ONLINE EXHIBITION: Kurt Jackson ‘the Glastonbury Paintings’

ONLINE EXHIBITION: Gommie – If you like you can just snog me & then drop me off at the hospital

ONLINE EXHIBITION: Peter Brown ‘Life in Lockdown’ & ‘The New York series’

ONLINE EXHIBITION: Material: Textile – Modern British Female Designers

18 April, 11am – Virtual exhibition opens on our website

Contact sales with enquiries

 

This year’s Material: Textile is an online exhibition of historically important and highly collectable textiles by some of the most important Modern female designers working in Britain. Brought together for the first time – and offered as an online and virtual exhibition with an accompanying catalogue and podcast – the exhibition highlights the relevance of these mid-century textiles and the vital role they played in the evolution of taste and culture. It offers us all a unique insight into the artistic vision and originality of these women…view works

 

ONLINE EXHIBITION: Inuit Sculpture

Pre-register interest

We are delighted to present a selection of Inuit Canadian sculpture and textile, which have been brought together by Pat Feheley, Director of one of the last remaining commercial galleries in Canada dedicated exclusively to traditional and contemporary art from the Canadian Arctic and an expert on the work of Inuit textile artists.

The social and economic changes which took place in the Arctic from the 1950s onwards resulted in many of the Inuit leaving their traditional camps and moving to permanent settlements. To help with the transition into a cash economy, art advisors travelled to many of the communities to encourage the making of arts and crafts for sale, including skin purses decorated with skin patterning. The art of larger scale textiles developed in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), an inland settlement west of Hudson Bay, in the 1960s. Commercial materials – including duffel, embroidery floss and felt – allowed for the creation of larger wall-hangings. The most common technique involved the application of felt cut-outs on duffel, which were then enlivened by fine embroidery. Some artists created abstract designs, but most made references to traditional life.

‘The artists of this early period had all lived the traditional life and their subject matter was reflective of this. These small sculptures, made more naturalistic by the addition of inlay or implements, had a monumental quality that defied their small scale. Greatly sought after by collectors, these small works capture the essence of Inuit culture. Several pieces in this collection of works reflect this transitional moment. The majority of pieces however, celebrate the next stages in contemporary Inuit art—when the scale of sculpture increased and artists began to develop their own unique styles, occasionally abstracting elements for a new and exciting aesthetic.’ Pat Feheley

ONLINE EXHIBITION: Tintypes by Tif Hunter

ONLINE EXHIBITION: Thiébaut Chagué

Thiébaut began his career in 1976, training in France, Belgium and in England under Michael Cardew and Richard Batterham. Returning to France in 1981 he set up his first workshop in the Loire Valley and in 1984 built a new studio in the Vosges with a wood-fired kiln.

Examples of his work can be found in many public collections across Europe in Belgium, France and Germany. He is represented in the V&A museum and has recently been exhibited in the Louvre.

“In May 2012 I visited Thiébaut Chagué at Taintrux in north east France. Taintrux is in the Vosges, an area that has witnessed battles and bloody conflict over many centuries. The Vosges retains a secret fairy-tale quality and Chagué’s home is surrounded by meadows and encircled by small mountain peaks, dark with fir trees and with deciduous trees on the lower slopes, just coming into bright spring-time leaf. One surviving industry in this remote area is logging.

It is a good place for a potter with a wood-fired kiln. Nicholas Bourriaud’s term esthétique relationnelle, describing art that produces or prompts human relations, sociability and even conviviality, comes to mind. Of course, Chagué spends time alone in his studio, with its view of meadows and mountains. But his natural playfulness and gift for friendship have led him into communities of all kinds. He has worked alongside the women potters of the Gwari village of Tatiko in Northern Nigeria. He makes the firing of larger works performative and very public – most memorably in the garden of the Victoria and Albert Museum where in 2010 he created an improvised kiln around his mighty sculpture La Soif et La Source.”  Tanya Harrod, design historian and co-editor of the Journal of Modern Craft…read essay in full

 

 

ONLINE EXHIBITION: Makoto Kagoshima ‘New Works’

Makoto_Kagoshima_Ceramice_Events_page

Based in Kyushu, the southern island of Japan, Makoto Kagoshima’s celebrated ceramics are a fusion of design and heartwarming motifs making each object a unique, one-of-a-kind work of art. His hand produced and decorated works are designed with a variety of plants and animals remembered from his childhood. They speak of whimsy and elegance and an almost quixotic sense of a fleeting pleasure somehow caught. Makoto first showed with us at Messums Wiltshire as part of a collaboration with John Julian Ceramics where he was decorating plates for a joint show of their work.

We are delighted to represent Makoto’s work exclusively in Europe and to be hosting his second ever solo show.

 

EXHIBITION: Aboriginal Art – Papunya Tula Artists

 

PAPUNYA TULA ARTISTS

Paintings and Woodblock from the Western Australian Desert

 

Indigenous Australian people have lived in the remote deserts of Australia for tens of thousands of years. In the late 1960s, the Australian government moved several communities from the Western Desert region – primarily Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri and Arrernte peoples – to the Papunya settlement, which is located about 150 miles south of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. Whilst a tradition of body and sand painting was prevalent – historically passing from generation to generation, down each distinct family line and depicted old stories, sacred imagery and transcendental visual codes – it was not until the first years of the 1970s that members of the community began to paint on to canvas in acrylic. In 1972 the Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd was officially founded as an artist cooperative, owned and operated by members of the community. The group’s work, often referred to simplistically as ‘dot painting’, has since been shown on almost every continent in the world with Papunya Tula Artists’ works in the collections of major public institutions globally.

This body of unique works – never previously shown outside of Australia – features paintings and woodcuts by some of the leading artists of the group today, which includes several women, attesting to the increasingly prominent role of female artists within the group.

Particular to this exhibition is a significant body of woodcarvings, to which technique the group was introduced in the 1990s by Chris Hodges (Director of Utopia Gallery, Sydney and representative of the PTA group). These works in particular speak of a direct link between the carving and scratching of trees, bark and wood in the landscape and the mark-making employed in creating the artworks. They also come from a period of time when the group was arguably less consciously aware of the increasing enthusiasm for decorative aboriginal work, nevertheless significant examples are held in the collection of the British Museum.

This exhibition, which has come as a highlight selection from Messums Wiltshire, represents a rare opportunity to see a body of works from the PTA group outside of Australia – pieces that speak to ancient traditions carried through time, representing both temporality and permanence, representation and experience.

To register interest please email [email protected]

 

 

EMERGING TALENTS EXHIBITION: Francesco Poiana

Describing the kind of Japanese paper he uses to make his prints, Francesco Poiana says; ‘It is very thin and also very delicate. I like its feeling of lightness and also the rich tradition and history of paper from which it comes, which has had such a big cultural influence in the West; van Gogh did paintings inspired by Japanese patterns as did many other artists.’

‘The Japanese give as much importance to the empty space as to any images in a work of art. It is the opposite of the medieval Western concept of horror vacui where every inch is covered.’

Born in Faedis near Trieste, the son of an architect and winemaker, Francesco Poiana attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and then the celebrated Albicocca fine art printing workshop in Udine before studying for a Masters degree at St Martin’s College of Art in London where he graduated last year.

The paper he uses is made from the mulberry paper trees and has a shadowy, translucence perfectly suited to the ghostly imagery of his works.

‘If you layer one sheet of paper on top of others they can look like a skin, soft and translucent and sensitive,’ he says.

The works in this show feature man at a crossroads as well as boats and other visual metaphors for life’s endings and beginnings.  A solitary figure is seen standing in a wood suggesting our isolation from each other yet our deep connection with other elements of the natural world. These are poetry in physical form, fragments from a mind less ordinary.

We are delighted to support an emerging talents programme for the second consecutive year, the criteria for which is one of talent in terms of making and originality in narrative.

Francesco will join us in the gallery for our regular Tuesday Talks on 10th March…buy tickets