CURRENT EXHIBITION: Crucible in Gloucester Cathedral

October 25, 2010 by Kay

Crucible will run from 1st September – 7th November 2010.

The exhibition will show over 75 works from 48 artists – including Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst, Daniel Chadwick and Sarah Lucas – a who’s who of contemporary British sculpture – from the “New Bronze Age” sculptors of the 1950s to current household names like Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley.

Crucible is a joint venture between Gallery Pangolin and Gloucester Cathedral. Most of the works were made in Gloucestershire, by the talented craftsmen working at Pangolin Editions foundry in the Stroud valleys, or by artists from Gloucester Cathedral. The Cathedral itself is a great work of art made in Gloucestershire by local craftsmen.

The exhibition will take place throughout the building and grounds, including the crypt and cloisters.

Entry to the exhibition will be free of charge.

Exhibition Opening Times
Monday-Friday    9.15 am-5.15pm
Saturday        9.00 am-4.15pm
Sunday           11.45 am-2.45pm & 4.00pm-6.00pm

Damien Hirst – St Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain

Angus Fairhurst – A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling

Marcus Harvey – Nike

Daniel Chadwick – White Mobile I

CURRENT: Drawings and sculptures by Angus Fairhurst

October 14, 2010 by Kay

Angus Fairhurst
12 October – 27 November 2010
Sadie Coles
69 South Audley Street, London W1

This exhibition of drawings and sculptures by Angus Fairhurst draws together key works from throughout his career and is the first gallery exhibition since the artist’s death in 2008. The show is curated and installed by artists Urs Fischer and Rebecca Warren. Part of their concept was to invite various friends of Fairhurst to build plinths for his bronze sculptures, which will both serve as individual tributes to the artist and re-contextualize his sculptures to enliven their posthumous display.

The drawings selected for this show range from small-scale vignettes (such as a graphite study of a banana springing out of its skin) to expansive sequences of disembodied, gyrating pairs of limbs. Collectively they indicate Fairhurst’s enduring innovation and ranging interests, whether in nature, the romantic pastoral genre, or cycles of regeneration and decay.

By turns cartoonish and diagrammatic, Fairhurst’s drawings epitomise his offbeat and melancholy-tinged humour, his experiments with figuration, and his use of gorillas as figures of pathetic buffoonery and otherworldliness. In one work we encounter two gorillas hoisting enormous fish under their arms in front of an amber-hued sunset. This incongruous and oddly poignant coupling of ape, man’s nearest animal relative, and fish, his primordial ancestor, expresses both opposition and symbiosis, and both a beginning and an end. Here and throughout Fairhurst’s art, origin and outcome sit side-by-side.

From around the turn of the millennium, Fairhurst began making sombre bronze successors to his anthropomorphic drawings, their pitted and textured surfaces bearing witness to his process of clay modelling. The bronzes in the show include a series of maquettes of gorillas in absurdist guises (several of which have large-scale counterparts) – flattened into a rug in A Couple of Differences between Thinking and Feeling (Flattened) (2001), or gazing into a mirror in The Birth of Consistency (2004). Untitled (With Bird) (2007) surreally transposes a donkey’s head onto the body of a gorilla, producing a characteristically tragicomic spectre. The piece revisits an early drawing of a gorilla with an ass’s head, alluding perhaps to the buffoonish figure of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lessons in Darkness (2008) depicts a tree and man melding copulatively into the same matter, expressing notions of cyclical regeneration and an entropic return to origins.

For further information please contact James Cahill on +44 [0] 20 7493 8611 or james@sadiecoles.com
Opening hours Tuesday – Saturday 10 – 6pm

ENDS NEXT WEEK – Rude Britannia: British Comic Art

August 24, 2010 by Kay

Rude Britannia: British Comic Art
Tate Britain
9th June – 5th September 2010

Gasp, cringe, or have a sly chuckle: Rude Britannia will certainly cause a reaction. See politicians brought down to size and the great and the good exposed; blush at the saucy postcards and laugh out loud at the slapstick fun – but watch out for that banana skin!

Put together with some the country’s best-known cartoonists and comedy writers, this exhibition explores British comic art from the 1600s to the present day. Bringing together a wide array of paintings, sculptures, film and photography, as well as graphic art and comic books, the exhibition celebrates a rich history of cartooning and visual jokes.

Looking at comedy that is both timeless and of-its-time, Rude Britannia contrasts contemporary artists such as Angus Fairhurst with key historical pieces, and covers everything from Hogarth to the YBAs.

VIDEO: Tate Shots, Rude Britannia – Gerald Scarfe

FRIDAY: Keep Me Posted, Group Show

2nd July – 26th September 2010

Open Thursday – Sunday 11-5pm or by appointment

KEEP ME POSTED is a group show, directed and curated by Julia Royse, that launches a temporary exhibition space in a former post office in East London entitled POSTED.

POSTED will present a series of art exhibitions, performances, screenings and workshops celebrating the ‘post’ and exploring and examining our postal history and heritage.

For the first show, KEEP ME POSTED, artists – both established and emerging – have been invited to present work that reflects what the notion of post means to them – past and present. Andreas Blank presents a stone carved ‘parcel’ using a former weighing machine as a ready-made plinth; James White’s painting of a ‘scrunched up’ electricity bill is a reflection of the mundane and more unwelcome use of the postal service whereas Rachel Howard’s homage to the ‘penny black’ celebrates our postal heritage. Both Claire Brewster and Miyo Yoshida have made use of the old paraphernalia left behind by the former postmaster and have created installations that recycle and reanimate the ‘postal’ material.

The GPO (General Post Office) used to be a powerful institution in Britain with postman delivering mail up to 8 times a day. It was a highly valued and efficient service for making appointments as well as communicating the usual news and views. The GPO often commissioned leading artists and designers to produce short films and a selection of these inventive and charming works are screened in this first show.
George Bernard Shaw once said, “The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post”, and while we still enjoy studying the idiosyncrasies of handwriting and style of stationery on old correspondence, we are less inclined today to communicate through letters and cards. As a way of encouraging a return to letter writing and to celebrate the joys of sending and receiving letters, a number of artists including Tracey Emin and Georgie Hopton are creating stationery sets that will be on view and available from POSTED. For the same reasons, Oliver Clegg offers a permanent ‘writing station’ complete with hand carved seat on which viewers are encouraged to sit and write and then even post their correspondence in the elegant George V pillar box that stands directly outside the space. Postage stamps will be available!

The exhibitions at POSTED will hopefully inspire people to put pen to paper again as well as reminding us of a time when communication was more personal and less generic.

Artists participating in KEEP ME POSTED include Andreas Blank, Claire Brewster, Jo Broughton, Natasha Chambers, Oliver Clegg, Julie Cockburn, Adam Dix, Itai Doron, Sean Dower, Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst, Vanessa Fristedt, Tom Gidley, Cate Halpin, Susie Hamilton, Georgie Hopton, Rachel Howard, Duncan MacAskill, Harland Miller, Polly Morgan, Benjamin Newton, Molly Palmer, Julia Riddiough, Jane Simpson, James White and Miyo Yoshida.

Julia Royse is currently a director of RS&A Ltd as well as an independent advisor to artists and art collectors. She was a founding director and co- curator of White Cube from 1992 – 2000.

For further information, please contact Julia Royse on +44 (0)7973 490242 or at mail@postedprojects.co.uk

June 30, 2010 by Ellie

CURRENT: First retrospective exhibition of Angus Fairhurst

June 8, 2010 by Kay

M Museum Leuven presents the first selected retrospective exhibition of artist Angus Fairhurst (1966-2008) in Belgium. A wide range of his works will be on show which reflect his vast use of both medium and subject matter, using sculpture, drawing, video, collage, photography to represent themes of nature, sex, death, desire and consumerism. This variety portrays Fairhurst’s resistance of categorisation and leads us to look at his methods of disintegrating the process of creation, allowing his artwork to form it’s own identity, “It’s like saying a word over and over again until it loses its meaning, and then gets it back again” (Angus Fairhurst, 2004).

The Angus Fairhurst exhibition is open until 12th September 2010 at M Museum Leuven. If you can’t make it to Belgium, watch this video showing some of the exhibition artworks with commentary from Pauline Daly and Tom Trevor.

To see Fairhurst works available through Other Criteria, click here.

A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling_II (front) high res

Angus Fairhurst
A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling II, 2003,
bronze
gorilla: 165 x 140 x 105 cm
arm: 31 x 120 x 67 cm
Copyright the Estate of Angus Fairhurst, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

The Problem with Banana Skins

Angus Fairhurst
The Problem With Banana Skins
Divided / Inverted
1998
polyurethane rubber, 36 x 36 x 7 cm
Copyright the Estate of Angus Fairhurst, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Three pages from a magazine, body & text removed med res

Angus Fairhurst
Three Pages from a Magazine, Body and
Text Removed
2003
cut out magazine on paper
29.7 x 22.2 cm
Copyright the Estate of Angus Fairhurst, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

This Does Not Last More Than Five Seconds [Yellow]
2001
watercolour on paper
68.58 x 81.28 cm
unique
Copyright the Estate of Angus Fairhurst, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

PRESS RELEASE:

M presents the first selected retrospective exhibition of artist Angus Fairhurst (1966-2008) in Belgium. One of the most influential members of the group of artists associated with London’s Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s, Fairhurst participated in the seminal exhibition, Freeze, in 1988, which introduced the world to a generation who became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), setting the tone for contemporary art in the UK over the next two decades.

This exhibition will feature examples from across his full body of work, which defied categorisation through its sheer breadth of media and invention: painting, performance, animation, photography, video, sculpture, music, print, wallpaper, drawing, collage. In contrast to the brash shock tactics of many of his contemporaries, Angus Fairhurst was an artist whose work was always a subtle combination of conceptual rigour and formal aesthetic concerns. His intriguing output cannot be placed in a single category or seen from a single perspective. Moreover, the artist often approached his work with a ready, self-parodying wit. Over twenty years, he revisited and reworked different strands of ideas, often to the extent that one set of works might appear to have little or no formal properties in common with any other. His work touches on subjects as varied as the nature of the self, desire, sex and death, the emptiness of expression, and the ubiquity and power of advertising, but always under-scored with a particular sense of the absurd, softened by his singular brand of humour. More

UPCOMING: Rude Britannia at Tate Britain

Screen shot 2010-06-01 at 11.41.23

Rude Britannia: British Comic Art 9th June – 5th September 2010

The room on the Absurd is curated by comedian Harry Hill, and includes such diverse materials as Alice in Wonderland illustrations, David Shrigley’s sculpture, and films by Edwina Ashton and Oliver Michaels. Within the Bawdy, Donald McGill’s smutty seaside postcards can be seen with works by artists as different as Aubrey Beardsley, Sarah Lucas, and Grayson Perry. The rooms exploring Politics, Social Satire and Cruikshank’s Victorian masterpiece The Worship of Bacchus, have been put together with Gerald Scarfe, Steve Bell, and the cartoonists from Viz. These show the power of comic art as a form of social and political commentary throughout history, from satires of Georgian society by Rowlandson and Gillray to Spitting Image’s damning Thatcher puppet.

Looking at comedy that is both timeless and of-its-time, Rude Britannia contrasts contemporary artists such as Angus Fairhurst and John Isaacs with key historical pieces, and covers everything from Hogarth to the YBAs.

To read Will Self’s review of the forthcoming exhibition in The Guardian, click here.

June 1, 2010 by Ellie

FRIDAY: YBA Group Show, Berlin

Opening 30th April 2010, 6-8pm

Coinciding with Berlin’s Gallery Weekend (30th April – 2nd May 2010) Galerie Haas & Fuchs are showing current works by 26 artists that all have one thing in common: they studied under Michael Craig-Martin at Goldsmiths College in London, and many still articulate the enormous influence of Craig-Martin on their artistic development. As an influential art lecturer and internationally acclaimed artist he has selected and brought together for Galerie Haas & Fuchs works by, amongst others, Damien Hirst, Glenn Brown, Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst, Fiona Rae, Angela Bulloch, Julian Opie, Gary Hume and Thomas Demand.

Based upon the fundamentals learnt at Goldsmith’s, Craig-Martin’s former students all work in a variety of media, from painting to sculpture, photography, sound and installation as well as computer film. Their work is characterized both by austerity and concept, whilst also being incredibly sensory, physical and direct. Many works deal thematically with a fascination in pushing boundaries.

Sarah Lucas NUD (24), 2010, Tights, fluff, wire, 45 x 35 x 45 cm, Unique, Photo by Julian Simmons; © Sarah Lucas, Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

The exhibition at Galerie Haas & Fuchs offers an impression of the current practice of the assembled artists: a medicine cabinet by Damien Hirst, a light based wall piece by Angela Bulloch, a minimal gloss on aluminum painting by Gary Hume. Julian Opie presents one of his recent computer generated animations, Sarah Lucas exhibits a body sculpture on a plinth and Fiona Rae shows one of her large abstract works on canvas.

Damien Hirst, In Search of Knowledge, 2007, Stainless steel and glass with plaster, metal and resin pills, 120.3 x 180.3 x 10.2 cm, Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst. All rights reserved, DACS 2010

Participating artists:

Johannes Albers, Tony Bevan, Glenn Brown, Angela Bulloch, Mat Collishaw, Jessica Craig-Martin, Ian Davenport, Peter Davies, Thomas Demand, Angus Fairhurst, Liam Gillick, Mathew Hale, Damien Hirst, Paul Hosking, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, Abigail Lane, Sarah Lucas, Martin Maloney, Lisa Milroy, Julian Opie, Simon Patterson, Richard Patterson, Fiona Rae, Michael Raedecker, Michael Craig-Martin

A book with an essay by Michael Craig-Martin accompanies the exhibition.

Gary Hume, In the Underarm, 2010, Gloss paint on aluminium, 184 x 150 cm © the artist, Photo: Stephen White

April 27, 2010 by Ellie