Exhibitions
The Silbury Group: 10th Anniversary Exhibition
This December there is an opportunity to see a huge variety of work by past and present members of the Silbury Group of Artists. The Group, which began in 1991 as a handful of artists based in the Milton Keynes area, eager to make connections, to find studios and to have somewhere to show their work. The Silbury Group has evolved into one of the longest running artist collectives in the country. With a consistent membership of around thirty, it continues to be led and administered by artists. It has an impressive record of exhibitions, international exchanges, residencies and educational and community projects. It also provides artistic links to and with local and national organisations. The Silbury Group is currently based at Westbury Farm Studios, where fifteen membershave studio spaces. This congenial environment provides a forum for discussion, opportunities to share resources and to work on collaborative projects. The Group has a strong local identity and, most effectively, offers the community access to professional artists, providing temporary studio space, exhibition facilities and educational events. This exhibition demonstrates the diversity and collective strength of its past and present members. This marks an important milestone for the Silbury Group and confirms Milton Keynes as a culturally rich place in which to live, work and exhibit as a practicing artist.
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Art Crazy Nation Show, Curated by Matthew Collings
Artist, broadcaster and writer Matthew Collings, most recently in the public eye as the presenter of Channel Four’s Turner Prize Award programme, has selected an exhibition for Milton Keynes Gallery this January. Art Crazy Nation Show features the work of some of the artists included in his recently published book Art Crazy Nation: the post-Blimey! art world. For the exhibition Collings has deliberately selected work which encompasses both extremes of contemporary British art. He includes glamorous celebrity-artists such as Sarah Lucas, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Gilbert & George, alongside marginalised, old-style lyrical abstract painters such as John McLean, Gary Wragg and Geoff Rigden. He says of its content: “The works in this show are very different to one another. Some are more aesthetic. Some are more poetic. But with all of them I think that there is a secret visual quality which is important. The nation is crazy about art now, but they don’t really know what it is that they are looking at.” Collings believes that what makes art important and worth looking at is not a single impact ‘hit’ which any idiot in the media can understand, but rather art’s depth and range of feeling. If there was a new political party for the end of art being popular, he says he would be head of it. He asks, “Why not just let something be itself?” He is profoundly sorry if he ever had anything to do with art’s current popularity. The exhibiting artists are: Bank, Simon Bill, Merlin Carpenter, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gilbert & George, Alan Kane, Simon Linke, Colin Lowe / Roddy Thompson, Sarah Lucas, John McLean, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Darren Phizacklea / Rory Macbeth, Geoff Rigden, John Russell + Fabienne Audéoud, Bob and Roberta Smith, Sarah Staton, Gary Wragg. Visitors will be able to see work in a variety of media including painting, sculpture and installation
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Dalziel + Scullion: Home
A collaboration between MK Gallery, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and Manchester Art Gallery. Home is an exhibition devoted to the work of Scottish artists Dalziel + Scullion. It features a body of new work recently commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, and includes video projections, large-scale sculptural pieces and photographic works. It will occupy all three of MK G’s elegant gallery spaces. Dalziel + Scullion’s art presents a rediscovery of landscape, both as a visual theme and as a means of reflecting on fundamental ideas about the world we live in today.At the heart of their work is a fascination with time-scales, such as the vast gap that exists between the limit of a human life-span and the incomprehensible span of geological processes and creation. The majority of their work to date has featured the north east of Scotland, but many of the new pieces are set against the backdrop of the magnificent glacial landscape of northern Scandinavia. Speaking of their work the artists say, “Over the last three years we have made aseries of trips to Norway, in particular to the area south east of the enormous Jostedalsbreen glacier. There we found landscapes that were reminiscent of places in Scotland, however the act of creation was still very active in these valleys. The vast presence of the glacier was everywhere – its physical form as immense as acity, but vulnerable to the vagaries of a few degrees of temperature change. Its energy was grindingly slow, yet powerful enough to wrench apart mountains. It seemed to be at odds with the speed and transience of our modern lives, but at the same time it acts as a metaphor of our own conscious life, of our own capabilities for change and renewal.” In the book which accompanies the exhibition Keith Hartley observes “…, ultimately, the general tenor of their work is one of an informed and guarded optimism. If wecan only learn to use modern technology to get closer to understanding Nature, there is hope for humanity. Dalziel and Scullion’s work provides highly poetic and resonant metaphors for that closer relationship.” Matthew Dalziel + Louise Scullion trained in Dundee and Glasgow respectively, and have worked together since 1993. They have exhibited both in the UK and abroad, including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bristol, Rome, Melbourne and Tokyo. Home was first seen at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and will be shown at Manchester Art Gallery from December 2002 - February 2003. It is funded by the Henry Moore Foundation and the National Touring Programme through the Arts Council of England and Dalziel + Scullion were assisted by a Scottish Arts Council Visual Artists’ Award.
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Tim Noble & Sue Webster: Ghastly Arrangements
Tim Noble & Sue Webster are two of the most successful and intriguing artists on the UK contemporary art scene. Fresh from the success of their recent show Instant Gratification in Los Angeles, they have just opened a UK version called Ghastly Arrangements at Milton Keynes Gallery. Their work includes unusually formed shadow pieces, casting self portrait silhouettes made out of cash, or artificial fruit or flowers, and a huge 20 foot neon flashing sign spelling out the work Forever.
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Air Guitar: Art Reconsidering Rock Music
This exhibition explored the relationship between contemporary art and rock music from the perspective of the artist as rock music fan. The show examined how music from the 1970s, '80s and '90s provided an enduring frame of reference for a generation of visual artists. Curated by Emma Mahony for MK Gallery, Air Guitar brought together work by emerging and well-established artists, including Bob & Roberta Smith, Luke Caulfield, Sam Durant, Christian Marclay, Seamus Nicolson and Jessica Voorsanger. Most of the pieces shown had been made within the preceding few years, and encompassed photography, video, painting, drawing and neon work. The related events programme included a talk by Kevin Cummins and Bill Drummond on 17 July and a tour of the exhibition by Emma Mahony on 20 July.
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Jiri Georg Dokoupil: Every Cloud is a Way
Bubbles, breast milk, fruit juice, rust, tyre prints and candle soot are just some of the media used in the work of Jiri Georg Dokoupil, whose work will be presented at Milton Keynes Gallery this autumn. It will be his first solo show in a UK public gallery. Dokoupil (b.1954) is an established contemporary artist who has built up an illustrious international career in Europe and the USA. His work radiates a playful inventiveness and creative pleasure. Using a diverse range of styles, he has demonstrated through his exhibitions of the 1980s and 1990s that his ongoing preoccupation is with painting - and an exploration of the processes involved. A sizeable retrospective of Dokoupil’s work, co-organised by MK G, has just opened at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands. MK G’s autumn exhibition will draw from this retrospective, but rather than including everything, MK G has decided to focus on several series of paintings which can be shown to best advantage in its three distinctive gallery spaces. Dokoupil is prepared to state that pleasure is perhaps the main driving force behind his activities as an artist. This will be fully evident to visitors to MK G in the Long Gallery which will be used to display the series of Soap Bubble Paintings – made using ink and soap suds on canvas. Their free floating shapes, colour and scale are bound to delight and inspire pleasure in the viewer. With titles such as Friday - In Front of You, Saturday - Simmer and Glide and Sunday - Back from Switzerland they may also induce a certain reverie. The Middle Gallery will contain the Tyre Paintings, formed from tyre prints on canvas. Some are very dark and dense, such as Black Wall (1991), whilst others are more spare and colourful, such as The Wedding (1991). The Cube Gallery will be used to display the Soot Paintings. To make these, Dokoupil suspends canvases on his studio ceiling, projects images onto them, and then working above his head with a candle flame rather like a paintbrush, traces the image using the soot rising from the flame. The subjects of these works tend to be rather more sombre and reflective, such as Train Accident in Siberia (1989), Illegal Immigrant - Coming to Germany (1993), Self-portrait with Skull (Arrugadic) (2000) and Napoleon (Arrugadic) (2000). The Foyer and Link areas of the Gallery will also be used to display paintings whose prints or marks have been made using such substances as fruit juice, breast milk, water and fire, for example 170 Apples (1992). Whilst fully aware of modernist concepts and contemporary art theory, Dokoupil prefers to take a lighter rather than a weightier approach to such issues. The experimentation with styles, techniques, themes and symbols represents a flowering of his artistic curiosity and inventiveness. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by the Centraal Museum, Utrecht.
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Boyd Webb: Horse & Dog
Horse & Dog is the latest in a series of films by the internationally acclaimed artist, filmmaker and photographer, Boyd Webb. Distinctively offbeat, droll and engaging, Horse & Dog revels in the kind of elegantly observed absurdities that have long been a feature of Webb’s photographic works. The film’s action revolves around a horse and dog and their ill-fated camping expedition to the country. Over the course of their holiday weekend, the two animals suffer the discomfort and indignities usually associated with camping; they struggle to pitch a tent, are accosted by insects, squabble and bicker about their sleeping arrangements and finally return home early. Combining knockabout physicality with the artist’s trademark visual invention and sly, sardonic humour, this cameo of man’s best friends offers a vivid reminder of the eccentricities of human behaviour. Horse & Dog has been filmed on location in Sussex with a professional cast and crew and the finished work will be projected in the Cube and Middle Galleries. It has been commissioned by the Estorick Collection, Film and Video Umbrella and The Laboratory at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford in association with the De La Warr Pavilion and Milton Keynes Gallery. Examples of Boyd Webb’s photographic work from the 1970s will be shown in the Middle Gallery. Taking the absurdities of human behaviour as his starting point, Boyd Webb created at the beginning of his career a series of “staged photo-events” which show a quirky world view and off-beat sense of humour very like that of Horse & Dog.
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Georgie Hopton: Laughed – I Could Have Cried
MK G starts the new year with solo exhibitions from London-based artists Sarah Staton and Georgie Hopton. The two shows will be the largest surveys of each artist’s work to date, giving an overview of their practice in the last 10-15 years and reflecting the scope and diversity of their careers so far. Georgie Hopton combines playfulness with tragedy, creating pieces in which humour and sadness collide. Like Sarah Staton, she works in a variety of media and will be showing paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs in the Cube and Middle Galleries. Her continual re-workings of her own and other artists’ work results in a circular vision tinged with the pathos of what she calls “l’homage pathétique”. For Hopton, it is this process of re-working existing pieces which gives her work its flavour of comic sadness. The idea of nature morte, which she takes literally as meaning “deadlife”, has inspired much of her work over the last few years. Painted clay jugs, skulls, flowers and apples sit listlessly, shadowed by neighbouring fake bronze palettes and logs. A Pierrot watches sadly over the scene, Harlequin’s batons lean, immobile, against a wall. Life, as revealed in Hopton’s exhibition, is a circus, with all its ups and downs, misery and hilarity.
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Sarah Lucas, Colin Lowe & Roddy Thomson: Temple of Bacchus
Temple of Bacchus presents all new work by Sarah Lucas, Colin Lowe and Roddy Thomson. The exhibition comprises individual and collective pieces, and the artists have collaborated on the show’s overall conception, themes and installation. Thomas Brown noted of London in 1730 that “to see the number of taverns, alehouses etc. he would imagine Bacchus to be the only god worshipp’d there”. (Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography). “Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly, gloomily and heavily, and everyone is strangely silent. Only curses and bloody brawls occasionally break that suspicious and oppressively sad silence....Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility.... Wives in no way lag behind their husbands and all get drunk together, while children crawl and run among them.’’ Dostoevsky on the English pub in Summer Impressions (quoted in Jeremy Paxman, The English). Sarah Lucas shares with Lowe and Thomson a subversive use of humour to unsettle and provoke. All three artists confront conventional interpretations of familiar imagery and are interested in the commonplace, the common man. Lucas’s provocative sculptures have used appropriated objects and common materials to form visual puns concerning sex, death and gender but her most recent exhibition, Charlie George (Berlin 2002), introduced new elements into her work such as the semantics of the seventies and football culture. Lucas’s individual and collaborative work for Temple of Bacchus, continues to look at established English imagery – high and low – with new considerations of St George and the Dragon and the pub drunk. Colin Lowe and Roddy Thomson met at St Martin’s School of Art in the late 1980s but only began to work together a few years later. Their work is often text-based and frequently humorous. The Hurangutang Letters, a collection of pleas for corporate sponsorship and other correspondence, was shown in City Racing: A Partial Account at the ICA in 2000 and recently in To whom it may concern at CCAC Whattis Institute in San Francisco, both curated by Matthew Higgs. Their mobile bar, The Dark Throttle, was commissioned by BBC4 and shown at the Royal Academy’s Galleries Show last autumn. Matthew Collings, who included Lowe and Thomson’s piece Enthusanasia in Art Crazy Nation Show at MK Gallery last year, has said of their work that it “seems to distil that excellent moment when the first couple of drinks kick in and any thought that occurs seems funny, creative and inspired. Drink, its comedy and its tragedy, is often the subject of their work but it’s not their only subject. No artist has ever expressed the pathos, self-doubt, delusion, fear, strivings and ambition of creativity with such a light and bitter touch”.
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Tony Beavan
Tony Bevan is one of Britain’s most distinguished contemporary painters. Born in Bradford in 1951, he trained at the Slade School of Art and has exhibited widely since his first solo showin 1976. This year Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal is celebrating his prolific career with a retrospective of paintings and drawings (14 April – 26 June). MK G’s exhibition will focus on the very large-scale paintings which Bevan has made in the last 5-10 years of his career, some of which he has never been able to show before due to their size, including one new piece. The human figure, particularly the head, has occupied Bevan for much of his career. Many ofhis paintings show heads, often with elongated necks, reaching upwards or outwards into the blank space of the rest of the canvas. They are powerfully suggestive of isolation and suffering, but also offer the hope of human resilience and the will to survive. In the last decade or so Bevan has also been concentrating on the interiors of buildings, producing monochromatic, stark canvases which focus on the structural elements of an interior and inwhich repeating patterns are emphasised. All the works due to be shown at MK G deal withthese two subjects. Bevan paints on a monumentally large scale, laying his canvases out on the ground as wellas pinning them to the wall in a manner reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. Bevan’s emphasison materials has led him to make his own paint and to insist on the different quality of marks generated by charcoal made of different woods. He makes no attempt to conceal the fall-out of the painting process – his canvases are littered with small fragments of charcoal, studio dust and other debris which testify to the physicality of the process. The strong visual impact and large scale of Bevan’s work will be complemented by the clean elegance of MK G’s three gallery spaces. Although inspired by a diverse range of art historical sources, including Mantegna, Holbein, Géricault, Manet and Bacon, Bevan is well known for his highly distinctive, wholly original style. He pushes the boundaries between drawing and painting, representation andabstraction in ways which make his limited subject-matter seem full of meaning and possibility.
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Paul Seawright: Hidden
Milton Keynes Gallery’s summer exhibitions take the visitor from one extreme of contemporary photography to another. Paul Seawright’s documentation of Afghanistan after the conflict of 2001 concentrates on its heavily mined, desert landscapes while the John Hinde Butlin’s photographs of holiday camps are saturated with bright colour. MK G has deliberately programmed these shows alongside each other to demonstrate the great variety of subjects and styles which contemporary photography can embrace, and will continue its photography season into the autumn with new work by Juergen Teller. There is an opportunity to find out more about photography as an art form at an informal illustrated talk at MK G on 13 August, given by Mark Haworth-Booth. Paul Seawright is Head of the Centre for Photographic Research at University of Wales College, Newport and is one of the artists currently representing Wales at this year’s Venice Biennale exhibition. Last year he was commissioned by the Art Commissions Committee of the Imperial War Museum to respond to the attacks of September 11th and the war in Afghanistan. His photographs of the Afghan desert attempt to capture the hidden menace of its mined landscape. On the face of it, the desert appears bleak, empty and sun-bleached; below the surface, however, it teems with lethal explosives. This conflict between the seen and the unseen is Seawright’s main preoccupation in Hidden. The resulting images are powerfully evocative of the terrible calm which follows an explosion of violence. Their bleak grandeur speaks eloquently and movingly about war and its aftermath. Hidden has been organised by the Imperial War Museum, ffotogallery and the IrishMuseum of Modern Art, Dublin. The exhibition tour has been organised in collaboration with ffotogallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Oriel Mostyn Gallery.
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Juergen Teller: Don’t Suffer Too Much
This exhibition presented new work by German-born artist Juergen Teller, best-known as one of the most influential fashion photographers of the preceding fifteen years. The exhibition featured self-portraits, together with shots of football celebrities and images of Teller's family, including one of his mother by his father's grave. A new film by Teller was screened in the Long Gallery. In it a video camera was trained on Teller for a full 94 minutes while he watched the 2002 World Cup Final between Germany and Brazil, live. Describing the video as "the most disturbing thing I have ever seen" and shocked by the pure animal instincts it reveals, Teller offered an extraordinarily cruel yet mesmerising self-portrait as he shouted and swore during the TV match commentary.
