera to give us reality in a manageable form, bitesize chunks which we calmly consume. Hart wants to reverse the taming of the real undertaken by cameras and use them to deliver a raw presence we don’t recognise. One without a wide angle vista or horizon; that is close up, fractured, and chaotic.
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, Victoria and Albert Museum
24 September – 15 January
www.vam.ac.uk
Of all movements in art and design history, postmodernism is perhaps the most controversial. This era defies definition, but it is a perfect subject for an exhibition. Postmodernism was an unstable mix of the theatrical and theoretical. It was visually thrilling, a multifaceted style that ranged from the colourful to the ruinous, the ludicrous to the luxurious.
Postmodernism shattered established ideas about style. It brought a radical freedom to art and design, through gestures that were often funny, sometimes confrontational and occasionally absurd. Most of all, postmodernism brought a new self-awareness about style itself.
REGIONAL
Camulodunum, firstsite, Colchester
25 September – 22 January
www.firstsite.uk.net
firstsite’s spectacular new building, designed by internationally acclaimed Rafael Viñoly Architects, will open in Colchester on Sunday 25 September 2011.
Drawing upon the town’s important collection of Romano-British, artefacts including coins, ceramics will be shown alongside contemporary works that consider the treatment of objects in the museum and contemporary culture as future historical record.
Including works by Ai Weiwei, Subodh Gupta, Barbara Hepworth, Sarah Lucas, Henry Moore, Cildo Meireles, Grayson Perry, Robert Smithson, Bill Woodrow and Andy Warhol, Camulodunum also includes new commissions to four international artists: Michaela Eichwald, Aleksandra Mir, Karin Ruggaber and Danh Vo.
The Wonders of the Invisible World, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland
Part I: Until 8 October
Part II: 27 October – 11 February
www.ngca.co.uk
The Wonders… is an exhibition in two parts. It brings together a new generation of artists across Europe who have taken an abiding interest in the areas of human experience that are beyond ready explanation or beyond plain sight.
Here, artists from London and Glasgow to Oslo and Berlin attempt to bring to sight that which by definition cannot be seen. The two exhibitions bring together artists who explore ideas that transcend mere instrumental reason.
Summer Exhibition, Tate St Ives, St Ives
Until 25 September
www.tate.org.uk
Juxtaposing artists and works from different generations, the common emphasis will be on space, structure and light. The show responds directly and playfully to the unique architecture and location of the galleries at Tate St Ives, drawing the building itself and visitors into the experience.
The displays include a room of late works by American painter Agnes Martin, an iconic work by Martin Creed, Half the Air in a Given Space, which sees the spectacular sea-facing galleries filled with hundreds of balloons; a selected display of the late Margaret Mellis’ paintings and constructions, as well as works by Naum Gabo, Roman Ondak, Fischli & Weiss, Lucio Fontana and Anri Sala.
Again, A Time Machine, Spike Island, Bristol
16 September – 9 October
www.spikeisland.org.uk
Featuring Laure Prouvost, Dora García, The Happy Hypocrite, Jonathan Monk, Slavs and Tatars and Book Work Archive Again, A Time Machine is a fluid tour of new commissions and archival presentations drawn from the 27 year history of Book Works, a London based contemporary visual art publisher. Reimagined as the work moves from venue to venue, the exhibition presents responses to a theme that plays with and inverts notions of time, archive and distribution, received pasts and possible futures.
For the fourth installment of this exhibition Laure Prouvost presents The Wanderer (The Storage), an ambitious new installation in which the viewer undertakes a labyrinthine journey encountering mysterious fragments of film, sculpture and signage before reaching a final large scale single-channel video.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
4 August – 25 September
www.nationalgalleries.org
Featuring 26 large-scale works from two of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s most recent series, Lightning Fields and Photogenic Drawing, this breathtaking show consists entirely of work shown for the first time in Europe.
Lightning Fields is a series of dramatic photographs produced through the play of violent electrical discharges on photographic film. The Photogenic Drawing series was inspired by the innovative techniques of the 19th century photographer, Henry Fox Talbot.
This revelatory exhibition offers the chance to experience first hand Sugimoto’s exploration of the very nature of photography.