Stephen Hepworth

Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, 2022

Kiki Kogelnik’s relationship to, and depiction of, women is founded in personal narrative. At the age of 21, she was engaged to the artist Arnulf Rainer, only to find in the house they were going to share his formal studio occupied a floor, while she was only given the attic to paint in. This established the conflicting pattern of dependency and self-determination that would shape her life. Marilyn Monroe appeared to Kogelnik an exemplar of a woman who had achieved this balance and she painted three paintings with the title Marilyn as homages to her idol. One of these three works, Marilyn (1962) in the present exhibition features the actress’ abstracted torso and legs. The figure’s voluminous proportions recall timeless symbols of fertility such as the Venus of Willendorf, while the green lingerie reinforces the body as an object of desire.

Following the unexpected death of Monroe she wrote in a letter to her mother in Austria on August 15, 1962: “I am really very sad about Marilyn – she died not far away from here – and on this night at about 1 till 4, I could not sleep and was very depressed. When I told this to Sam [Francis] the next day, he told me Marilyn killed herself. […] Well, poor Marilyn – I collect all the papers – and I have to paint to her glory.”

The sudden awareness of the fragility of the human body becomes one of the key tenets of her work in the 1960s as she explored ideas of the fragmented body and its augmentation. From 1966 to 1967, she made a series of drawings entitled Robots that utilized anatomical rubber stamps employed by doctors to make reports of diagnoses. Some show a form of utopian freedom as they blasted off into space while others depict vulnerability, trauma and pain. Coinciding with her own pregnancy she wrote in her diary: “Maybe there will come a time where the female bodies won’t be [necessary] for that process anymore and life could be created aside. I would not mind.”

Drawing on the images found within the pages of fashion magazines, in the 1970s she embarked on a series of paintings that showed their subjects as both empowered and absurd as they performed their assigned roles. Stripped of the context of a photoshoot, dressed in fiercely patterned dresses and bathing suits, augmented by the occasional prop, their dynamic poses contrast with their painted faces, and eyes that no longer appear to harbor any emotion. Echoing her interest in the idea of the cyborg from the previous decade, they are in her own words: “beautiful, rich, worldly, superficial, bored, neither happy nor unhappy, no deep thoughts, no sentiment, no feelings.”

In the series It Hurts, 1974-76, Kogelnik depicted a succession of women dressed in black who appear to be the subject of physical abuse conducted with a range of items found in the home. The women themselves appear impervious to the pain that is being inflicted on them as if they have no choice but to stoically ignore the flowers that are being offered as an apology. By the 1980s she employs simplified representations of the female face which become mask-like in a series of fixed expressions that evolve to become a motif that reoccurs throughout her late work and across a range of media. She said towards the end of her life: “For me, the mask is nothing that takes place in front of the face but it is the face. It doesn’t conceal anything. It is it.”

Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles, 2021

Kayne Griffin is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Austrian born artist Kiki Kogelnik (1935–1997) titled “Falling.” This presentation will mark Kogelnik’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, California, displaying a selection of never before shown early 1960s works.

The exhibition title, Falling, is inspired by a painting, Falling in Love Again, created in 1962. Falling draws from Kogelnik’s free and monumental spirit—an evolutionary narrative of the artist and person. These paintings are exceptional examples of Kogelnik’s use of color and form that brings together the language of figuration and abstraction. Her use of broad gestural brush strokes to produce a variety of angular shapes and curved arcs, circles, and semi-circles is evident in these works, both reminiscent of, and a departure from, a form of European abstraction.

Falling marks a period of Kogelnik’s life that involved a series of travels and moves. While the artist eventually relocated to New York in 1962, Kogelnik’s American travels included landing her to the West Coast, initially in Santa Barbara, before moving for a short period to Billy Brice’s Neutra-designed Plywood House in Los Angeles. Beginning a relationship with the artist Sam Francis in Venice, Italy during the Biennale of 1960 led to Kogelnik spontaneously introducing the color pink to her existing paintings, as seen in California Man (1960). In an unsent letter dated November 1964, she acknowledges his influence on her life:“You really made the whole world pink for me – now I know.” Kogelnik’s work from this period gains a painterly urgency as her color palette expands and its application gains a new fluidity.

Departing stylistically from her gestural paintings, Marilyn (1961) is heralded by a series of oils on paper that are studies of groups of figures, both standing and reclining, each brushstroke defining a limb or curve. Female (1962) replaces the Matisse-like background of Marilyn for the aggressive striped glare of the lights of Broadway. It conveys the rush of speed, both exhilarating and dangerous, three black bombs aim downwards while time is marked by the different phases of four floating moons. This painting marks the first appearance of many of the signature motifs that would come to populate her paintings of the 60s. Kogelnik’s reaction to the death and autopsy of Marilyn Monroe allows an acknowledgement of the corporality of the body whereas previously she had focused on its form and its sexual potency. This work contains the suggestion of mechanical augmentation and the creation of the artificial human, ideas that would obsess her throughout her career. Untitled (1962) is similarly about establishing new forms and ideas. This two-panel work was begun on the West Coast, before she traveled cross-country by train to settle in New York.

It is not clear that in titling the painting Falling in Love Again (1962) if Kogelnik is referring to her relationship with Francis, but it is an indication of a degree of personal biography that she would sometimes include in her paintings. Despite their subject matter, Kogelnik’s work remains resolutely bright, colorful, and optimistic—her imagined worlds playful in their understanding and imagery, as seen in Untitled (Still Life with Globe) (c. 1963), Untitled (Still Life with Hand) (c. 1963) and Hands in the Moon (1964). Outer Space (1964) looks forward to a world without commodities, consequences, regrets or bombs, a place (for a moment) of escape from the realities of life. A place just to be free.

Kiki Kogelnik is widely considered to be one of the most important Austrian born artists. She is associated with the pop art movement—the connection with its American form she contested during her lifetime. In establishing herself amongst her contemporaries, including artists Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wessleman and Andy Warhol, she had the distinct advantage of being a recently arrived European amidst all the Americana of the time—bringing forth a more jaundiced eye to the mechanization of culture.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a digital catalogue with an essay by Stephen Hepworth, Director of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.

Photography: Flying Studio, Los Angeles.

Mostyn, LLandudno, UK, 2019

Riot of Objects is the first institutional presentation in the UK to focus solely on Kiki Kogelnik’s ceramic works.

Considered one of the key figures of the post-war avant-garde, Kogelnik’s multidisciplinary oeuvre spans five decades. Her multifaceted artistic style evolved from painterly abstraction to Pop Art and the representation of the (female) body.

Consumer culture, technology and feminism were recurring themes throughout her work. Her unique aesthetic is marked with playfulness and humour yet imbued with a stark sense of criticality. In resisting and contesting the lure of post-war capitalist culture in her work, she demarcated herself from her contemporary peers.

Her first ceramics were made in 1974, and soon became a key activity in her artistic practice. Her ceramic works were hand-built and cut from slabs using stencils and are reminiscent of her earlier paintings in their boldness, bright colours and vivacity. Drawing on a method of presentation she employed in an exhibition at the Henri Gallery in Washington, DC in 1990, a number of islands pepper the space; made from clusters of plinths of different heights and widths and displaying a range of her freestanding works that date from the 1950s through to the 1990s. Arranged chronologically, this exhibition demonstrates Kogelnik’s boundless capacity for invention and restless commitment to making.

This exhibition is curated by Chris Sharp and organised by Alfredo Cramerotti, in partnership with the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.

Photography by Mark Blower

Musée de Beaux-Arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 2019

In 1961, Kiki Kogelnik left her native Austria for New York. This change of continent was accompanied by a change of style. Her increasingly colorful works move away from abstraction to address the question of the body from different angles: social, medical and technological. Critically, she observes that the bodies shaped by consumer society have become distorted. They lose all definition, until they become empty, interchangeable envelopes. Fashion photography have reduced everything to 2D, and people are just judiciously arranged against the backdrop of the city. What happens inside is just as disturbing: organs can be detached like spare parts, and replaced to create hybrid beings, no longer quite human, not entirely machines: cyborgs. Bodies can be healed or disassembled, sent into space or scattered by bombs; this is the ambivalence of progress.

On the pop art scene, Kiki Kogelnik's recognition was equally ambivalent: she was hailed as an avant-garde muse, but her work never achieved major commercial success. Until recent rediscoveries in art history, pop art has been considered an almost exclusively male movement. Kogelnik's discreet but resolute feminism made her a marginal figure. Today, her pioneering work, both serious and light-hearted, should be saluted.

Curated by David Lemaire and Marie Gaitzsch in partnership Kiki Kogelnik Foundation.

Photography by Gaspard Gigon

Gagosian, 980 Madison Ave, New York, 2019

The first significant exhibition for 20 years in New York of paintings made by the Japanese born Arakawa (b.Nagoya 1936 – d. New York 2010). He moved to New York in 1961 and soon began exhibiting at Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles and New York, where he was included in the now legendary 1967 exhibition Language to be looked at and/ or things to be read. Over the decades that followed, Arakawa explored the workings of human consciousness, diagrammatic representation, and epistemology.

This exhibition focused on work made between 1965 and 1984 in which Arakawa worked in two dimensions, using paint, ink, graphite, and assemblage on canvas and paper to demonstrate what critic Lawrence Alloway called “the logic of meaning, the texture of meaning.”

Curated with Ealan Wingate on behalf of Reversible Destiny Foundation.

Photography by Robert Mc Keever

Courtesy Gagosin

© Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, GSAPP, Columbia University, New York, 2018

This exhibition traced the emergence of architecture as a wellspring of creativity and theoretical exploration for the artist Arakawa (1936-2010) and poet and philosopher Madeline Gins (1941-2014). 

In the early 1960s, Arakawa and Madeline Gins began a remarkably original and prolific collaboration that spanned nearly five decades. During the 1980s—a critical juncture in their careers—this line of inquiry became increasingly spatial as Arakawa and Gins together developed a series of speculative architectural projects that sought to challenge the bodily and psychological experience of users.

The exhibition examined this pivotal exploratory period through a stunning array of original drawings—many exhibited for the first time—as well as archival material and writings that illuminate the working methods and wide-ranging research interests of Arakawa and Gins. It uncovers a little-known body of visionary work that anticipated the artists’ subsequent commitment to architecture and their realization of various “sites of reversible destiny.”

Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Eternal Gradient featured over 40 hand drawings, an architectural model, and archival material including ephemera, research materials, poetry, manuscripts, photographs, slides, and other items drawn from the Estate of Madeline Gins. The exhibition toured to the Graham Foundation, Chicago in 2019.

Organized by Irene Sunwoo, Curator, Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery and GSAPP Director of Exhibitions; with Tiffany Lambert, GSAPP Assistant Director of Exhibitions; Exhibition design by Norman Kelley

Photography: James Ewing, Courtesy GSAPP, Columbia University

© Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins

Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, 2017

Arakawa, (born Shusaku Arakawa, 1936, Nagoya, Japan) was one of the earliest practitioners of the international conceptual-art movement of the 1960s, working within the media of painting, drawing, and printmaking. The work of Arakawa is now represented by Gagosian.  

Arakawa attended the Musashino Art University in Tokyo before moving to New York from Japan in 1961. Following his arrival, Arakawa began producing diagrammatic paintings, drawings, and other conceptual works that employed systems of words and signs to both highlight and investigate the mechanics of human perception and knowledge.

In 1962, he met his future wife and collaborator – poet, writer and philosopher Madeline Gins. They were married in 1965 and worked closely together in the years following. Throughout the subsequent decades Arakawa continued to exhibit at museums and galleries extensively throughout North America, Western Europe and Japan with works that grew in scale and visual and intellectual complexity.

Jean-François Lyotard has said of Arakawa’s work that it “makes us think through the eyes,” and has described it as transforming “the usual constancies of orientation into a strange, enticing game—a game of continually thinking out.” In a 1988 interview, Arakawa spoke of the relationship of image and text in his work, saying:

The language has its own world, the picture its—the gap, that is where I want to play. When the gap is enormous, the title takes on a greater importance. The title is, of course, an additional layer of language beyond or over that of the controlling sentences appearing on the face of the canvas.

Curated with Ealan Wingate on behalf of Reversible Destiny Foundation.

Photography by Robert Mc Keever and Stephen Hepworth

Courtesy Gagosin

© Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins

LMAK Projects, New York, 2015

Matthew Abbott, Carl Fudge, and Joey Kötting

Once upon a time, there were three (little girls) guys who went to the (police academy) same art academy and they (were each assigned very hazardous duties) all moved to New York, but I took (them away from all that) and I moved there too, and now, they (work) are doing a show (for) with me. My name is (Charlie) Stephen.

Matthew Abbott, Carl Fudge, Stephen Hepworth and Joey Kötting while all born in London met at Brighton Polytechnic in the 1980's studying Fine Art. Abbott, Fudge and Kötting then moved to Philadelphia to do their MFAs at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, while Hepworth went onto London University's Goldsmiths' College to do his.

Original Show Season One is a reunion of sorts, for something that never happened, an opportunity for three artists and a curator to come together and make a show. Matthew Abbott is known for his bold, abstract paintings containing swirling geometric shapes and text. His paintings are inspired by various sources including: crossword puzzles, Islamic symbols and record covers.

Carl Fudge combines digital technology with traditional artmaking techniques, creating paintings and unique prints that range from the monumental to the miniature.

Joey Kötting's films, prints, drawings, paintings and collages explore political issues and the state of the human condition. Deploying language, gesture and the human body his work is often both humorous and torturous.

Stephen Hepworth has curated over 80 exhibitions internationally. He moved to the United States in 2007 to relaunch the University Art Gallery at University of California San Diego. Previously he worked at Bloomberg Space, Jerwood Gallery, and The Tannery all in London. He has lived in New York for five years.

Wilmer Jennings Gallery, New York - 2015

Nadema Agard, Pena Bonita, Maria Hupfield, Athena LaTocha, and Melissa Staiger.

Consciously referencing a historic act of generosity, this exhibition of five Native American women artists resident in New York is the result of an invitation to a British contemporary art curator, Stephen Hepworth, by AMERINDA Inc (American Indian Artists) to venture into new and alien territory. Positioned as an explorer, he encountered an openness in the sharing of knowledge, expertise and experience reflected through the range of work included in the exhibition.

 Each of the five artists identifies to a different degree with their distinct tribal ancestry, further defined by social, cultural and geographic difference - collectively though they remain identified as Native American. While New York is now their home, the experience of being other, perhaps inevitably in a city of others (a place that is historically and geographically part of their larger home) sustains and informs their practice, especially in one that functions as a dynamic global center for contemporary art.

Through this contemporary framework the exhibition embraces the work of these artists who in turn: deploy traditional symbolism to ensure the passing forward of a continuing heritage; evoke memories of rugged landscape through material invention; question the possibility of the spiritual within a modernist tradition; echo the procedures of exchange as a performative act; and by the introduction of an adorned and embellished tree stump into a community garden creates a place to wonder and question.

Jousse Entreprise, Paris, France - 2012

Michele Abeles, Kate Costello, Sam Falls, Corin Hewitt, Matt Lipps, Elisa Sighicelli

The six artists brought together in Set-Up, all make photographs through revisiting the studio as a place for creating images. Each employs different approaches and strategies, drawing on areas such as performance, anthropology, and art history to generate images that are visually arresting while tantalizingly evasive. Photography in the United States has developed a new and fresh focus with some artists interested in exploring the technical limits of their materials and recording the process manifest in making a photograph, while others are interested in creating studio based situations, or still lives, as a way of making new and provoking images. Set-up speaks not only to the nature of the creation of these images, but also to a sense of willful misdirection.

Sam Falls straddles both of these tendencies testing the limits of what a photograph can be with works made in the Californian sun in which the trace of an object is bleached into dyed cloth, while others use the conventions of a studio and camera to index different methods of describing a subject. In these fruit and vegetables are arranged then a digital photograph is taken which is sampled to create swathes of color which are added to the image before it is printed. Finally the fruit and vegetables are cut in half and used to print ink onto the surface of the photograph, shifting it from image to object, and back again

Elisa Sighicelli continues her, often gently humorous, investigation into the poetics of light and space with a return to the studio after many years traveling the world taking photographs and shooting video in exotic locations. Here she chose to photograph mundane materials such as tape, ribbon and paper, but keeping light and its effects as her subject. These new images possess a spare elegance that often disguises their components and questions what is real, photographed and re-photographed in an exercise in contemporary trompe l'oeil.

Corin Hewitt similarly uses mundane materials in the making of his photographs. These are created and emerge as part of durational performances staged within galleries and museums. At the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2009 he constructed a fully enclosed raised workspace with a crawl space hidden below. Throughout the exhibition he constructed still lives using materials both grown and bought that he photographed before recycling, along with the resulting photographs, to stage the next image. In so doing he created an ongoing record of his activity as well as an intimate examination of transformance.  

Michele Abeles uses a restricted number of everyday items (including a male nude) to make elegant and compelling tableaus. Each element’s identity is very clear and is in a way emblematic of itself. While very formal, each photograph both suggests and evades meaning, as if a series of clues is constantly being reshuffled, the elements redeployed and recast. Her stark graphic images are made in camera, immaculately composed with a crisp depth of field that speaks of the classic photographer’s studio with its eternal white backdrop.

Kate Costello’s series Kiki and Me refers to the famous Parisian model and muse Kiki de Montparnasse. Costello collaborates with models in the creation of studio photographs in which they pose in front of a series of painted backdrops. The works reference, through the quotation of pattern and palette, a historical period that is both supported and questioned through the pose of the nude and the transitory nature of scene. Often augmented through a sculptural intervention in the space, her photographs create a sense of uncertainty through merging historical lineage with an improvised theatricality.

Matt Lipps appropriates images from Horizon, an international arts and culture magazine. Focusing on the issues from the 1950s and 60s he playfully explores what happens to the meaning of certain objects and images when they are remixed into new systems and categories – altering both content and context. Collected together in their new groupings clearly appearing as variously sized cutouts they are wittily arranged and dramatically lit as if players on a temporary stage who can at any moment be reconfigured.

UAG, University of California, San Diego - 2009

Mark Dean Veca is renowned for creating paintings, drawings and installations that portray surreal cartoons, psychedelic landscapes, and pop culture iconography while also being inspired by long-established decorative motifs. He is widely recognized for his all-encompassing installations that surround the viewer and inspire a sense of awe. Revealing fantastical and, at times, humorous imagery with frenzy and pattern-like precision, his works often resemble a modernized interpretation of toile painting. In the 1998 catalogue for Veca’s El Gloominator exhibition, Steve Mitchell asserts that “Veca works in the meticulous tradition of the fresco painter to produce an image that paradoxically evokes the immediacy of the graffiti artist.”

This solo exhibition will for the first time present a comprehensive overview of his practice, including two new wall paintings, one inside the gallery and one outside, documentation and studies for previously realized projects, paintings on a variety of surfaces and works that he has made with companies such as: Ford Motors, Nike, Burton Snowboards; editions he has produced in collaboration with museums; and works made with other artists such as the New York artist and designer KAWS.

UAG, University of California San Diego - 2009

Spencer Finch, Graham Gussin, Gabriel Lester, Takeshi Murata, and Christian Tomaszewski

Fear Minus One focused on five artists who use preexisting films as their source, particularly in this selection, movies that have a sense of foreboding or fear as part of their dynamic. Through their interaction with the original its form is changed, be it as the result of translation, transcription, editing or recreation, but remains strongly referenced in the final piece. Collectively these five individual works transform the gallery into a site for the imagination, where the relationship between narrative and image can be examined and the creation of illusion explored.

Spencer Finch’s West (Sunset in my motel room, Monument Valley, February 26, 2007, 5:36 – 6:06 pm) uses the light from nine video monitors, which display a changing selection of stills from John Ford’s 1956 epic and violent Western The Searchers. The gallery bathed in this reflected light is transformed from day to night exactly mimicking, over a 30-minute period, the color and intensity of the fading twilight. 

Graham Gussin’s Dark Light Piece, Night of the Living Dead (Luminosity Wave Form) uses the entire film, Night of the Living Dead (1968), as seen through a light-measuring screen used on edit suites. This translation turns the images into a kind of ectoplasmic landscape, through which the movement of the camera and barely recognizable figures become enhanced yet are abstracted. 

Gabriel Lester similarly reworks Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) in the form of a computer controlled light installation. 50 individual lights bathe an open sided room in a range of colors and hues that evoke the moods and scenes of the film as its soundtrack plays in its entirety. 

Takeshi Murata twists and stretches sequences of the classic Italian horror movie Black Sunday (1960) using a technique he calls “VideoSlime.” Each frame is digitally rendered sifting black and white images through graduations of abstraction in fluid motion while hyping up the menace redolent through out the film. 

Christian Tomaszewski has previously reconstructed parts of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) in real space: exploring the ability of architectural fragments to convey dramatic narrative. Through his installations he superimposes two different structures, the one belonging to the film and the one of the architecture, which together become a third reality. For Fear Minus One he turns his attention to Giulio Berruti’s Killer Nun (1978).

UAG, University of California San Diego - 2008

Shaun Gladwell’s practice critically engages personal experience as well as wider speculation upon art history and the dynamics of contemporary culture. This range of interest and sources is explored through a variety of mediums, but in recent years most particularly video installation. His recent projects in video have made discursive links between historical models and understanding of the body in space such as the flâneur and contemporary cultural figures such as the skateboarder, the motocross rider, the freestyle BMX rider, the graffiti artist and other physical and street performers. The work generally deals with performative figures in space, disrupting the social and architectural programming of urban spaces in particular. As this ongoing investigation of spatial articulation has deepened and gathered momentum it has begun to more closely inform and be reflected in the installation structures of the work itself, with an increased experimentation with multi-channel formats and architectural features as projection surfaces.

Gladwell’s work also experiments with certain traditional or established representational genres and concepts. For example, the genre of the romantic landscape and its association with traditional concepts such as the sublime is handed over to – or co-opted by – contemporary practices such as skateboarding or break dancing. However, his practice does not attempt to either simply update or recuperate traditional models. On the contrary, the traditional model and current cultural practice cross-infect each other, nor is the continued use of ‘street’ or ‘subcultural’ activity directly claimed within the category of ‘art’. Rather, the popular projections of such cultural activity are both destabilized and transformed. The fast and furious MTV jump-cut editing of these popular representations are resisted through the use of slow motion and ambient soundscapes. The results are poetic, hypnotic and meditative representations that open the represented activities themselves to a wide range of readings not immediately associated with either their sources or my apparent subject matter.

UAG Outside, University of California San Diego - 2008

Joey Kötting has been using his body as the subject and the material for his art for many years.  The images he makes are at times humorous and torturous, often taking on the appearance of documentation of performance art from the 1970s. Kötting, responding to an invitation from the University Art Gallery, has chosen to use the external walls of the Mandeville Center to temporary put up self-portraits that are both confrontational and introspective. These images are intended to be ambiguous in their references and sources: appearing perhaps on one level to reference European painting of the seventeenth century, on another the work of nineteenth century French absurdist writer Alfred Jarry.

Made simply with colored paint poured, wiped and splattered onto his own face, he photographs himself adopting a number of different moods and personas. These images are then blown up as large-scale digital prints, the smallest comprised of 40 individual sheets, which have been pasted directly onto the concrete walls of the University building. This method draws on the street culture of flyer posting, be it for the purposes of advertising, propaganda, or protest. Kotting's aim, however, is to be generous and open rather than tied to a single cause or idea. 

Over a relatively short period of time, in the sun of Southern California, the image of these heads will start to fade and the edges of the paper on which they are printed begin to curl and brown, marking the temporal nature of most images. Similarly, Kottings project does not have a preset end date, as it is intended that they should disappear as suddenly as they appeared, and their presence will pass into the remembered rather than the seen.

UAG, University of San Diego - 2008

Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Fikret Atay, Yto Barrada, Yeal Bartana,
Johanna Billing, Ulla von Brandenburg, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Emily Jacir, Hassan Khan, Sigalit Landau, Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Steve McQueen, João Onofre, de Rijke/de Rooij, Bojan Šarčević, Zined Sedira, Mariana Vassileva, and Mark Wallinger

A selection of 18 video works from the collection of French collectors Isabelle and Jean-Conrad Lemaître. For the last seven years these London based French collectors have been collecting almost exclusively video work. The collection includes artists from all over the world and at the latest count numbers 80 works. This selection includes work by artists originating from Cuba, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, The Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States.

Focusing primarily on younger artists the collection demonstrates many approaches to making film and video from the use of a simple gesture or intervention, the documentation of people and events, to the staged and performative. This, in turn, reflects many of the themes and concerns of today, the way social and political change is manifested and reflected in everyday life, a fascination with the negotiation of boundaries both physical and metaphoric, and a reflection of the kaleidoscopic nature of human beings, their emotions, and their lives. Collectively, they announce the arrival of a new generation of internationally recognized video artists who choose to occupy the gallery space yet talk of the world outside it.

Revolutions occupied six especially created rooms, which housed both projected works and pieces shown on monitor. Each work, ranging from 80 seconds to 30 minutes in length, was shown sequentially creating a complete cycle lasting almost three hours, and required the visitor to complete three rotations of the gallery.

Professor Yolanda Snaith working with her students from the Department of Dance and Theatre at UCSD created dance pieces made in response to eight works in the show. Each work was performed in front of a projected version of the video.

UAG, University of California San Diego - 2008

Jesus Aguilar, Ricci Albenda, Fiona Banner, Peter Davies, Tami Demaree, Graham Gillmore, Danielle Gustafson-Sundell, Emma Kay, Justin Lieberman, João Louro, Ján Mancuška, T. Kelly Mason, Dominic McGill, Aaron Parazette, Fernando Pintado, Monique Prieto, Maya Schindler, Bob & Roberta Smith, Mark Titchner and Cerith Wyn Evans.

In the Beginning takes its cue from the strong involvement West-coast artists have had with text, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, and looks at a newer international generation of artists whose practice focuses as much on appearance and form as much as what the words say.

In the Beginning features the work of 20 artists from Europe and America in a range of media including painting, sculpture and video. Collectively they reflect a cross section of contemporary approaches and subjects. For Peter Davies, Monique Prieto and Aaron Parazette words and phrases become the very thing they paint, while Cerith Wyn Evans and Maya Schindler use words and text as sculptural form that is both a representation and a physical manifestation of itself. Jesus Aguilar and Fiona Banner both compress and expand our experience of time, while Rici Albenda distorts text in order to propose new perspectives. Graham Gillmore and Emma Kay employ the layering and interconnectivity of text to evoke ideas and memories where as Justin Lieberman and Dominic McGill are concerned with its use as a tool to investigate and reveal contemporary society, politics and culture. João Louro, T. Kelly Mason, and Ján Mancuška engage with the possibility of narrative, while Bob & Roberta Smith, Danielle Gustafson-Sundell and Mark Titchner offer stories, musings and slogans, and Fernando Pintado and Tami Demaree both represent and question language as an authentic carrier of expression.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2007

Paul Morrison breathes life into the traditional genre of landscapes and botanical paintings in a skillful and multi-faceted way. His black and white paintings are characterised by the recurrence of individual plant motifs, which he presents in a range of compositions and scales. Mixing high and low culture, Morrison draws on imagery from popular and classical sources. These references range from the Disney cartoon to an Albert Dürer landscape to create abstracted and often hyper-magnified visions of landscape. Morrison makes inventive use of perspective and proportion, the classical elements of composition, to sample different patterns of perception. He slowly unpicks the act of seeing and challenges the sophisticated way we have grown to see the world.

Paul Morrison’s exhibition at Bloomberg SPACE was characterised by his continued involvement and fascination with the use of traditional printing methods to represent landscape. For each of the three galleries he responded to the particular architectural qualities with newly commissioned site-specific work. Across two adjoining walls in the front gallery the expansive image of a lake was dominated by two smoking volcanoes. Bordered by the black silhouettes of two trees this densely lined image had at its centre a large circular flower over four metres in circumference. This circular motif reoccurred in the rear gallery this time as if a huge peephole has been drilled in the wall through which a large spherical single multi-headed bloom could be seen. Finally, a medieval landscape of citadels perched on rocky mountains ran around the atrium.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2007

Soudabeh Ardavan, Matthew Barney, Jonathan Bayer, Lucinda Devlin, Rita Donagh, Nicole Eisenman, Harun Farocki, Jean Genet, Robert Gober, Grennan and Sperandio, Thomas Kilpper, Koestler Trust, Langlands and Bell, Beltran Obregon, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Prisons Foundation, Mark Raidpere, Gary Rough, Paulo Sacramento, The Simpsons, Poppy de Villeneuve, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Artur Zmijewski

Showcasing a diverse group of international artists working across a wide range of media, Prison included both historical and contemporary representations of prison drawn from the visual arts and popular culture. The subject or theme of ‘prison’ is as broad and open to interpretation as the colour of the sky, that square patch of blue through the bars in a cartoon illustration. For those with direct experience of prison (and their families) it is a harsh reality. Prison attempted to deal with art and artefacts where the concept and reality coincided. The exhibition Prison was concerned primarily with its representation – the prisoners, the architecture, the reality, the concept and society’s relationship to it. From those unsubtle cartoons with the shorthand of bars, through the Monopoly ‘Get Out of Jail’ card, to a film made by inmates of a Sao Paulo prison which subsequently had to be pulled down. The subject is so vast that the exhibition did not even try to address everything, rather it focused on artists, both inside and out, that attempt to make work that is relevant and revealing.

Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea, Rome - 2007

Shaun Gladwell, Christian Gonzenbach, Joey Kötting, Oliver Michaels

Collezione #2 is the third in an occasional series of exhibitions commissioned by Isabella Brancolini from British curator Stephen Hepworth. This instalment brings together the work of four young video artists from Europe and America that share an interest in the humour, physical comedy and technical innovations of early Hollywood cinema. Echoing the films of early stars such as: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin; they share a humour that can makes us laugh out loud while reflecting poignantly on life.

Shaun Gladwell uses urban environments as temporary stages for physical activity, such as skateboarding, freestyle bike riding and break dancing, to explore the relationship between body, activity and site. In Tangara (2003), he employs the device of inverting the camera turning it on himself inside a Sydney train. Hanging from the handrails of its futuristic interior he performs a series of movements that when played back in slow motion appear to show him defying gravity.

Christian Gonzenbach's animations give life to a range of objects and materials from clay to dead animals. In Natural History (Gherkins!) (2005), he uses the humble pickle cucumber in a video that is part Damian Hirst, part science fiction. Close-up shots of gherkins crammed together in a tank are cut together with scenes from a makeshift processing tank/nursery where proud, if agitated, 'parents' watch over the production/growth of their young. The activity is frenzied, and the Gherkins escape to 'graze' on a green hillside before returning to overwhelm the facility from where they came.

Joey Kötting's short films record the act of making paintings. Canvases painted with light sensitive paint are exposed to sunlight, whilst being partially obscured by a human body or activity. His films capture the genteel absurdity of these actions with the faded charm of a 1950's home movie. Trying to Fly Before the Sun's Too High (2001), shows Kötting sitting on top of a child's climbing frame with a large canvas strapped to his back, periodically he flaps his wings, like some demented Icarus and jumps to the ground, before climbing back to his perch and repeating.

Oliver Michaels' Tube Balloon Thing (2006), shows a rudimentary machine sitting on a table in his studio. At the end of two thin pipes are blue balloons that periodically inflate and then violently deflate. This exertion causes a variety of everyday objects to be expelled from a larger tube at the opposite end of the machine. Some items fly out ricocheting off the wall, while others appear to need more encouragement from a further blast of air. As time goes on the pile of miscellaneous objects grows, reflecting the absurdity of the machine that produced them.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2006

One of the most inventive and influential French artists of his generation, Bertrand Lavier focuses on the convoluted relationship between art and reality – where are the limits of art and how much is the look of art influenced by what we expect of it? Superimposition is a distinctive characteristic of Lavier’s work, often elevating everyday objects to the level of artworks. La Bocca (2005) stacks the iconic lip-shaped sofa (originally produced in 1970) based on Salvador Dali’s famous Mae West sofa of 1936 on top of a chest freezer, forcing the idea of hot and cold together. By filming Mark Rothko’s painting Four Darks in Red (1958) on 35mm film, Lavier attempts to capture the experience of this painting. Transferred to video and projected actual size, it is both a documentation of the original work and a piece in its own right. In this provocative work Lavier takes a popular artist, whose work fulfils prescribed expectations of modern art, and raises questions about value and exchange. Empress of India II (2005) is a remake of one of Frank Stella’s striped works in coloured neon. Lavier regards these works as paintings but in light. The shift in material makes clear reference to advertising, surrendering the art object, in part, to the world of communications and design. Empress of India II (2005) glows with an intensity that appears to leave behind its origin as painting, yet still fulfils Stella’s declared intentions of “What you see is what you see”.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2006

Keith Coventry, Mustafa Hulusi, Hew Locke, Dietmar Lutz, Mark McGowan, John Riddy, and Anne Tallentire

Seven London based artists were invited to consider the journey from their home or place of work to Bloomberg SPACE as the inspiration for making new work. The seven resulting commissions were distinguished by their very different approaches to the idea and their experiences of these journeys. They encompass the disciplines of sculpture, performance, painting, photography and film. Part of our experience of the city is formed by the way in which we move around it. Whilst London is constantly developing, certain aspects of its geography, such as its roads and rail links, appear to evolve slowly, over decades, if not centuries. The significant changes can be observed in the space between – the islands of land described by the webs of interlocking networks and the neighbourhoods in redefinition.

Keith Coventry utilised the symbolic language of early modernism in a large, white, shallow sculptural relief that features directional arrows. Mustafa Hulusi used abandoned billboards in the East End to display posters with his retinal starburst logo that also appeared as paintings within the gallery. Hew Locke appropriated the sculpture of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square which he transformed with pound-shop merchandise, an act which questions the nature of history and culture. Dietmar Lutz’s installation of impressionistic paintings captured people and vistas glimpsed on his journey from Hackney Wick. Mark McGowan showed the press coverage of his celebrity three-legged race from Peckham via Lambeth Bridge and Oxford Street to Finsbury Square (taking place shortly before the exhibition opened). John Riddy’s intense colour photographs are reflections of his meditation on time and place, surface and light, while Anne Tallentire’s twenty minute film showed the night sky growing lighter, framed by the edges of buildings and the tops of trees, as dawn breaks on her journey by car.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2006

Wilhelm Mundt, Nicholas Deshayes, Adam Chodzko, Laurent Grasso, and Lee Mackinnon

The work of the five artists included in From There involved the notion of an alien presence. All of the works addressed the notion of manifestation, its articulation, and how otherness might be described or imagined. The works suggest that they are the earthbound indications of another dimension, and that they have arrived from a parallel or completely different space. This raises questions about origin, and plays with ideas of identification, visitation, and expectation.

Wilhelm Mundt’s Trashstones are highly finished multicoloured forms each individually stamped with an enigmatic numerical code. With an internal core made from compacted discarded material, and swathed in shiny resin, each carries a suggestion of energy. The iridescent form of Nicholas Deshayes’ Rock (2005) echoes the Rosetta Stone stripped of symbols and text. The shining surface continues to carry communicative possibilities, in its association with the past as well as the future. Adam Chodzko’s glass droplets filled with bright red ‘manifestation juice’ appear to seep into the gallery. His Secretors (1992) carry an indication of movement, a force that oozes through into this world. These diminutive sculptural works, which appear where wall meets ceiling, provide a sign of a different presence. Laurent Grasso’s Projection (2003-05) consists of a video projection of an unearthly cloud moving at a highly determined pace through the streets of Paris and consuming all in its way. It is projected at such a scale that it provides an almost threatening and direct experience for the viewer. Lee Mackinnon’s video shows a crashed flaming craft that reconstitutes itself in reversed time and hovers enticingly in an urban park.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2007

For his debut exhibition in the UK, Dutch artist Gabriel Lester presented a series of three works which related to the illusions of cinema and theatre. Each work represented a different aspect of the ‘set’ or ‘scene’ – stage, scenery and sound. As such, the three works could be seen as the three basic elements of a theatrical or cinematic narrative: location, setting and action. In a reversal of the expected illusion of the performing arts, the theatre scenery wais moved to the foreground and became a sculpture itself.

Bloomberg Space, London 2007

BIG BANG (2007), a room-sized sculpture commissioned for Bloomberg SPACE, which filled the double height of the first gallery, took the form of a series of stage flats through which the visitor was invited to walk. Only upon reaching the front of the stage is the illusion fully revealed. Taking its cue from the devices employed in baroque ceiling painting, Lester’s sculpture telescopes time and space while also appearing to extend beyond the architectural framework of the gallery. By contrast How to Act (2000) takes the appearance of an empty stage. Coloured lights set into the roof are programmed to accompany a number of audio extracts that are taken from old movies. The audience is encouraged to imagine narratives or events that are evoked by the choreography of light and sound.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2006

For Olivo Barbieri’s first major solo show in the UK, Bloomberg SPACE showed three films brought together in an exhibition for the first time, alongside six large scale photographs from Barbieri’s ongoing project site specific_.

For over 20 years Barbieri’s work has focused on cities and their inhabitants. Filming from a helicopter on 35mm film and HDV (High Definition Video) Barbieri uses a tilt-shift lens – a technique of selective focus – in order to create an image which seems to contract, recede and expand in unexpected ways until the sense of distance and reality becomes confused. The resulting recent films seem to exist between documentary and fiction with the cities that Barbieri depicts appearing at first like models.

site specific_ Roma 04 shows the Italian capital’s famous tourist destinations such as the Coliseum and the Pantheon, contrasted with 1930s public housing, transport systems and the car lots and contemporary buildings on the periphery of the city. site specific_ Las Vegas 05 begins in the spectacular surrounding desert, moving to the reflecting edifices of hotel and gambling complexes, which through their architecture bring together influences from Venice, Paris and Egypt. site specific_ Shanghai 04 (A Silent Story) reveals a perpetually evolving city of skyscrapers, industry and housing sprawl fed by its river. Shown together the films become a trilogy presenting the old world (Rome), new world (Las Vegas) and future world (Shanghai).

Bloomberg Space, London - 2006

David Batchelor. Angela Bulloch, Spencer Finch, Ann Veronica Janssens, Jeppe Hein, Mathieu Mercier, Erwin Redl and Leo Villareal

Backdrop brought together eight international artists whose work uses electric light. Ranging from the experiential room-sized installation to interactive work, and illuminated sculpture made from mass-produced items, the exhibited works echoed the spirit and experience of American artist Dan Flavin, while continuing to expand and experiment with a broad range and quality of illumination.

In one of several works made especially for the exhibition, David Batchelor created a huge chandelier for the internal atrium at Bloomberg SPACE. The work, fashioned from 500 individually lit coloured plastic cleaning fluid containers, hung down through the layers of space. In Angela Bulloch’s ‘pixel boxes’, red, green and blue fluorescent tubes mixed to generate an infinite range of changing colours, combining references to film with minimalism. American artist Spencer Finch’s wall and ceiling installations used fluorescent tubes and filters to recreate the lighting conditions of specific times in particular places in the world. Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens’ mesmerising LED units both described and hid their source, illuminating and blinding simultaneously. Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s No Presence (Red) (2005) is an enticing globe covered with a filigree of red neon that switched off as the viewer approached. French artist Mathieu Mercier’s endless edition Untitled (Light Fixture) (1999) used a number of mass produced Y-sockets and different sized bulbs to create a work that was as much a sculptural object as a source of illumination. Austrian artist Erwin Redl explored and described space with strings and grids of coloured LEDs. Light Volume (1998) discreetly occupied a corner of Bloomberg SPACE with three short lines dotted with points of diffused light. American artist Leo Villareal’s Column (2004), an installation of 51 vertical computer controlled light tubes, created an enveloping environment that pulsed and changed colour, to saturate the room with an intense flow of luminescence.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2005

Snapshot was a solo exhibition of a new work commissioned for Bloomberg SPACE by 1997 Turner Prize winning, London-based artist Gillian Wearing.

Shown on a single free standing wall Snapshot (2005) appeared as a huge moving photographic album. For the piece Wearing focused on the subject of loneliness. From a girl playing the violin to an elderly woman in a residential home, seven individual screens showed scenes in the lives of seven different women, each set in a different decade of the 20th century and all at a different stage of their lives. Each film, informed by old photographs, was accompanied by a single spoken monologue reflecting one person’s life. The images remained distinct and separate as representations of innocence, aspiration, self image and resignation.

Wearing’s work uses photography and video to explore the intimacies and complexities of everyday life. Her work borrows from familiar forms of popular culture to explore deep-seated human trauma and emotion, often adopting methods similar to television documentary for her ‘fly-on-the-wall’ view of people’s lives. Her art can be disturbing and confessional, an honest portrait of the many sides of contemporary life.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2005

Stephen Buckley, Prunella Clough, John Cobb, Barrie Cook, Garth Evans, James Faure Walker, Carole Hodgson, Charlie Hooker, Albert Irvin, Jeff Lowe, Michael Mason, Genesis P-Orridge, Nicholas Pope, Tony Sinden, John Stezaker, Euan Uglow

The sixth edition of the British Art Show was exhibited in 2006. Prompted by this, the curators of Bloomberg SPACE chose to look back to 1979, the year of The British Art Show’s inception, and a time of great social and political change in the UK and abroad. 1979 brings together sixteen artists who were included in the first British Art Show or in the Hayward Annual of the same year. The artists selected included painters and sculptors as well as those working with performance, film installation and photography. Some works were actually shown in the original exhibitions from which this show has been selected, others could have been. So much of the work made at that time has not survived; some has been lost; some was not intended to survive. Some works were restaged or remade for the exhibition.

1979 is intended to be seen as a slice through time, a representation of the diverse nature and continuing relevance of these artists’ practice. Much of the work appears today as fresh and contemporary as when it was made, and shares concerns and approaches to material and form with many younger emerging artists of today.

Bloomberg Space, London - 2005

Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Darren Almond, Alice Anderson, Fikret, Atay, George Barber, David Blandy, Wojciech Bruszewski, Louise Camrass, Simona Faithfull, Nayia Frangouli, Gary Hill, Patrick Keiller, Edward Lipski, Len Lye, Nicky Magliulo, Christian Marclay, Jeremy Millar, Jill Miller, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Rachel Reupke, Favien Rigobert, Damien Roach, Sean Rogg, Christoph Rutiman, Margaret Salmon, Yorgos Sapountzis, Carolina Saquel, Hiraki Sawa, Elisa Sighicelli, John Tappenden, Grazia Toderi

The Mind is a Horse (Part 2) was a further exploration of film and video that was begun with part one in Bloomberg SPACE in 2002. A looped compilation of works, lasting approximately two hours, was shown as a continuous large projection in a cinema-like space, allowing gallery visitors to walk in at any point.

Very recent and perhaps unseen film and video pieces were put together with more known and historical works creating a broad spectrum of approaches and ideas. The exhibition avoided following a pre-determined theme and instead, with its central emphasis on the shifting relationship between movement and stillness, suggested that the camera takes the mind on a journey. There are moments of complete rest juxtaposed with chaos, obsessive visions, introversion and detail mixed with expansive landscapes, and images that simply elude description through their beauty.

Bloomberg Space, London 2005

Ross Chisholm, Jack Duplock, Alistair Frost, Paula Kane, Lee Maelzer, Penny Neville-Lee, Christopher Orr

Through a major architectural intervention in Bloomberg SPACE The Valley provided a space to view and reflect on the world from a new perspective. From on high the world below looks different. Geographical relationships are recognised and new narratives developed. Time sometimes provides such vantage points, zeitgeist moments for reflection and evaluation. It has been suggested that painting can provide a metaphorical boat within which it is possible to escape to somewhere else. This sense of escape is much more about effect, vision, and defining a different role for painting, which combines a dreamlike atmosphere with the understood and familiar.

This exhibition of work by seven British painters reflected a recent tendency to make small paintings that often feature places and spaces that are imbued with a particular sense of strangeness or difference. Drawn from a variety of sources, be they imaginary, art historical or appropriated, or using the visual languages of popular culture, each artist creates their own world and brought to the exhibition a different approach from the romantic yearning of an empty space to the silent intimacy shared by a group of figures. The works in the exhibition revealed our changing relationship to landscape, where the rural has become a strange and foreign place while the city is familiar and everyday. These paintings showed a growing sense of estrangement, at times melancholic longing, and an intense affection for spaces both real and imagined.

Bloomberg Space, London 2005

Bloomberg SPACE commissioned Phyllida Barlow to create new work in response to the different character of each of the three galleries, from the double height voluminous first space to the balconied areas of the atrium. Skit was assembled onsite during January 2005. Emotional and instinctive, nailed and bound together as if broken and unstable, it existed and evolved in contrast to the architecture.

For the last four decades Barlow’s work has consisted predominantly of large three-dimensional installations in which the use of space – and our relationship to it – plays an important role. The identity of the materials she uses (wood, cloth, plaster, paper and house paint) remains visible in the completed work. Structures and forms, both rudimentary in construction and densely built, explore ideas of mass and volume. Containing references to architecture, with elements such as staircases, platforms, walls and barriers, her work triggers narratives but also demands to be read as abstract form. Barlow’s daubed application of paint amplifies the use of pattern and repetition in her constructions. Her work references painterly abstraction both through the deployment of colour and the materials she uses. By shifting scale and composition her structures and objects play with the familiar and seem to take command of a space whilst simultaneously appearing temporary and incomplete.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2004

Narda Alvarado, Jeremy Diggle, Neville Gabie, Robert Gober, Emily Jacir, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Tere Recarens, Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Ed Ruscha, Yorgos Sapountzis, Ross Sinclair, Joao Tabarra

Plain Sight focused on the work of twelve international artists. The exhibition took as its starting point the personal or intimate set against a global background. This essentially involved a question of scale that was explored through gesture, documentation, and juxtaposition. The acts highlighted here have a sense of futility, but the simple gesture leads us to think about our boundaries, be they political, ethical, sexual or environmental Treading a line between tenderness and aggression the works do not become swamped with subject matter but find a means to escape it and return to what they are; simple gestures made in plain sight.

Jeremy Diggle (UK) records the burial of ex-military fighter planes in the Welsh mountains. Narda Fabiola Alvarado (Bolivia) halts traffic on a busy road in La Paz with the aid of uniformed police. Neville Gabie (UK) photographs makeshift football goals around the world. Robert Gober (USA), in his fabricated newspapers, contrasts stories of abuse and prejudice with images of the celebration of everyday life. Emily Jacir (Pal/USA) visits territories to enact simple tasks on behalf of Palestinians who are forbidden to do so. Jean-Michel Othoniel (France) distributes 1001 red necklaces at a festival visibly uniting a previously disparate group of individuals. Tere Recarens (Spain) arrives home in a helicopter to tell her family of the changes in her life and her future plans. Chemi Rosado-Seijo (Puerto Rico) collaborates with the inhabitants of a Puerto Rico village to paint their buildings in shades of green sampled from the surrounding jungle. Ed Ruscha (USA) introduces uncertainty and ambiguity into his painted depictions of landscapes through the use of signs and words. Yorgos Sapountzis (Greece) sets off car alarms in a street to provide a rhythm to dance to. Ross Sinclair (UK), accompanied by his daughter, revisits Glasgow School of Art where he studied. João Tabarra (Portugal) restages a standoff in Tiananmen Square using shopping trolleys.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2004

For her first significant exhibition in London, the distinguished American photographer Shellburne Thurber exhibited a selection of colour prints from two recent series of works. Psychoanalytic Interiors (1998 to present) and Abandoned Interiors (1998 to 2001) continue her documentary approach, which focuses on empty spaces in order to articulate the complexities of the lives of those that pass through them. 

Psychoanalytic Interiors shows the interiors of a number of different psychoanalyst’s offices in and around Boston in the USA and Buenos Aires in Argentina. These are spaces where intimate information is offered and examined in a private exchange between patient and analyst. In their absence a variety of chairs and couches stand in and the details of décor, pot plants and pictures provide information for analysis. From these observations a portrait can be drawn that reflects class values, power relationships and shows the possibility of intimacy, transference and detachment.

Abandoned Interiors further explore ideas of place and longing. These abandoned rooms where nature encroaches, reveal in the remaining fragments the presence of the families and individuals who previously occupied these spaces. Often featuring doorways and windows, Thurber’s photographs point to a world outside where life continues in contrast to the gently decaying interiors. Documenting the inner life of strangers offers for Thurber a way to intimately connect to others and explore the emotional energy between closeness, distance and the passage of time.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT - 2004

Laura Ford, Matt Franks, Roger Hiorns, James Ireland, Jim Lambie, Mariele Neudecker, Mike Nelson, David Thorpe and Saskia Olde Wolbers .

The works in the exhibition display a refreshing sincerity, marking a departure from the coolness and cheeky attitude that have characterized the British art scene for the past decade. These emerging British artists entice the viewer into a world that transcends their reality, engaging themes that are spiritual and fantastical rather than raw or shocking. Whether futuristic, mythological, or purely fanciful, the works in the exhibition stroke a strong counterpart to the British art scene's notorious Young British Artists (YBAs) made famous in the Brooklyn Museum of Art's 1999 Sensation exhibition. 

Laura Ford's theatrical sculptures depict small boys with donkey-like heads, weighed down by their own strange soft anatomy. Reminiscent of the lost boys of Pinocchio, these figures lead us into both a mythological and a strangely psychological space.

Matt Franks builds precarious sculptures carved from pastel-hued Styrofoam, and assemblages of neon-colored Perspex. In each a strange narrative emerges, and humor is at the fore as he juggles comic book references with Bernini in a constantly evolving playground of shape and form.

Roger Hiorns's dense and twisting columns of soap bubbles ooze from suspended ceramic pots in one of his works, while a growth of blue copper sulfate crystals threatens to engulf a pair of model cathedrals in another. These curious and fragile juxtapositions of materials provide glimpses of the artist's spiritual world.

James Ireland sets out to draw the viewer into a search for the perfect world hiding in the ordinary mixture of household furniture, light bulbs, plants, boxes, and images torn from magazines he haphazardly assembles. Forcing the viewer to crouch or kneel by creating a single vantage point, Ireland engages the viewer, allowing them to search for the picturesque among the mundane.

Jim Lambie is interested in redefining territories and spaces utilizing everyday materials to make sculptures and installations that have a dream-like quality. Often appearing makeshift in form and sometimes inspired by pop music, they create new and changed psychological spaces in which the viewer becomes immersed.

Mariele Neudecker's fluid-filled vitrines contain three-dimensional renderings of landscapes that quote the Northern European Romantic tradition. With the addition of chemicals, they give the impression of being shrouded with early morning mist.

Mike Nelson's works consist of labyrinths of small, but politically and symbolically loaded corridors. Each space leads on to the next through salvaged doors that slam closed behind the visitor. Sparsely furnished with found items from other peoples' lives, they articulate the patina of memory and meaning that is encrusted like dirty fingerprints on used furniture.. 

David Thorpe's work is inspired by his interest in utopian communities and fantastical architecture. His collages capture the exteriors of his imagined homes, while his sculptures give form to what they might contain. Made with passion and conviction, the work remains the product of the suburban daydream.

Saskia Olde Wolbers's video works invite the viewer into a world both fantastical and at times excruciatingly psychological. Using low-tech means, she creates desolate and distorted environments driven by spoken text narratives.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2004

Invited to make new work for Bloomberg SPACE, Chantal Joffe decided to work on a series of paintings on a scale that she had not approached before. The huge size of the nine resulting paintings was influenced, in part, by the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows of the gallery’s front space. The idea of the limitation of time came with the commission, the much larger surfaces on which to paint and the use of different materials and methods were both thrilling and daunting for the artist.

By contrast, Kenny Macleod makes work primarily in the mediums of video and image/text. His works often create disorientation and confusion by refusing to provide linear narratives with which the viewer can engage. He is particularly interested in ideas related to identity and the fluidity that exists between professional, social and personal spheres. Having to provide their own interpretations of the situation proposed by the artist, the viewer becomes a vital part of the work as they examine, reassemble and complete each piece.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2004

Eileen Agar, Tariq Alvi, Donald Baechler, Eric Bainbridge, John Baldessari, George Barber, Hans Bellmer, Lynda Benglis, Kiera Bennett, Wallace Berman, Pierre Bismuth, Stan Brakhae, Ian Breakwell, Andre Breton, William Burroughs & Ian Sommerville, Claude Cahun, Mark Cannon, Melanie Carvalho, Andrew Child, Gordon Cheung, Bruce Connor, Dan Coombs, Layla Curtis, Guy Debord, Eugenio Dittborn, Thomas Draschan, Marcel Duchamp, The Duvet Brothers, Nusch Eluard, Max Ernst, Erro, Angus Fairhurst, Gelatin, Judith Goddard, John Goto, Brian Griffith, Thomas Grünfeld, Raymond Haines, Rachel Harrison, Nigel Henderson, Nicky Hirst, Hannah Höch, Christian Holstad, Georges Hugnet, Graham Hudson, Peter Hutchinson, James Ireland, Gwyther Irwin, Andre Breton with Jacqueline Lamba & Yves Tanguy, Gavin Jantjes, Chris Jones, Ray Johnson, Lawrence Jordan, Asger Jorn, Jeff Keen, Peter Kennard, Lewis Klahr, Jochen Klein, Jiri Kolar, Udomsak Krisanamis, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Jim Lambie, Peter Lanyon, Guy Limone, Linder, Graham Little, Andrew Mania, Christian Marclay, Louise Nevelson, Chris Ofili, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Roland Penrose, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Carlyle Reedy, Seppo Renvall, Mimmo Rotella, Carolee Schneemann, Kurt Schwitters, Katy Shephard, Ian Skoyles, Nancy Spero, Charles Spurrier, Frank Stella, John Stezaker, Tommy Stockel, Jessica Stockholder, Tomoko Takahashi, Jane Turley, Fred Tomaselli, Geerten Verheus, Rebecca Warren, Tom Wesselman, Jan Wilbraham, and David Wojnarowicz.

Collage included over one hundred artists and examined the way collage has been used to explore different ideas from formal exercises in colour, material and form, to the creation of surreal spaces and the expression of political ideals. The exhibition did not attempt to be a survey or provide an overview, but included examples of key artists and movements to illustrate the role that the juxtaposition of images and material have played in the development of artistic practice. Expanding ideas of traditional cut and paste techniques, the exhibition opened up the definition of collage to show a range of approaches including examples of sculptural assemblage, film montage and work created with digital technology.

Collage is one of the central creative activities within art of the twentieth century. Initially seen as a way to challenge the conventions of art itself, found elements were brought into play with paint in a formal collision of visually tactile materials which created new and exciting dialogues. Collage is inextricably linked to the age of mass media, where images are available to all and on a huge scale, where nothing is precious and can therefore be used again and again, cheaply and with alacrity.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2004

Matthew Darbyshire, Edward Kay & Samuel Porritt, Keith Wilson, Gary Stevens, Nathan Coley, Adam Chodzko, Andrew Mania, Jo Bruton, Maggie Ellenby, Sally O’Rilley, JJ Charlesworth, Louise Camrass, Daniel Silver, Simon Faithfull, Jack McMillan, Phil Collins

Art School took place for six weeks within the galleries of Bloomberg SPACE. The exhibition consisted of many familiar and expected functions of an art school but carried the added element of transparency. The audience was able to witness the artistic activity and production in the form of group discussion, one-to-one tuition, collective painting, sculpture, filmmaking and writing. Artists were invited to initiate a wide range of practical workshops and investigative projects. There were also artist’s residencies, film screenings, talks and on-going displays of the work produced. In addition a weekly publication appeared alongside the exhibition that reflected and commented on the process and activities. But perhaps most importantly, all of the above was open to the public to view and engage with.

The exhibition involved teaching, observation, inquiry and collaboration. Many of the activities overlapped, crossed over and fed back into each other. There were no prescribed outcomes, instead an evolution of ideas was facilitated through the employment of different processes at different times. Through this insistence on openness, Art School provided the rare opportunity to intercept art at all stages of its existence, at its inception and through development, doubt, questioning and ultimately, display.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2003

Polish artist Goshka Macuga creates installations that engage with ideas of the role of the curator, the artist and the collector. By bringing together other people’s work and collections in sculptural environments Macuga examines ideas of authorship and creativity.

Reflective of a culture where value is transitory and determined by attention and desire, Macuga samples history, movements, styles and ideas. Driven by personal enthusiasm and a sense of contemporary relevance, she gathers together borrowed images and objects for the short period of an exhibition and then returns them to their owners and personal collections. Installed on and inside the sculptural structures, and staged within installations that transform gallery spaces, the places she establishes for display pay homage to the visions of specific individuals as well as generic natural places. The collected items range from historical modernist art works to contemporary and outsider art, from antiques and antiquities to the newly purchased object. All are chosen because of their relationship to each other and how they are to be collected or shown. 

For Bloomberg SPACE Macuga created a large installation in which visitors were first welcomed and taken along by a host before continuing through the work at their own pace to explore and discover, or simply spend some time.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2003

Ana Genoves, Siobhan Hapaska, Mark Hosking, Stefan Kern, Toby Paterson, Ben Mayman, Paul Ramirez Jonas, David Shrigley, Tomoaki Suzuki, Gavin Turk, Xavier Veilhan, Franz West, Keith Wilson

Work placed outside typically conforms to the material-led orthodoxies of the sculpture park, the temporal nature of the site-specific or the compromise of the public sculpture. Reflecting a variety of approaches to sculptural form, The Square Show acted as a proposal and an invitation to reconsider a familiar urban space as viable and valid place for the temporary placing of art. The exhibition utilised Finsbury Square, where Moorgate and City Road meet in front of Bloomberg SPACE, and the gallery itself to display thirteen individual works by a number of international artists.

The works in the square were installed both in the open air and within the built structures that service the car park below. Some sculptures could be sat upon, Stefan Kern’s large pink seat Haltestelle (2001), Paul Ramirez Jonas’ deckchairs You Are Here (2003) and Franz West’s bright orange Stizwurst (2000), recognising and acknowledging the recreational purpose of the square. Some works were more consciously ornamental as with Mark Hosking’s Fountain Hose (2003), whereas others were more traditional in their sculptural form and role.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2003

John Armleder, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Michael Landy, Haim Steinbach, Thomas Struth

Contributors: Juan Vincente Aliaga, Nicholas Bourriaud, Louisa Buck, A.S. Byatt, JJ Charlesworth, Patricia Ellis, Heather Galbraith, Mark Gisbourne, Hari Kunzru, Harland Miller, Mark Haworth-Booth, Raimundas Malasuskas, Dale McFarland, Catherine Millet and Matt Thorne.

L’Air du Temps aimed to extend the relationship between art and writing by placing texts in the gallery along with the actual art work to which they related as equal parts of the same exhibition.

A variety of contributors were invited to participate in the exhibition. They ranged from novelists, artists, critics and curators. From regular visitors to those based elsewhere who may never have seen the show or space. Provided with images of the work and the gallery, the writers were invited to respond in whatever way they wished. Some chose to directly engage with the work, while others were more elliptical. The spare selection and installation of very particular art works encouraged the space for contemplation and interpretation.

Individually printed texts and images were freely available to be read, considered, collected or ignored by the visitor. These, along with colour reproductions of the work, allowed the viewer to extend the relationship between individual works as well as open imaginative possibilities both during and after the exhibition itself.

Contributors responded to a silver gelatin print by Thomas Struth of a streetscene in Tokyo, a wall text installation by Haim Steinbach, a small perspex sculpture by John Armleder, a wall piece made from folded tarpaulin by Michael Landy and a video work by Fischli & Weiss.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2003

Kathrin Bohm, Peter Davies, Fransje Killaars, Mark Dean Veca

Pavilions straddle the boundary between art and architecture. Some are unquestionably sculptural objects that encourage the viewer to enter and explore, others are inherently beautiful in a way that does not determine their function. Deploying scale, form, and sometimes colour and pattern, they can heighten perceptions of place and dimension.

This exhibition explored ideas about perceptual space and allowed the viewer to become involved with the work by moving through it, across it, and sometimes inhabiting it. In this sense the work could be described as immersive, a form which takes on such dimension and profusion that is absorbs the viewer.

Kathrin Bohm’s poster project and millions and millions (2001) expands and develops across time and through various spaces. Working with mass produced coloured paper, hand printed designs and found printed matter Bohm created a collage which temporarily transformed the gallery. Mark Dean Veca’s wall paintings operate between painting and installation. Viewed at a distance they appear as a singular painting framed by the architecture of the space they adorn. In closer proximity they rise up with bulbous tentacles and plumes of smoke to engulf the viewer in a new and changed space.

For Pavilion, Davies made a painting of multicoloured shapes arranged into layers of shallow perspectival play that repeatedly extended across the whole surface. By contrast Fransje Killaars dealt with ideas about space, or more precisely, location. Non-Stop Amsterdam (1998) presented itself as a transparent picture, reminiscent of a train’s sleeping compartment or a shelf-lined store, where the viewer could both experience the space it provided and be viewed as part of it.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2003 

Gaia Alessi & Richard Bradbury, Michael Blazy, Mathieu Briand, Jachym Fleig, General Idea, Jenny Holzer, Germaine Koh, Ange Leccia, Damiàn Ortega, Martin Walde

Our Mutual Friend featured an unusual combination of work that explored the notion of the building as host. For this exhibition, Bloomberg SPACE and its infrastructures became a body from which material, energy and ideas could be drawn, with the resultant works manifesting in radically different forms. Mutualism is another name for symbiosis, a relationship of dependence, where two or more things may grow together. These elements, entities or organisms, which might at first depend on each other, can also ultimately threaten, corrupt or even dissolve each other. 

Some works relied on the structure of the building itself to give them space and form. The Adjuster (2003), a new commission by Gaia Alessi & Richard Bradbury, shifted the angle of 4 columns within the space, to suggest some kind of structural crisis. A mass of green slime placed in the gallery by Martin Walde spilt across the space, while Michel Blazy contaminated the walls. German artist Jáchym Fleig was commissioned to make a new work, consisting of large sculptural constructions, which appeared to grow of their own accord both outside and inside the building. By cutting out part of the gallery wall, Damián Ortega obtained materials to form a sculpture, which was not just evidence of process but rather encouraged ideas of fantasy and potential.

Germaine Koh’s Prayers (1999) took data from a computer screen and translated it into Morse code, released outside as smoke signals. Similarly Ange Leccia’s Baiser (1986) brought together 2 high-powered spotlights, positioned face to face in a continually powered illumination, drawing from the electricity supply of the building, day and night. Mathieu Briand’s DJ booth provided a space and opportunity for the audience to mix music, which seeped into the fabric of an active working place. Jenny Holzer’s Erlauf (1995), an LED message board commonly associated with a corporate or financial announcement, became a carrier for a message of a different nature, confusing the relationship between the office and its occupants, while General Idea’s giant floating pills, Pharma©opia (1992) enabled the audience to re-imagine the atrium as the interior of a body in which they were held.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2002

Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt, Mark Lewis, Michael Joo, Alex Ingram, Clare Langan, Michelle Williams, Robert Cahen, Louise Camrass, Nic Nicosia, Marine Hugonnier, Peter d’Agostino, Darren Almond, Robert Morris, Graham Dolphin, Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Roddy Buchanan, Dan Graham, Shaun Gladwell, Anri Sala

The Mind is a Horse was an unorthodox combination of films, presented within the main gallery at Bloomberg SPACE, which included documentaries about artists, artists’ films, exceptional footage shot during the Second World War, and a one-off live presentation by the artist Cerith Wyn Evans. The large projection wall acted as a fixed forum for a fluid approach to the use of film by artists. The programme consisted of a daily, looped, two hour compilation of films as well as individual weekly evening screenings.

The different programmes did not follow a predetermined theme or subject. Rather the works were selected with the idea of gathering important, memorable and less familiar material together – things that have stayed in the mind and won’t go away. The projection wall was, in a simple way, the only fixed element in the exhibition through which material, from a range of background, experience and position, flowed, creating a rhythm that carried the static viewer on a journey through the programme.

Arnolfini, Bristol - 2002

Michael Ashkin, Melanie Carvalho, Claude Closky, Rob de Mar, Dan Hays, James Ireland, Patrick Jacobs, Paula Kane, Clare Langan, Matts Leiderstam, Virgil Marti, Gianni Motti, Seamus Nicholson, Ester Partegàs, Torbjørn Rødland, Børre Sæthe, Dirk Skreber

View Finder focuses on the pictorial dimension of painting. Each artist in the show addresses the representation of nature, and considers landscape as a natural phenomenon, or as a social and cultural construct. The natural development in the history of picture-making from painting to photography and cinema, and eventually to video and digital imaging, is reflected in the prevailing number of lens-based works- including film, slide projections and photography

Bloomberg Space, London – 2002

Despite differences in generation and use of medium, the work of Rene Daniels and Karin Ruggaber carries the same sense of spatial promise.

Karin Ruggaber’s work asks questions about perception and function. Working with materials and scale with great consideration, Ruggaber creates works that have a sense of belonging to the surrounding architecture, and yet they carry a strange feeling that they come from elsewhere. At Bloomberg SPACE Ruggaber exhibited Fence – a work which neither played a purely functional role, nor did it delineate or prohibit. Its parts were displayed rather than functioning to create a fence that did not contain and could not in turn be contained.

Ruggaber’s second work in the exhibition, Light, was a functioning rig which illuminated the gallery with its own subtle conditions. Existing as a layer on the pre-existing architecture it added something barely perceptible, yet its scale and positioning threw everything into contrast.

Rene Daniels’ painting literally opens up the possibility of space within the surface of the painting. This geometric play with illusion, where the shape shifts backwards and forwards between spatial illusion and regular motif, does in its very simple way bridge abstract and illusory space. This exhibition provided the first opportunity to experience Rene Daniels’ painting in Britain and to test its relation to time. The exhibition was not a grand retrospective but rather the chance to see his highly influential and valuable work in an active contemporary context.

Bloomberg Space, London – 2002

Cesare Pietroiusti is interested in analysing and determining the conditions under which critical thought is formed and shared by a community. His work explores the intentions formulated by others, which he adopts as his own. He is interested in the problems and contradictions that lie within everyday relationships and which motivate our actions. For Pietroiusti ‘art offers a way to imagine doing things that are unpredictable and that one would not otherwise do’.

Cesare Pietroiusti’s project for Bloomberg SPACE involved inviting individuals to bring something to the gallery that they believed is certainly not art. These items were then sorted, x-rayed, catalogued and placed within the galleries of Bloomberg SPACE. Each participant was given a receipt which entitled them to collect their contribution at the end of the exhibition. The work focused on the inherent paradox of an art project that features explicitly non-art objects shown in an art context. It questioned ‘what art is not, rather than what it is’.

Bergen Centre for Contemporary Art, Norway - 2001; Vilnius Centre of Contemporary Art, Lithuania - 2001; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tallinn, Estonia - 2002; Museum Of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Yugoslavia - 2002; New Museum of Contemporary Art, Salamanca, Spain -2002; Turku Art Museum, Finland -2003; Brno House of Arts, Prague, Czech Republic - 2003

Kate Bright, Peter Davis, Matt Franks, Jun Hasegawa, Jim Lambie, Graham Little, Simon Periton, Eva Rothschild, DJ Simpson, David Thorpe, Gary Webb, Claire Woods

Tailsliding is a new British Council international touring exhibition, featuring 12 young British artists currently creating eclectic work within the conventions of painting and sculpture, selected by Stephen Hepworth, former curator of the Jerwood Gallery, London. 

The highly coloured, large, exuberant works draw imagery from a gamut of high and low populist sources; from the gothic fairy tale to contemporary cartoon imagery, acknowledging historical influences along the way. Through contemporary materials, the artists express a joy of making, often playfully evoking ideas centred on our perception of time and place. 

Tailsliding is concerned with the fleeting nature of history. Of what went before, and how these events alter our perceptions of place and self in the present. These concerns are reflected through the exhibition title – a skateboarding term for a difficult trick. Art has many parallels with street culture. Transient in nature, erased, written over and superseded by new styles, new names, new colours. Street graffiti recognises history through the places it is written, the act of writing being both an assertion of an individual and a tribute to those that have gone before. It has its own language. Likewise, Tailsliding demonstrates that the languages of painting and sculpture are far from safe options - that they are capable of taking on an extraordinary new direction in the hands of these young practitioners.

Jerwood Gallery, London - 2001

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Jerwood Gallery - 2001

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Jerwood Gallery - 2001

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Jerwood Gallery - 2000

Paul Carter, Annabelle Dalby, Louisa Fairclough, James Ireland, Daniel Jackson, Bob Matthews, Sarah McFadyen, Obuabang, Matthew Smith (curated by Louise Trodden)

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Jerwood Gallery, London - 2000

Paula Kane, Ian McLean, George Shaw

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Jerwood Gallery, London - 2000

Lolly Batty, Enrico David, Roger Hiorns, Richard Reynolds, Eva Rothschild, Polly Staple, Geerten Verheus.

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Jerwood Gallery, London - 2000

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Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

Jason Brooks, Benedict Carpenter, Anya Gallaccio, Jim Hodges, Virgil Marti, Jason Minsky, Jo Mitchell, Simon Periton, Jean Noel Rene Clair, Bridget Smith

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Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

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Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

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Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

Mark Cannon, Ana Prada, DJ Simpson

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Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

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Jerwood Gallery, London - 1999

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Jerwood Gallery, London - 1998

Sybille Berger, Kate Bright, Ana Genoves, Jun Hasegawa, Dan Hays, Graham Little, Sarah Morris, Paul Morrison, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Philippe Parreno, Alessandro Raho, Daniel Sturgis

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Feeringbury Manor, Feering, and Firstsite, Colchester, UK - 1998

Don Brown, Jason Coburn, Keith Coventry, Jeremy Deller, Ana Genoves, Jun Hasegawa, Stephen Hughes, Richard Kirwan, Mariele Neudecker, Obuabang, Brendan Quick, Kerry Stewart, Gavin Turk, Jessica Vorsanger, Mark Wallinger, Catherine Yass

Originating in the 14th century Feeringbury Manor is set in extensive gardens, whose features include formal lawns, ponds, wooded areas, pathways both official and found, a riverside meadow, and various ornamental features, such as iron gates, a pergola, water features and a swimming pool. However they remain within the scale of the domestic; this after all is someone's home, rather than the epic extravagancies of a turreted stately house. Each are spaces in which one feels comfortable inhabiting, or could even presume to live.

For the majority of artists emergent in the last fifteen years in this country, placing autonomous art in the open air has not been a concern, preferring instead to rely on the negotiated neutrality of the white cube or focus on the evolving discipline of installation and the site specific. Art in the open air in Britain is perceived by this generation as having the orthodoxy symptomised by the material led traditions of the Sculpture Park, or the associative restrictions of the public commission. This territory once considered central has now been lost and its rich heritage has become stale with repetition.

Taking the work of sixteen artists, Feeringbury VIII utilises work that has previously occupied, or is intended for the sanctuary of the white cube and re-deploys it within the terrain of the garden. Treating the spaces as a given in the way that the architecture of a series of rooms would determine the installation of works, the same strategies are deployed. A corridor becomes a lane, the view across a room now occurs across water, and the surprise of unexpected placement around a corner becomes one set in undergrowth. While some artists employ traditional materials they do so with a critical awareness, while others bring the material and strategies of other areas of practice.

A garden is a form of sanctuary. It is a delineated space that is cared for and looked after, it too is a safe space. The flowers, shrubs and trees are fed and watered, pruned and deadheaded. The new are introduced and nurtured, while others sometimes forgotten are re-bedded on their inevitable way to the compost heap. It is a place equally for poetry and for violence, capable of encompassing many such opposites, although always with the residue of memory, be they cultural, or experienced. Perhaps familiarity would allow the presumption of neutrality, but this is not a possibility for those urban souls caught up in a reverie of Pre-Raphaelite romance.

Cultivated is an act of introduction and nurturing, away from the windy hilltops and woodland trails, the faux marble halls of the shopping mall and PR hard sell. It seeks to plant the possibilities of revisiting, reactivating and extending a barren area of practice, to reintroduce the external as a component in the vocabulary of a your urban British Artist. The works in the exhibition still remain distinctive as in their previous lives, but here in the gardens of Feeringbury Manor and the garden of the Minories art gallery the settings and context allow new interpretations to sprout and their differences to mature. Fundamentally they look at home.

A project by Curtain Road Arts in association with firstsite, Colchester.

The Tannery, London - 1997

Patrick van Caeckenbergh, Paul McCarthy, Mariko Mori (curated by Melissa E. Feldmann)

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The Tannery, London - 1997

Lolly Batty, Smadar Dreyfus, Rachel Evans, Judith Goddard, Sarah Staton, Catherine Yass

Catherine Yass explores the relationship between the photographer and subject. "Portrait: Chairpersons of the City of Salford,” 1994, simultaneously flatters her sitters by depicting then in colour saturated back-lit transparencies while setting in motion a critique of the structures of patronage.

Smadar Dreyfus makes video installations of private human experiences. Projected huge, a detail of a woman's face lying awake both fascinates and intimidates, inviting the viewer to examine their own responses and conduct.

Rachel Evans installation of drawings brings together perceptions of pleasure. Referencing the erotic, expressive painting, and home decoration, they play with ideas of the feminine.

Judith Goddard's video projection explores the nature of perception and beauty. Dissolving the video screen "Mira" replaces it with the virtual depth of an animated computer screen saver.

Lolly Batty fuses together the organic with the mathematical in large three-dimensional sculptures. Carved from polystyrene and other synthetic materials, their lightness and pliability evokes play, while exploring the territory between realism and abstraction.

Sarah Staton remakes the everyday. Changing scale and material the normal becomes extraordinary, fascinating in their bilious transformation they explore Ideas of boredom, fashion, and nationality.

PROJECT SPACE ¬¬- CHUCK NANNEY: BEARDED LADIES

"I have always had a fantasy of a man dressing as a woman, and then over that dressing back as a man: a woman dressing as a man and then over that dressing back as a woman. A man in drag as a man. A woman in drag as a woman, But isn't this something like the way we are in everyday life?" American artist Chuck Nanney was included in "Bad Girls" at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

The Tannery gratefully acknowledges Viewpoint Gallery, Salford: Galerie Jousse Seguin, Paris; and Harkness Hall Ltd. for their assistance in realising these exhibitions.

The Tannery, London - 1997

Pierre Bismuth, Laurence Crane, Sarah Dobai, Peter Fillingham, Margarita Gluzberg, Pat Naldi & Wendy Kirkup, Simon Starling (curated by Andrew Renton)

B.c.c. stands for Blind Carbon Copy. Although carbon copies are no longer use in offices, the meaning of the term is still current in our vocabulary, becoming a metaphor. It is understood that the more copies made simultaneously the poorer the quality of the reproductions. It is this process of transformation, if not degeneration, that distinguishes the copy from the original.  With digital transmission a blind carbon copy has become a copy that is sent to a destination of which the other recipients are unaware.

B.c.c. is an exhibition that will take place twice, on two sites simultaneously. Rather than being an exhibition which spreads itself over two location of The Tannery and Cleveland it will attempt to remake itself in two distinct spaces. Each version of the show will be a self contained experience, formed according to the individual space. Yet both parts of B.c.c. will reflect the other setting up a dialogue between the works and their different contexts.

Pierre Bismuth portrays himself on a video projection accessing verbal descriptions of popular movies by the touch dial facility of a multiplex cinema. There is a flattening out of the superficial film narratives by the transcription from a visual to the audio experience, which is further translated from one language to another.

Laurence Crane has composed a piece of music for a various number of electric organs originally recorded onto DAT tape, before making a succession of re-recordings to play at The Tannery. As these recordings are overdubbed they degenerate, becoming unrecognizable from the perfect template. The music manuscript will similarly undergo a series of transformations and hence deterioration.

Sarah Dobai's The Chase uses a reduced visual vocabulary to create a minimal suspense movie. The projected double-image video develops a fascination with picturing fictive, and often theatrical dramas, within actual sites in the city. The subject is portrayed as a fearful victim of potential danger, real or imagined. The looping of the sequences constantly defers the expectant viewer from a conclusion.

Peter Fillingham takes moulds of 18 & 24 inch meteorological balloons to create repetitive fibreglass casts. The exquisite detail deteriorates during the process as a slightly different tone appears on the surface of the objects. The sculptures, configured of both the casts and the actual balloons seem to spontaneously reproduce, re-appearing on each floor.

Margharita Gluzberg's meticulously detailed pencil drawings of lady’s wigs and fictional characters investigate notions of artifice and beauty. Taken out of their everyday context and disembodied, the wigs possess a surreal and eerie quality. Re-productions of storytale characters have a peculiar relationship to these functional items that is both comfortable and disturbing.

Pat Naldi and Wendy Kirkup use the medium of sound to cut through the three floors of The Tannery, uniting the space as the operatic trio continues its endless cycle and potential degeneration. The vocal parts from this excerpt from Orpheus & Euridice by Gluck have been separated out leaving the visitor to piece together their own performance.

Simon Starling continually uses found objects and the processes of re-production in his work, usually with a frame of reference specific to the geographical context. For B.c.c. he has created replicas of the Eurocoin, a token used for access to the nearby Design Museum. These replicas allow visitors free admission to both sites, a rhetorical exercise as there is no entrance charge to either exhibition venue. Replicas of a Charles Eames stacking chair have also been made, one for each person involved in the show, artists and organisers, pursuing the idea of a 'collaborative' exhibition.

The Tannery, London - 1996

Attila Csörgo, Mark Firth, Annabel Howland, Stephen Hughes, Dante Leonelli, Tim Meacham, Mathieu Mercier, Tim Olden, Christopher Pauling (Guest curated by Christopher Pauling with Stephen Hepworth)

Computer World takes its title from Kraftwerk’s album of the same name and references a future when innocence and wonderment with science and technology are still possible, unlike our own computer world where such possibilities are banished to the banal limitations of the keyboard, mouse and screen.

Exhibiting the work of five British and four foreign artists, Computer World explores an alternative world through objects, light, sound and movement. There is not one computer in the show.

Tim Olden has installed four floor to ceiling Theromins, which translates the movement of the viewer into the language of sound, offering an alternative mapping for the spectator within the space, while referencing early science fiction film sound effects.

Dante Leonelli's "Neodome Series", originally realised and exhibited in the 1970's, echoed the 70's futuristic styling and a 2001 positivism that now reads as a kind of naiveté and wonderment. The domes gently pulsate with internal lights as the neon tubes respond back in some secret dialogue.

Mark Frith is obsessed and fascinated by a technological overload. His metal sculptures look as if they have fallen from a UFO. Mysterious in their origins they are etched with disparate formulae, maps and diagrams which both explain the object's origin and disguises its meaning. In "Computer World" he will show a piece which retains a radioactive core and a Geiger counter, emitting the random clicks of potential contamination. It both fascinates and terrifies.

Annabel Howland is also concerned and fascinated by contamination. Taking bank notes, she enlarges their detail and rearranges them in installational form, creating beautiful flowerings of viral landscapes, attractive both in their source and their derived manifestation.

Attilo Csorgo's work is a visual representation of the phenomena of physics. Often employing motors and lights he makes the tangible become intangible, the comprehensible - illusive. An Illusion is created as a glass sits glimmering on a tabletop, proffering an explanation while evading certainty.

Tim Meacham's" Mae West" consists of 200ft of clear plastic tubing filled with water. Inside a tiny plastic figure is pumped around its internal labyrinth. The viewer watches both fascinated and appalled at the figures dilemma and identifies with its fate.

Mathieu Mercier approaches science as a true innocent. He painstakingly constructs little support balconies for every leaf of a large household plant that he has grown, and creates strange assemblages of light bulbs, that take simple pleasure in the light they emit, while acknowledging the eventual redundancy of such an object.

Christopher Pauling's Kinetic sculptures humorously inflate and deflate mimicking some kind of biomorphic function. Their actions are triggered by human presence, they are both enticingly beautiful and threatening in their absurd function - he will create a cube of 3 meters with twenty-seven individually inflating units.

Stephen Hughes's "Gate Crasher" is a cast of an actual meteorite found in the collection of The British Museum. Remade in luminous resin, it casts a contaminating green light onto the viewer and it’s surroundings.

The Tannery, London - 1996

Sean Dower, Georg Herold, David Powell, Liv Rygh, Martin Shiel, Georgina Starr (curated by Sean Dower)

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The Tannery, London 1996

Ralf Berger, David Regehr, Jeremy Whitehurst (curated by Jeremy Whitehurst)

Center[e]dge presents the work of two German and one English artist who studied together at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in the early 90’s under the professorship of Gerhard Merz and Klaus Rinke. Still resident in Germany they represent a younger generation’s continuation of the tradition of exploring the conceptual and formal relationship between art and architecture. 

Center[e]dge is derived from Robert Smithson’s list of ten points of difference between ‘Sites’ (edge) and ‘Non-sites’ (centre). The artists will construct three different spaces that constitute individual confrontations with the architecture of each floor of the Tannery; moving backward and forward, within and without, the two forms of aesthetic practice. Architecture seen as a metaphor, as transient, and absence.

Ralf Berger perceives the ground floor of The Tannery as a "Tunnel;” this is echoed by his journey to London through the Channel Tunnel. Berger's work is primarily concerned with the body in space, in this case the body moving through the architectural space of a tunnel. Using video, objects, and performance he will create a temporal matrix within an architectronic room.

Jeremy Whitehurst creates individual text works to the dimensions of the walls on which they are displayed. They are presented on structures veiling the walls for which they have been made, just as the texts themselves veil meaning in favor of their objectivity. Whitehurst proposes an unending exchange between the structure of the building, the text, and the object.

David Regehr's work examines the idea of "moving architecture" and becomes perceptible through the components of movement, thought, and their exchange. His wall drawing installation stems from a series of technical drawings executed during a ten day walk of buildings along the Via Appia, between Rome and Capua; and is the latest in a series including New Mexico, and the Alps.

The Tannery wishes to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Galerie Luis Campana, Cologne; and Galerie Sophia Ungers, Cologne.

The Tannery, London - 1996

Frances Carlile, Kate Davis, David Foster, John Hilliard, Katrine Hjelde, Nicholas May, Graham Revell, Lucy Wood (curated by David Foster and Graham Revell with Stephen Hepworth)

The cultural critic Walter Benjamin saw in the detective story a popular literary form that identified a way of recovering the individual, through the trace, after they had disappeared into the crowded populace of a new industrial society. The artists in Tracer offer a series of clues/traces that invite consideration of the artwork not exclusively as an object or surface but as a site where meaning may be constructed.

The cultural critic Walter Benjamin saw in the detective story a popular literary form that identified a way of recovering the individual, through their trace, after they had disappeared into the crowded populace of a new industrial society. The artists in Tracer offer a series of clues/traces that invite consideration of the artwork not exclusively as an object or surface but as a site where meaning may be constructed.

Graham Revell's television screen projection of an area of the gallery wall records it's periodic dusting in a search for or erasure of clues, falling flakes of paint creating paths of light that accumulate to reveal the final resting place of the debris.

David Foster makes paintings by means of processes that emphasise the surface by casting and question it by presenting fragments of existing surfaces as evidence alluding to other possible spaces.

Frances Carlile alters and arranges fragments of the real world, using drawing and modelling to manipulate objects so that shadows or the handprints of an unknown person are in fact built into works that invite reverie on memory, loss and absence.

Nicholas May creates trompe l'oeil abstracts formed from a collision of material and mark making. They evade possible deciphering of authorship by the erasure of the trace, leaving instead a conundrum of making.

John Hilliard proposes his work as a scene for detection. Scenarios are carefully staged and photographed in which fragmented narratives are proposed, whose reconstruction is left to the viewer.

Kate Davis uses sculpture to describe states and events at the edge of consciousness. Images and objects are brought together colluding to achieve meaning and the possibility of knowledge.

Katrine Hjelde's high gloss, low relief painting installation pictures rooms from the Wallace Collection in low relief. Abutted at right angles they implicate the viewer in an ever-shifting world of reflection into which they can never enter.

Lucy Wood invites the viewer's participation in a deadly exercise. A gleaming full-size trampoline has been manufactured, it's canvas replaced by a single flawless sheet of glass: A crime waiting to happen…

The Tannery, London - 1995

Glenn Brown, Jeremy Dickinson, Gregory Green, Stephen Hepworth, Brendan Quick, Andrew Renton, Paul Stone

Obsession is an exhibition which charts and explores male preoccupations. These range from the hobbyist to the neurotic, from the erotic to the dull.

Paul Stone is interested in exploring and questioning the ideas and values we are taught during our childhood and school education. He has had the handwriting of his teachers analysed by a graphologist whose psychological profile he displays next to their reports on him in a work that questions power structures and so perceived notions of what constitutes the correct.

Brendan Quick is preoccupied by fantasy, the seedy fantasy of grungy film making saturated with the brittle undertow of 70's bad fashion chic; through his deconstructed stagings he offers a lament for a decade no one wants to remember, and wishes they could forget.

Glenn Brown makes versions of other people's paintings, which he adopts as part of his own cannon. The expressive gestures of Auerbach, the Surrealism of Dali, and the airbrushed sci- fi fantasies of Chris Foss are painted in tromp l'oeil style, altering scale and colour, focusing on detail and changing orientation; these are then hung in spaces painted a single bright colour indicating a place where things are ordered as his. In his piece "Exercise One" he has taken a found anonymous presumed self-portrait of a school girl, this has been photographed and enlarged to menacing proportions, and hangs in a claustrophobic white walled space reproduced five identical times.

Andrew Renton is best known as a writer and curator. For Obsession he will offer an internal critique of the show, in the form of a fax project transmitted from 1st December (the start of Advent) throughout the show from London and Jerusalem; which will combine with an interpretation of a tractate of the Babylonian Talmud from the Compendium of Jewish Law.

Stephen Hepworth explores ideas of language and desire, through the adoption of his role of a translator. Using visual signs and existing language forms (shorthand, Morse code, and braille;) changing their scale, material and form, he proposes and eroticises another reader who is other and different.

Gregory Green is an American artist who is interested in the processes of individual and collective empowerment. His various projects extend from the researching, building and distribution of the means of localised and mass destruction, through the democratisation of the radio and television channels, to the creation of a new country: The Free State of Caroline.

Jeremy Dickinson paints super-real renditions buses. These he displays as trophies lining the walls of galleries, a document to his collectors zeal, and a telling record of the uniqueness of types and liveries which we locate and indeed transport ourselves.