LONDON EXHIBITIONS
Ed Fornieles: Modern Family, Chisenhale Gallery
19 September – 9 November 2014
64 Chisenhale Road, London E3 5QZ
Chisenhale Gallery presents a major new body of work by the London and Los Angeles-based artist Ed Fornieles for his first solo exhibition in a UK institution. A new online work forms the basis of the commission and will be presented alongside sculpture and performance within an ambitious installation environment.
Modern Family skews the material logic of home improvement, sitcom architecture and the shopping mall, taking us on a journey to a distant yet familiar suburban land. Fornieles invites you to join the family BBQ as an artificial Californian sun sets over the gallery. The exhibition evokes a distorted ‘Pinterest reality’ derived from the aspirational online image-sharing platform, which, along with home decor magazines, has come to present a contemporary definition of the American ‘good life’. The installation plays with scale and spatial perspective to create a cartoonish landscape of sculptures, combining high-spec finishes and new technology with breakfast cereal, DIY home tiling techniques and a ‘living room materiality’.
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Image: Ed Fornieles, Despicable Me 2, 2013, installation View, Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles. © the artist, courtesy Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles and Carlos/Ishikawa, London.
Nina Beier: DRAF
12 September — Symes Mews, London NW1 7JE
Danish artist Nina Beier’s (b. 1975) first solo exhibition in a London institution presents recent and new sculptures including a major spatial commission created for DRAF.
Beier’s works investigate notions of value in relation to time, addressing the transitory nature of both objects and people. They suggest an antagonism at the centre of the relationship between man and creation, asserting a combative status between surface and subject, image and object. The exhibition will contain elements of performativity, with some pieces changing over time and evolving during the course of the exhibition. Works reveal a violent contradiction in what they are and how they are used. Labour, capitalism and consumption dynamics as explored by Beier find their natural echo in the Foundation’s building, a former furniture factory built at the end of the 19th century, and now operating as an art gallery.
This exhibition is the culmination of a six-year conversation with Nina, and possibly her most ambitious project to date. It will present one of the most singular and accurate voices of recent years. We will focus this London presentation on sculptures, and so explore works that are trapped in an ambiguous position between an object and the representation of that object. Vincent Honoré (Director, DRAF).
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Image: Nina Beier, Scheme, 2014. Online organic vegetable box scheme, delivered to host gallery at times intervals, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Croy Nielsen, Berlin
The Nakeds: Drawing Room
25 September – 29 November 2014
Tannery Arts, 12 Rich Estate, Crimscott Street, London SE1 5TE
David Austen, Fiona Banner, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Paul McCarthy, George Condo, Enrico David, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Leon Golub, Stewart Helm, Chantal Joffe, Maria Lassnig, Chris Ofili, Carol Rama, Egon Schiele, Nancy Spero, Georgina Starr, Alina Szapochnikow, Rosemarie Trockel, Nicola Tyson, Andy Warhol and Franz West.
A group exhibition looking at drawings of the body exposed. The naked body is frequently the physical terrain artists traverse in search of the inner self. How to represent love, shame, solitude and sexual yearning? Drawing from the self or life model, from reproduction or the imagination, has provided artists with the freedom to explore desires, fears and fantasies.
The Nakeds takes as its starting point selected drawings of the single figure by Egon Schiele. From here it considers work by artists from the post-war period to the present day. The exhibition will include new work made specifically by Enrico David, Stewart Helm, Chantal Joffe and Nicola Tyson.
The Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918) was a prolific and provocative draughtsman. His drawings of the body unclothed or in a state of undress are amongst the most arresting works to have emerged from Vienna in the tumultuous years around the First World War. Working at the same time as Sigmund Freud, in the birthplace of modern psychiatry, the artist was attacked and acclaimed in his short lifetime. Still dividing opinion today, his drawings tested long-held distinctions between the ‘nude’ and the ‘naked’, art and pornography. The exhibition seeks to explore this contested terrain.
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Image: Maria Lassnig, Woman in the Bed, 2002. Pencil and watercolour on paper, 50.2 x 64.1cm Private collection, New York.
Cerith Wyn Evans: Serpentine Sackler Gallery
17 September – 9 November 2014
West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London W2 2AR
Serpentine Galleries presents an exhibition by Cerith Wyn Evans at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. This major solo show presents a varied body of work brought together ‘in concert’, and Wyn Evans has described the exhibition as “responding to the spaces which examine the transformative ‘Site/Sight/Cite’ effects that light, sound and duration can have on both spaces and their occupants. The site of the gallery, the perception of sight, the citation of references are multiple and swarming.”
Wyn Evans began his career as a film and video maker, producing short experimental films in the late 1970s. Since the 1990s, his work has been characterised by its focus on language and its articulation in space through perception, as well as a precise, conceptual clarity that is often developed out of the context or history of the exhibition site. For Wyn Evans, installations should work like a catalyst: a reservoir of possible meanings that can unravel many discursive journeys. His work has a highly refined aesthetic that is often informed by his magpie like approach to influences which shape and colour his practice.
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Image: Cerith Wyn Evans, Column (Assemblages) VIII, 2010. Mixed Media. Dimensions variable. Courtesy White Cube. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography
REGIONAL EXHIBITIONS
Bruce McLean: Sculpture, Painting, Photography, Film: firstsite, Colchester
14 June – 30 November 2014
Lewis Gardens, High Street, Colchester, Essex CO1 1JH
The exhibition features the first major survey of the work of Bruce McLean (b. Glasgow, 1944). Tracing the career of an artist who was at the forefront of the development of Conceptual art in Britain in the 1960s, the exhibition features over 100 works across 5 decades including working drawings and photographs never previously exhibited. Sculpture, painting, photography, drawings, ceramics and film is presented across seven galleries occupying 855 square metres.
Characterised by wit and an often ironic sensibility, Bruce McLean’s work has employed a range of media since the late 1960s. Often considering ‘the condition of sculpture’, McLean has explored the parameters of what a sculpture could be and tested conventional definitions, modes of production and display. These investigations have acted as a critique of social and academic hierarchies at work within the production and exhibition of contemporary art.
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Image: Bruce McLean, The Cheese Players, 1983. Courtesy the artist.
Danh Võ: Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham
www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
19 July – 28 September 2014
Weekday Cross, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire County NG1 2GB
The first major UK exhibition of the work of Danh Võ. Võ’s work explores the intersections of personal experience and major historical events, including the impact and mutations of Catholicism as it spread through colonisation. His artworks reflect on the paradoxes inherent in the construction of identity. His use of objects evokes the historical circumstances that shape contemporary life.
I don’t believe that things come from within you. To me things come out of the continuous dialogue you have with your surroundings, he has said.
Danh Võ was born on the island of Phu Quoc, in South Vietnam in 1975 and eventually granted political asylum in Denmark, where he was raised. Since 2009 Võ has been collaborating with his father, Phung Võ, a skilled calligrapher, who has made new works for the exhibition.
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Image: Danh Võ, installation view, Nottingham Contemporary 2014. Photo Andy Keate.
Stuart Brisley, State of Denmark: Modern Art Oxford
20 September – 16 November 2014
30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP
One of the most Influential figures in post war British art, Stuart Brisley brings his own brand of expressive work to Modern Art Oxford. This exhibition reveals aspects of Brisley’s broader artistic practice and includes early and rarely seen works alongside more recent paintings, video and sculpture.
“All work needs content,” says Brisley, “without content there is no work.” Alongside the distinct formalism that underpins six decades of practice, Brisley has unflinchingly probed the contemporary political, cultural and social contexts in which we live.
Including film and performance photography of some of Brisley’s most iconic work, and a new installation from which the exhibition takes its title, this show traces enduring themes in Brisley’s work such as the body as a tool for directly addressing individual autonomy and fundamental notions of power, authority, community and freedom.
State of Denmark surveys the breadth and consistent inventiveness of Brisley’s practice and asserts his influence of one of the most important and enduring voices in international contemporary art.
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Image: Stuart Brisley, Incidents in Transit, 1992. Sala Montcada de la Fundacao La Caixa, Barcelona. Photo: Maya Balcioglu
The Influence of Furniture on Love: Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge
14 September – 2 November 2014
The Influence of Furniture on Love with An Endless Supply, Ruth Beale, Juliette Blightman, Ben Brierley, Céline Condorelli, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Luca Frei, Gil Leung, Seb Patane, Florian Roithmayr, Phil Root, Laure Prouvost, Cally Spooner, The Grantchester Pottery, Philomene Pirecki , Elizabeth Price, Mark Aerial Waller, Neal White and Lisa Wilkens.
The Influence of Furniture on Love is an exhibition in Wysing Arts Centre’s 17th century farmhouse. The title of the exhibition is taken from an unpublished essay by economist John Maynard Keynes entitled “Can we consume our surplus or the influence of furniture on love”, a handwritten copy of which is held in the archives of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. In the essay, Keynes discusses whether it is possible for the rooms within which we live to “suggest to us thoughts and feelings and occupations?”
Wysing’s Grade II Listed farmhouse, which was built in the early 17th century reputedly from timbers of ships salvaged from the sinking of the Spanish Armada in 1588, has hosted many hundreds of artists since the organisation was founded twenty five years ago.The farmhouse is where artists live, sleep and eat, and where together they discuss the works that they are developing during residencies and retreats.
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Image: The Grantchester Pottery, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 2013. Photo: Max Slaven
