Exhibitions

Future City

This December, MK Gallery presents Future City, an exhibition and events programme that looks back at the utopian origins of Milton Keynes in order to consider aspects of its future, providing a backdrop for MK Gallery’s exciting expansion plans. The exhibition includes a range of inspiring material from the early days of Milton Keynes, including paintings, drawings and models by artists Boyd & Evans, Stephen Gregory and Helmut Jacoby. This accompanies an insight into the work of architectural practice 6a who have been appointed to design the Gallery’s expansion, with source material from the studio and elements related to previous projects. Alongside these displays is a community section and social space including iconic marketing material from early MK and new contributions from local residents including submissions by Milton Keynes school pupils in response to a ‘Design your MK Gallery’ brief. The exhibition will also provide context for some major wide-ranging, experimental and provocative discussions around Milton Keynes city centre, past, present and future. Speaking about the project, Anthony Spira, Director of MK Gallery said: “It is an honour to bring together such inspiring material and people who are crucial to the past, present and future success of Milton Keynes. We are delighted that the Gallery can play a role in this exciting development and that our expansion can make a real difference to the city centre.”

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Treasures in MK

Treasures in MK is MK Gallery’s surprising and extraordinary exhibition for the start of 2014. It features an exceptional range of art works - spanning almost an entire millennium - selected from over 50 collections within Buckinghamshire, mostly in private hands. This unique exhibition is effectively mobilising a community of art lovers at the heart of the newly emerging city of Milton Keynes. MK Gallery is renowned for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, but this exhibition combines historical items with the contemporary, in anticipation of the broader programme that will be presented on completion of the Gallery’s ambitious expansion plans. Like a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, the exhibition brings together an eclectic array of objects and focuses on the fascinating stories behind the works. Old Masters such as Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, William Hogarth and John Everett Millais rub shoulders with Modern Masters from Picasso and Matisse to Andy Warhol. Other extraordinary items include the Boarstall Cartulary from the 11th century which featured in the BBC’s History of the World; memorabilia from ‘godfather of British aviation’ Frank McLean’s hair-raising flights under the bridges on the River Thames; taxidermied pelicans from a private zoo; an Aston Martin DB4 on loan from Aston Martin Works Service and a unique self-portrait by David Bowie from a private collection. These extraordinary artworks and objects are supplemented with additional work from local collections such as the Open University, Waddesdon Manor and Buckinghamshire County Museum. Speaking about the exhibition, Anthony Spira, Director of MK Gallery said: “Treasures in MK is the second of a two-part programme about art in and around Milton Keynes. Earlier this summer, part one, MK Calling, featured over 100 artists from Milton Keynes in a festival of art, music, dance, poetry and much, much more. We hope that by working intensively with both artists and collectors around Milton Keynes, we can build and nurture a strong, dynamic and thriving artistic community in the build up to the much needed expansion of the Gallery’s facilities. This ambitious £10m project is scheduled to open in 2017 to celebrate the city’s 50th anniversary.”

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Melanie Smith

This spring, Milton Keynes Gallery presents the first major survey exhibition in the UK by Melanie Smith, one of Mexico’s most celebrated contemporary artists, including the premiere of a new film, Fordlandia (2014), commissioned by MK Gallery. Melanie Smith (born Poole, UK, 1965), has lived and worked in Mexico City for the last 25 years, and represented Mexico at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. She works in a variety of media – painting and photography alongside film, video and installation - and exhibits regularly in the United States, Europe and Mexico, with works held in major museum collections worldwide. This exhibition focuses on works made since 1994 that relate to the artist’s own experience of migration; travel, adventure and utopian aspiration combine with disorientation, dislocation and abstraction in the search for a brave new world. The video Spiral City (2002) shot from a helicopter as it circles above the urban sprawl of Mexico City shows an aerial view of the city’s streets and buildings slowly fading to white as the camera spirals higher and higher. The film Xilitla (2010) features the ‘Garden of Eden’ in the Mexican jungle populated with architectural follies by the British poet turned Surrealist collector, Edward James, between 1949 and 1984. The new film Fordlandia (2014) was shot in the Brazilian Amazon amidst the remains of an aborted city and rubber plantation built in the 1920s by the car manufacturer, Henry Ford. Alongside these films, a number of large museological vitrines contain hundreds of objects, paintings, photographs, collages and clips that build up an accumulated and evocative material culture, where archaeological remains and personal records mingle with tourist souvenirs as the eager process of excavation and discovery melds into a faded and enigmatic sense of the past.  

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Cadences

MK Gallery’s summer exhibition, Cadences (27 June – 7 September 2014), brings together a selection of 40 historical and modern works on loan from one of Holland’s most illustrious collections - the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam - alongside a contemporary film, Flight by Catherine Yass, a British artist who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002. The paintings, prints and ceramics from the museum range from Old Master artists Neri di Bicci, Adriaen Collaert, Hendrick Goltzius, Frans Huys, Willem van Mieris and Crispijn de Passe to Modern artists Constant, M.C. Escher, Lucio Fontana, Bruce Nauman and Bridget Riley. Many of the works share themes of flight, falling, destruction and gravity. The earliest work in the exhibition, by the Italian Old Master Neri di Bicci, is The fall of the rebel angels with St Michael fighting the dragon, (c.1480). Originally part of a larger alterpiece, it shows angels falling awkwardly from the sky whilst the Archangel Michael vanquishes Satan in the guise of a dragon. The exhibition also includes various representations of the Greek myth of Icarus, whose wax and feather wings melted when he flew too close to the sun, such as Frans Huys’s Armed Three-master with Daedalus and Icarus in the Sky c.1561-62 and Icarus ,1588 by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617). Related contemporary works include, Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970) showing the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader falling off the roof of a house or Tulips (1965), a film from Wim van der Linden’s acclaimed series Sad Movies where a petal falls off a tulip as the soundtrack reaches a climax. Other works in the exhibition revolve around flight such as Day and Night, 1938, by Dutch graphic artist, M.C. Escher (1898–1972), an optical illusion showing a flock of birds flying in opposite directions: black birds semi-silhouetted by day to the left and white birds by night to the right. Other examples include Bird, 1949, and Wounded Pigeon, 1951 both expressive, naive paintings by Constant A. Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005) and Wassily Kandinsky’s 1930 painting, Launisch of an ambiguous aquatic or air-bound vessel. Catherine Yass (b.1963) is a leading contemporary photographer and filmmaker, known for her films and light boxes of architectural space and its psychological impact. Her film Flight (2002), created as part of the ‘Artists on Site’ BBC Public Art Programme, was captured in just one take. Attaching a camera to a model remote-control helicopter, it swoops over roof tops, providing a dizzying and disorienting bird’s-eye view of London. Cadences will be accompanied by a diverse public events programme, including a solo-voice theatre performance by Melanie Pappenheim featuring three songs about hitting the ground. This musical and visual ensemble is co-commissioned by Milton Keynes’ biennial international festival – MKIF 2014 – and MK Gallery

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An-My Lê

Born in Vietnam in 1960, Vietnamese-American artist An-My Lê’s adolescence was marked by conflict. In Saigon, she grew up experiencing nightly mortar attacks and the daily presence of American soldiers. In 1975, the final year of the war, she and her family were among those airlifted to safety and they finally settled in the United States as political refugees. An-My Lê graduated in biology from Stanford, before turning to photography, which she studied at Yale University. The recipient of many awards, including the prestigious MacArthur Genius Award (2012), she is widely recognised as one of the most significant photographers working in the world today. This exhibition surveys four major series: peaceful scenes evocative of conflict, in Viêt Nam, (1994–1998); fictional scenes staged by hobbyist war re-enactors in Small Wars, (1999-2002); a film showing the American military training for the Iraq war in 29 Palms, (2003-2004); and the most comprehensive showing yet of Events Ashore (2005-2014), a magnum opus, ten years in the making, which depicts the US navy on missions across the globe. Also shown for the first time are drawings by An-My Lê inspired by images and texts engraved on replicas of zippo lighters owned by American troops in Vietnam. Lê has consistently explored the myth and memory of war through photography and film. While her personal experience of conflict has shaped both her life and her artistic subject matter, Lê’s work transcends that personal story. She avoids simple representations and simple judgements about the US military machine, and, like many great photographers maintains a certain distance from her subject in order to create nuanced pictures. ‘My goal has been to... address issues of power and fragility. My intention is not to dictate a message. It is a call for perspective, not a call to action.’ The exhibition has been programmed to coincide with the centenary of the First World War, and will subsequently be presented at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden (20 February – 17 May 2015). An-My Lê's work will be included in Tate Modern’s group exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography (26 November 2014 – 15 March 2014).

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How to Construct a Time Machine

This January MK Gallery presents How to Construct a Time Machine, an exhibition of over twenty-five historical and contemporary works that explore how artists play with media in innovative ways to transform our experience of time. What is time? How do we order the past, the present, and the future? Why are artists interested in time? How is art a machine, vehicle, or device for exploring time? How is art a means by which time ‘travels’, and how does art permit us to travel in time? Consideration of these and other questions has provided the exhibition rationale for guest curator, Dr Marquard Smith, Head of Doctoral Studies/Research Leader in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London. The show’s title is taken from an 1899 text by the avant-garde French writer, Alfred Jarry, written in direct response to H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel The Time Machine (1895). Wells invented and popularised a distinctively modern, fictional concept of time travel, with the time machine as a vehicle that could be operated ‘selectively’. Jarry’s response crafted a pseudo-scientific fiction that presents the time machine and time travel as an instance of ‘the science of imaginary solutions’. Taking this idea of the time machine, time travel, and perhaps even time itself as an instance of ‘the science of imaginary solutions’, the exhibition is divided thematically across the galleries and includes works by John Cage, Martin John Callanan, Jim Campbell, Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, Mat Collishaw, Ruth Ewan, Tehching Hsieh, On Kawara, the Lumière Brothers, Chris Marker, Kris Martin, Georges Méliès, Manfred Mohr, Melvin Moti, Nam June Paik, Katie Paterson, Elizabeth Price, Sun Ra, Raqs Media Collective, Meekyoung Shin, Maja Smrekar, The Otolith Group, Thomson & Craighead, Mark Wallinger and Catherine Yass. Film work ranges from George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902), an iconic silent movie which follows a group of astronomers as they explore the moon, to Thomson & Craighead’s The Time Machine in alphabetical order (2010), a complete rendition of the 1960s film version of the Wells’ novella re-edited into alphabetical order. Sculptural work includes Mark Wallinger’s Time and Relative Dimensions in Space (2001), a polished stainless steel version of Dr Who’s ‘Tardis’ police box that simultaneously disappears into the space-time continuum and reflects its own surroundings, and Ruth Ewan’s We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be (2012), a decimal clock which divides the day into ten (rather than twenty-four) periods, echoing a bold 18th century French Republican attempt to redefine and rationalise the day. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, designed by Herman Lelie, featuring an extended Introduction by the exhibition’s curator and a translation of Jarry’s How to Construct a Time Machine, together with essays by Dutch cultural theorist and video artist Mieke Bal and radical philosopher Peter Osborne. The exhibition will be supported by a range of related events including tours by the curator and artists, seminars, academic conferences, and film screenings.

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Ellen Altfest

This spring MK Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery of paintings by Ellen Altfest (born New York City, 1970). The exhibition will include early paintings of rocks and trees in the landscape, paintings of plants and gourds in the studio, and works from a series of male nude studies that Altfest first began in 2006. Altfest’s work calls to mind the precise naturalism of early Lucian Freud, and finds affinities in others who painted from life such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Stanley Spencer, but she has developed her own distinct approach to figurative and representational painting since graduating with an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1997. In Milton Keynes, Altfest will be showing almost twenty oil paintings from 1998 to the present, including three new works. Altfest’s small-scale oil-paintings are painstakingly executed and drawn from life and realised over a long period of time. Compositionally, images are tightly cropped and framed. Folds of skin, tufts of hair and surfaces of bark are deeply scrutinized and rendered in exquisite, almost excessive, detail so that the subjects can appear both familiar and unfamiliar. But, as observed by American art historian and poet Barry Schwabsky, Altfest’s work is perhaps best considered as being ‘image-based’, rather than representational in the sense of the Western art tradition that developed from the Renaissance. Altfest titles all her works with a blunt descriptiveness: Gourds, Armpit, Two Logs, Green Plant, Penis, The Hand, and Torso, for example. When painting the human body, Altfest frequently represents hirsute male models. In their immensely topographic detail, these images oscillate between desire and detachment. In Penis (2006), every strand of the model’s hair and folds of the scrotum are depicted with the same immeasurable care as each tangled stem or stalk of an uprooted tumbleweed. Altfest has commented that ‘The paintings of men seem to have an inverse relationship to still life, with the men becoming less like human subjects and more like still life objects.’ The exhibition will be accompanied by a range of related events, including an opportunity to hear the artist In Conversation, and a publication containing texts by Ellen Altfest, Barry Schwabsky, Linda Nochlin and Morgan Falconer amongst others.

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MK Calling 2015

This summer MK Gallery presents the work of almost 70 artists, musicians and performers from Milton Keynes in MK Calling 2015. This exciting show selected from an Open Call for submissions, is designed to explore the breadth of creativity in or inspired by Milton Keynes. The event builds on the hugely popular MK Calling exhibition in the summer of 2013, with approximately a third of the exhibitors making a welcome return. This year is characterised by a higher proportion of artists than performers, and work by talented amateurs will sit alongside that of recent graduates through to established practitioners. The selected work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film, sound, photography, poetry, music and performance, which will be presented in broad thematic groupings, such as figures, landscape and geometry/abstraction. This year’s exhibition marks the end of the Gallery building in its current form, before work begins on the Gallery’s expansion. The ambitious new Gallery will open in 2017 as part of the celebrations for MK50 - the city’s fiftieth anniversary year. Speaking about the exhibition, MK Gallery’s Director Anthony Spira, said: “MK Calling 2015 provides a great opportunity for artists and audiences in Milton Keynes to meet, share ideas, and participate in workshops, training and mentoring. This project celebrates the end of the first phase of the Gallery’s history and launches our exciting expansion.”

MK Calling 2015 Participants

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MK Calling 2017

This spring, MK Gallery showcases new and exciting work by over 70 emerging and established artists in MK Calling 2017. This exhibition is designed to celebrate the breadth of creativity around Milton Keynes and will include a wide range of art forms alongside a dynamic programme of events and participatory sessions. Building on the highly popular MK Calling exhibitions in the summer of 2013 and 2015, this year’s show will see artists utilise and transform unusual spaces within the Gallery. Provocative, humorous, sensitive and brash, the exhibition includes artists of all backgrounds; all of whom have a connection to the city, either through locality or their practice. Diverse themes and subjects will be explored through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, installation and much more. Many of the artists have chosen to respond directly to MK Gallery and its expansion plans and will present site-specific work that looks at architecture and the fabric of the building in its current form. Over the last few months, the Gallery has been examined by architects and builders through digging, drilling and other physical interventions to test the foundations, structure and services in anticipation of our major expansion. For this exhibition, the basic access and health and safety have been temporarily restored to enable the building to be opened up for one last time before construction begins. With the exhibition designed to make the most of the makeshift quality of the building, artists and visitors will have exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the entire ground floor, including the old workshop, loading bay, shop and other improvised areas. Speaking about the exhibition, MK Gallery’s Director Anthony Spira, said: “We’re delighted to celebrate both the 50th anniversary of Milton Keynes and this exciting chapter in the Gallery’s development by bringing together the diverse creative community for MK Calling 2017 and offering opportunities for all those with a connection to the city to meet, share ideas, network and participate in mentoring and workshops.”

MK Calling 2017 Participants

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Vivian Maier: Anthology

10am – 5pm

The exhibition at MK Gallery features over 140 black and white and colour photographs, as well as film and audio which reveal the breadth of Maier’s work and her fascination for observing and recording everyday life.

Exhibition events

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The Lie of the Land

Through a playful and provocative display The Lie of the Land charts how British landscape was radically transformed by changes in free time and leisure activities since hunting and shooting, the recreations of the aristocracy, were enjoyed on the rolling hills of their private estates. In part, tracing a line between Capability Brown’s aristocratic gardens at Stowe and the social, urban experiment at neighbouring Milton Keynes, the exhibition teases out the aspirations that underpin our built environments. The Lie of the Land examines the modernisation of leisure propelled by industrialisation, a theme developed from Canaletto’s painting of the fashionable public entertainment venue, Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. The Victorian era, with its social reforms aiming to improve urban living conditions, is represented by the Parks Movement. Alongside works by early science fiction writer Jane Loudon and the founder of the Garden City Movement Ebenezer Howard, the exhibition also includes the first-ever lawnmower, John Ruskin’s rock collection and influential horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll’s gardening boots. From the late-18th century, large-scale public spectacles became hugely popular as a result of technical advances. Hot air ballooning, horse racing and concerts heralded the commodification of leisure. By contrast, grassroots-initiated activity such as raves, carnivals and urban sports are traced in the work of, for example, Jeremy Deller and Errol Lloyd and use of public spaces for protest are explored, including the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp occupation. As the 20th century progressed, in Milton Keynes, chief architect Derek Walker proposed a city greener than the surrounding countryside where cars, electronic communication and nature reinvented the idea of the town-country for the 1970s. Radical urban theory was to be combined with the LA lifestyle and the thrill of pop culture – also reflected in the art of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. The Lie of the Land highlights campaigns to democratise space, from the 17th century egalitarian Levellers to the 1930s Ramblers. We look at how people use public space, and the communities that have been excluded through structures of race, gender, disability and class, explored in works by artists including Jo Spence, Rose Finn-Kelcey and Ingrid Pollard. Overall, the exhibition aims to capture a visionary spirit of grand designs tempered by the realities of political expediency. Public resources are under increasing pressure and ‘placemaking’ and ‘regeneration’ remain central to urban development. The Lie of the Land looks reflexively at the role of culture in this process, drawing inspiration and seeking lessons from the past. Artists and designers: Edward Alcock, David Alesworth, Archigram, Edwin Beard Budding, John Berger, James Boswell, Boyd & Evans, Charles and Sarah Bridgeman, Thalia Campbell, Canaletto, Philip Castle, Ithell Colquhoun, John Csaky, Caroline Devine*, Jeremy Deller, Sarah Ann Drake, Malcolm Drummond, Susanna Duncombe, Rose English, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Elisabeth Frink, William Powell Frith, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Gainsborough, Walter Goodall, Walter Greaves, Richard Hamilton, Emma Hart, Ebenezer Howard, Julius Caesar Ibbetson, Helmut Jacoby, Bob Jardine, Gertrude Jekyll, Gareth Jones, Michael Kirkham, Laura Knight, Mabel Francis Layng, Ann Lee, Lawrence Lek, Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, Linder, Errol Lloyd, Jane Loudon, John Loudon, Laurence Stephen Lowry,  Edwin Lutyens, Andrew Mahaddie, Mark Leckey and Martin McGeown, Robert Medley, Brian Milne, Henry Moore, Marlow Moss, Joseph Nash, Paul Nash, Balthazar Nebot, Nils Norman, Marianne North, Eduardo Paolozzi, Joseph Paxton, Olivia Plender, Ingrid Pollard, Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price, Project Art Works, Jacques Rigaud, Bridget Riley, John Robertson Reid, William Patrick Roberts, John Ruskin, Benton Seeley, Yinka Shonibare CBE, David Shrigley, Alison and Peter Smithson, Jo Spence, Thomas Struth, Superstudio, James Tissot, James Walker Tucker, Joseph Mallord William Turner, John A. Walker, Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, Ed Webb-Ingall, Carel Weight, Stuart Whipps, Rachel Whiteread, Althea Willoughby, Audrey Weber, Stephen Willats, Harold Williamson, John Wootton, James Wyld, John Yeadon Curatorial team: Fay Blanchard, Tom Emerson, Niall Hobhouse, Sam Jacob, Gareth Jones, Anthony Spira, and Claire Louise Staunton.

This exhibition was made possible with support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Research Grant from Art Fund.

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Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance

Showing works spanning her entire career since the 1960s, this is the first major retrospective of Rego’s work in England for over 20 years. The exhibition includes previously unseen paintings and works on paper from the artist’s family and close friends, which reflect Rego’s perspective as a woman immersed in urgent social issues and current affairs. The selection of works focuses on the moral challenges to humanity, particularly in the face of violence, gender discrimination and political tyranny. There are paintings and etchings related to children sold into slavery in North Africa (1996-98), abortion (1998-2000) and female genital mutilation (from 2009). Many of the images begin with the artist’s Portuguese roots and childhood experiences or respond to current affairs. This exhibition addresses challenging subjects. Parental and carer discretion may be required. MK Gallery will be the only venue in England for the exhibition which will subsequently travel to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin where it will be the first ever retrospective of Rego’s work in Scotland and Ireland.

An exhibition organised with the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. This exhibition has been made possible as a result of the Government Indemnity Scheme. MK Gallery would like to thank HM Government for providing Government Indemnity and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and Arts Council England for arranging the indemnity.

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