Exhibitions
Mark Wallinger: Cave
Mark Wallinger has been developing significant interest in his work since coming to prominence in the mid 1980s, exhibiting at both national and international levels. His public sculpture Ecce Homo in Trafalgar Square, London, received considerable acclaim and he has been selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale exhibition in 2001. One of Britain’s most respected contemporary artists, Wallinger has worked across diverse media and is using video as part of his exploration of identity, class and religion. Cave provides British audiences with a timely opportunity to experience the artists’ work. Cave is a new large-scale video installation that displays Wallingers’ hallmark style of an unedited single take with the minimum of manipulation. Wallinger’s reference to sport features significantly in his work. Football and horseracingare used to exaggerate the social divisions of race, class and religion. The artist combines his interest as a fan with critical observation fuelling a personal and passionate interest. Cave develops Wallinger’s use of sport as subject by changing the context in which spectator and viewer interact. The boxing ring is the arena recreated in the gallery space in the form of a large four-screen video installation in which two boxers fight a round at quarter the normal speed. As the three minutes stretch to twelve, it is the clarity of the space itself that comes to impress us. The individual shouts and group encouragement from the audience become animalistic howls as the fight replays in slow motion. Drawing on all the noise and feeling surging in the arena, with its particular sound and imagery, Cave explicitly magnifies the conflicting emotions aroused by the sport, from the collision of desire and disappointment to the coexistence of anticipation and revulsion.
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Marta Marcé: New Work
Marta Marcé’s was born Vilafranca, Barcelona, in 1972 she studied in Barcelona and the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2000. She was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2000. Marcé literally transposes the basic structure of board games and computergames as a starting point for her brightly coloured abstract paintings. She setsclear rules for each one of her paintings. She follows these rules until thegame terminates, which is when she has decided that the painting is finished.Though she is governed by strict criteria, the resulting works are not totally conceptual. The rules set by Marcé allow chance to intervene. She manipulates the unexpected in her paintings by using dice and personal decisions to question the rules as the painting progresses. Marcé´s paintings envelop the idea of expanding the different options of a basic grid as well as enriching it with chance and colour. The grid and concept of leaving things to chance mirrors the realities of Marcé’s life. Marcé's paintings display clearly the set of rules that intervened on its making, and the exact places where those rules were broken. Marcé uses different types of paint and experiments with colour and texture inspired by colours found in her everyday life. Her paintings thus speak about process, freedom and beauty. She is currently working as an artist in residence as part of the Picker Fellowship at Kingston University 2000-2001.
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Abigail Lane: Tomorrow’s World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated)
For her exhibition Tomorrow's World, Yesterday's Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated) British artist Abigail Lane presented a trilogy of theatrical video installations comprising The Figment, The Inclination and The Inspirator. Each looped film projection was set within a sculptural environment in each of MK Gallery's three rooms. These arresting installations extended Lane's preoccupation with the fantastical, the Gothic and the Uncanny and her exploration of the journey from the material to the imaginary world. Two of the three pieces featured were developments of work previously shown in Europe and the United States in other configurations; the third was made specifically for this exhibition in Milton Keynes. For more information about each work please download the press release (right). Artist Information Abigail Lane was born in Penzance in 1967. She emerged during the early 1990s as one of the young British artists (YBAs). With fellow Goldsmiths College London students such as Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas she co-organised the renowned Freeze exhibition of 1988 to show-case their own work. She has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA, where her enigmatic installations have brought her much attention and critical praise. Tomorrow's World, Yesterday's Fever (Mental Guests Incorporated) was a Milton Keynes Gallery / Film and Video Umbrella collaboration. It was subsequently shown at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London, from October – November 2001.
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Andy Warhol: Cars
The Andy Warhol Cars exhibition, sponsored by Mercedes-Benz, opens at Milton Keynes Gallery on Saturday 8 September. The 28 works, comprising 17 silkscreens and 11 drawings of Mercedes-Benz cars date from 1986 and 1987. The exhibition is on loan for two weeks from the DaimlerChrysler Collection in Germany and this is the first time they have been shown in the UK. Cars was Warhol’s last cycle of paintings, remaining incomplete at the time of his death in 1987. Commissioned by Mercedes-Benz in the mid-1980s to celebrate their centenary, the series was to have included 20 different Mercedes models, chosen to document the history of the car. Of the 80 pictures planned, only 36 paintings and 13 drawings featuring 8 different models were finished, and 28 of these will be shown at MK G. The subjects include the earliest three-wheeler Benz of 1886, a Mercedes Touring Car from the 1920s, a classic 1937 racing car, coupes and Formula 1 cars from the 1950s, and finally an experimental Mercedes-Benz from 1970. The resulting canvases of stylishly contoured cars in glowing colours are both sensual and seductive.
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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.
