Exhibitions

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.

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Larry Achiampong: Wayfinder

10am – 5pm

British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong works in film, sculpture, installation, sound, collage, music and performance. His work draws on popular culture and his communal and personal heritage.

Included in his first major UK solo show to date is Achiampong’s debut feature length film Wayfinder, as well as a large presentation of his Pan African flags, life-sized Relic Traveller figures and Glyth collages. It also reveals some of his influences from video games to the landscape paintings of JMW Turner.

Exhibition events

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Inside Out: Investigating Drawing

Exhibiting artists: Jack Duplock, Laurence Elliott, Stephen Groom, Andrew Mania, Jamie Shovlin, Mari Sunna, Julie Verhoveven & Roxy Walsh Inside Out has drawing as its focus. The selected artists, whilst all very different, share an interest in the human form or their work includes figurative elements. Much of the work has the quality of ‘fragmented dreams’, and explores the mental landscape of the artist’s psyche. Some of it is mysterious, some autobiographical, some humorous or even nightmarish, and many create intriguing narratives for the viewer to explore personal visions and alternative ways of looking around the world. The appropriation of imagery from horror films, comics and memories of stories and places visited to create environments, is also inspiration for some works. The exhibition reveals how artists can use a combination of collage and non-art materials such as glitter and felt tip pens to create imagery with a low budget, but compelling aesthetic.

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Giuseppe Penone: The Imprint of Drawing

The Imprint of Drawing was the first solo exhibition in a British public gallery for fifteen years by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. Penone (b.1947) first achieved recognition for his work associated with the Arte Povera movement in Italy in the 1960s, in which artists worked using materials from daily life such as sand, earth, stones, fabric and newspapers. They used these simple materials in order to push the boundaries between art and nature, and to show connections among all organic life, in a process of open-ended experimentation. The Imprint of Drawing featured around twelve of Penone's impressive large-scale drawings and a selection of the artists' sketches made between 1968 and 2003. The exhibition focused on Penone's impressive contributions to drawing over his 35-year career. Penone's ambitious, yet understated drawings magnify the delicate sensory surfaces of the artists' body, such as his eyelids and fingertips, to landscape-like proportions, reflecting upon the body's relationship to physical space. His work simultaneously refers to the visual and tactile, and creates formal and conceptual connections between drawing and sculpture. Penone is inspired by the quiet slowness, growth, and time of the natural world. For example, several of his series of drawings are imprints of his own skin, magnified so that their patterns take on characteristics similar to those within nature such as leaves or tree trunks, that continue to change and grow. As a result of the deliberately slow pace of his artistic process, Penone's work suggests a sense of time much larger than our own existence, and an awareness of the union of his own body and nature found in even its smallest parts.

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Michael Craig-Martin: Surfacing

In the gallery Craig-Martin presented a selection of new work made specifically for the exhibition. Known for his sweeping, brightly coloured canvases that depict a repertoire of everyday objects, his art is one of maximum economy and maximum impact. Central to his work is the act of drawing and an investigation of line, space and form. Transcribing these images onto the painting’s surface using a distinctive black tape, the painted objects flicker between foreground and background, between line and image. The everyday objects, invariably have a practical use; a drawer that opens, a chair to be sat on or a shoe awaiting its owner’s foot. All suggest a form of human interaction which is forever absent. In an intriguing new departure, Craig-Martin showed works based on two major paintings in Western art history – Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation (1452) and Georges Seurat’s The Bathers at Asnières (1884). Here he deconstructed and redrew them in order to create new paintings, replacing the original colour with his familiar vivid palette. A striking new work that took the form of specially printed black and white wallpaper was also shown. This pull towards the domestic was echoed in the selection of images that erupted across the wall surface, such as chairs, light bulbs, and shoes. Colour was introduced through the placement of eleven smaller canvases that mapped the same motif as the wallpaper, and transformed the plane of the wall into a three-dimensional relief.

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Keith Wilson: Galvanised

Best known for his playful sculptural interventions in the fabric of everyday life, for his exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery UK artist Keith Wilson made a series of sculptures or performative structures that directly engage the body. These large, galvanised steel structures, influenced by cattle markets and animal pens, retained a distinct agricultural character. Previously exhibited in outside locations, at Milton Keynes Gallery they were displayed inside, engaging the specific architecture of the gallery. The Gallery also placed a number of Wilson's sculptures offsite at The Open University Campus, Milton Keynes.

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Boyd & Evans: Landmarks

Residents of Milton Keynes for almost thirty years, Fionnuala Boyd and Les Evans began working together in 1968 and have exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Their practice incorporates traditional drawing and painting techniques, colour and black and white photography, and more recently digital imaging. Sometimes painting is dominant, sometimes photography, their subjects ranging from the personal to the epic. For the past five years they have created images broadly inspired by the abundance of natural wonders in the American landscape. For their exhibition at MK Gallery, Boyd & Evans showed new images drawn from a six week research trip in the USA, alongside a selection of earlier work. The exhibition featured examples of Boyd & Evans' 'colour in black and white process'. This process, using computer-imaging software, involves the removal of colour from all but the chosen area of focus. The reworking of the photograph intensifies the subjects' natural colour and we are prompted to experience a revival of the sensation of 'looking for the first time' at something extraordinary.

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Phil Collins: yeah…..you, baby you

UK artist Phil Collins' exhibition for Milton Keynes Gallery was his most comprehensive to date and comprised a selection of video and photographic projects and a new commission for Milton Keynes. The show included the UK première of Collins' remarkable two-screen video installation they shoot horses, 2004. For this work Collins went to Ramallah, Palestine, where he auditioned a number of young people to participate in an 8 hour 'disco-dance marathon'. The resulting film was by turns energetic, amusing, beguiling and moving. The work is about survivalism and collapse, heroism and exploitation and the cabin fever mentality generated by eight hours of repetitive action. Also shown was the world won't listen, (2005), a karaoke machine made for fans of The Smiths in Bogotá. Working with local musicians, Collins re-recorded the backing tracks of the entire album and after a city-wide campaign filmed sixty singers over three days. This exhibition was organised by Milton Keynes Gallery and subsequently toured to The National Gallery of Arts, Tirana, Albania; firstsite, Colchester; Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea, and Neue Kunst Halle, St.Gallen, Switzerland.

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Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK

Produced by Alan Kane and Jeremy Deller From our two small collections of modest objects and pictures and an ensuing conversation about the Millenium Dome's corporate representation of the UK, the question arose for us as to what might constitute present day folk art. Some seven years later, 'Folk Archive' is our response to this question and our celebration of the creative life of Britain. (Kane & Deller) Artists Alan Kane and 2004 Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller presented a selection of works from their contemporary Folk Archive. Kane and Deller's ongoing research has explored and documented both traditional and contemporary forms of popular creativity, that brings works from one of public display to the more traditional presentation of art in a gallery. From gurning to graffiti, and tapestry to sculptures made from vegetables, Kane and Deller's project is testament to the enduring compulsion for people to find creative forms of community and individual expression. The variety of their collection was reflected in MK G's exhibition, which presented video, drawings, paintings along with objects including Snowdrop, a working, life size mechanical elephant. Energetic and engaging, this exhibition suggested how popular art has developed and questions what might constitute present day folk art.

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