Exhibitions

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Roger Hiorns

This was Hiorns' first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery. It comprised a selection of work from the preceding five years and provided the opportunity to see the breadth and invention of his practice. The exhibition featured a selection of Hiorns' 'crystallised' car engines. Hiorns dips the engines into a solution of copper sulphate, so that blue crystals form a baroque-like embellishment on the intricate network of pipes, wires and filters, making a stark contrast to the engines' original function as mechanical components. Also included were a series of ceramic sculptures. Hanging from the ceiling, the sculptures contained a piping system that pumped air bubbles into a solution producing columns of white foam that tentatively climbed upwards in infinite configurations until they collapsed or disintegrated. New work commissioned by Milton Keynes Gallery revealed the artist's fascination with materials and their transformation. Hiorns investigated the effects of particular substances on a group of steel sculptures. They were accompanied by 'Benign' (2005), Hiorns' film with a play written by the artist and performed by an actor as a monologue.

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Carlos Bunga

This was the first project in the UK by Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga.  He was commissioned by Director Michael Stanley to make a new site-specific for Milton Keynes Gallery's Long Gallery space. Bunga builds complex structures made from corrugated cardboard held together with packing tape. The structures take over the environment they inhabit, encouraging an alternative reading of the original space.  The constructions emphasise the instability of architecture. There is a possibility of growth and change; the constructions mutate, develop, extend and remain in a state of transformation.

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Phillip Allen

This was the first major solo exhibition in the UK by British artist Phillip Allen. Allen is known for his textured paintings, in which the central motif is framed at the top and bottom by multiple layers of paint that are amassed and coated over each other. Allen’s work demonstrates not only an interest in image-making, but also in the substance and nature of paint itself. The artist’s continuous practice of making numerous felt-tip sketches and drawings on A4 paper chart the inception of his abstract forms and arrangements. These drawings become the basis for his paintings where the rules of modernism are both playfully acknowledged and irreverently dismissed.

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Anja Schrey: Solo Entertainer

MK G presented the first solo exhibition in the UK by German artist Anja Schrey. The exhibition comprised new and recent works of larger-than-life size colour pencil drawings of the artist. Schrey is always the subject of the work. Taking numerous photographs to inform the choice of pose, she then works on an enlarged scale, with drawings ranging from 50cm to 4.5m across; with the resulting images dominating individual gallery walls. In the various poses she assumes, she never engages in direct eye contact with the viewer, but with an air of detachment, stares beyond the margins of the work. Schrey's influences vary; the media, the fashion industry and art history can sometimes be detected in the drawings. Occasionally the poses she adopts have been informed by performances she has made in which the audience are invited to suggest her dress, style and gesture.

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Carlos Amorales: Spider Web Negative

This was Mexican artist Carlos Amorales's first solo exhibition in the UK. It featured new and recent work, comprising video, installation, drawing and animation. Amorales draws on his ongoing fascination with the fictitious and the real, as explored in his evolving "liquid archive". This comprises an inventory of digital images that become the means of collaboration with other practitioners; animators, musicians and composers. As part of his exhibition at MK Gallery, Amorales transformed the archive into an elaborate suite of children's puzzles, set within a specially designed environment.

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Rose Finn-Kelcey

For this, her most comprehensive exhibition in nearly ten years British artist Rose Finn-Kelcey presented three new sculptural installations in the Cube, Middle and Long Galleries. Made partly in response to her recent residency and tour of China sponsored by The Red Mansion Foundation, the use and misuse of language provided the focus for the work in the exhibition. With a characteristic blend of humour and pathos, she investigated the nature of interpretation and re-contextualisation. Chinese characters collided and were assimilated into new and alien contexts so that they were both lost and found in translation, allowing them to develop new meanings. Appropriating street signage, fairground art and shop front hoardings, the exhibition demonstrated the extent and breadth of Finn-Kelcey's invention.

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David Austen

This exhibition was the largest and most comprehensive by British artist David Austen for over ten years. It brought together a rich and significant body of work which included the distinctive paintings and works on paper for which he has become widely known, as well as a film and hanging sculptures, both of which signaled a new and important departure in the artist's work. Central to the exhibition was the premiere of the film Crackers, commissioned by Milton Keynes Gallery and the Centre for Contemporary Visual Arts, University of Brighton, with the support of Arts Council England. Written and directed by Austen, the film is set within the confines of a single space, the Drawing Room of The Regency Town House in Hove, once home to a sea captain and now undergoing a lengthy process of renovation. Sparsely furnished, the room is host to two protagonists, Tin and Heart (actors Toby Kebbell and David Leon), who engage in an exchange that reveals a dark, complex narrative, interjected with black humour and sharp wit. Through the provocative and sometimes explicit nature of the language, Crackers resonates with many ideas that often resurface in Austen's work - love, sex, death and the ache of human impulse and emotion in which love lies complicit with fear, comedy complicit with tragedy. There is no resolution to the story being told, only ambivalence, an uneasy rhythm and profound uncertainty, as Heart poignantly remarks, 'We are adrift. We have left our moorings'. The exhibition featured a number of new paintings including Glass, Tree and Hearts and the text-based Heart Snatcher and Black City. Here, the forcefulness of the statements - the clash of adjective and noun - reveal the distillation of image and text that takes place in Austen's studio. The 'deadness' of the painting surface — as Austen often paints large expanse of his heavy flax canvas with small brushes — and the paint — almost dry, bleached, but seductive to the touch – creates an uncompromising surface.  Within Austen's work, the landscape of text, repeated abstract patterns and graphic forms becomes a measure of time – from the months it may take to finish a canvas to the moments to create a watercolour of one of his tiny figures that can be seen in his installation of watercolours, Froth on a Daydream. In Darkland, the huge and evolving installation of hundreds of black ink drawings that fill an entire wall, the viewer may see the gestation of the source material that will figure in Austen's future films. Much of the basis for the work is derived from observations of the everyday world that, removed from their original context, become invested with new meaning or take on different forms. For example, Austen's sculptural works take the form of suspended mobiles constructed in painted plaster, cardboard, steel and wire. His use of everyday objects is thrown into sharp relief by the elegant balance of the sculpture itself.
Exhibition supported by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts, the Centre for Contemporary Visual Arts, University of Brighton, The Regency Town House, Hove, and MITES, a FACT service.

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Adrian Paci: Per Speculum

Adrian Paci has become internationally recognised as an artist whose work addresses themes of exile, dislocation and loss. Milton Keynes Gallery presented his first solo exhibition in the UK, revealing the depth of his work, in film, sculpture, painting and drawing. Paci sought exile from his native Albania in the mid 1990s and since settling in Italy his films have addressed the political and personal changes that have taken place in Albania and his own experiences. Many of his films have involved his family and friends, and men from the town in which he grew up, providing insight into the adjustments that they have had to make in coming to terms with their new situation. Art and life have until recently been interchangeable, as Paci has used his practice to understand his own role in society and what might be expected of him as an artist. Rather than providing the viewer with a nostalgic glance at the life that was left behind, Paci presents people that are trying to come to terms with how it is now. The short film per speculum (2006), shown at Milton Keynes Gallery, represents a marked shift from the preoccupations of Paci's earlier films. Commissioned and produced by Milton Keynes Gallery and francesca kaufmann, Milan, per speculum, instead of being based on real circumstance, has a fictional, lyrical, slow moving plot. It brings together a number of strands that have surfaced in earlier films, including childhood, human knowledge and light. Filmed on location in the Northamptonshire countryside, per speculum sees a group of children playing with a mirror. Shattered into pieces, it is then used to reflect the sun as the children sit in the boughs of an enormous tree, so that it glistens with sparks of light. The shimmering light alludes to a passage from St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (13:12), (providing the source for the film's title) 'videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate tunc autem face ad faciem' – At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known. As the light is reflected back onto the viewer, Paci invites us to consider the possibilities and limits of knowledge and the way that we use it. Religion has been significant in other areas of Paci's practice. The Pasolini Chapel (2005) which was part of the exhibition, is dedicated to the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Painted film stills (gouache on wood) from Pasolini's films The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) and Mamma Roma (1962) adorn the inner and outer walls of a small hut placed in the middle of the gallery. The Gospel According to St Matthew was highly controversial and showed Christ as a young revolutionary while Mamma Roma was full of allusions to religious stories. The sepia-like paintings depict important silent scenes from each film, and this work, shown alongside paintings of scenes in Pasolini's The Decameron (1971) reveal Paci's avid fascination in the relationship between painting, photography and the cinematic tradition. Paci also captures photographs from his films and exhibits them alongside the films. Again, the significance of light in Paci's work was brought into focus, as visitors had the opportunity to see images from Turn On (2004) which featured a group of men from Paci's home town Shkodra, playing with the effects of light and dark, as they consider their changed lives. The images were accompanied by photographs from other works, including images taken on the set of per speculum. The exhibition was accompanied by a full colour catalogue, with contributions from Christy Lange, Assistant Editor of Frieze and Michael Stanley, Director of Milton Keynes Gallery.
Exhibition supported by The Henry Moore Foundation

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Stephen Willats: Person to Person; People to People

Since the early 1960s British artist Stephen Willats has been making socially engaged, multi-media art projects in areas and communities as diverse as tennis clubs, housing estates, tower blocks, art galleries and night clubs. This exhibition featured one of his most ambitious commissions, Person to Person, People to People. The exhibition provided an opportunity to engage with the breadth and integrity of Willats' practice and to recognise the remarkable influence his practice has had on a subsequent generation of artists. At the heart of Willats' practice is the encouragement of the active participation in a work of art by collaborators and viewers, in order to stimulate an engagement in their own creative processes. Examples seen at Milton Keynes included New Visions (2006) made for the Barbican Centre in London, where viewers could explore the different ways three philosophers might have viewed certain environments and encounters, and From My Mind to Your Mind (2006) and Imaginary Journey (2006) where viewers could experience the surroundings of typical suburban outer London towns. For Milton Keynes Gallery Willats made a new work, People to People, Person to Person by collaborating with eleven residents from the Netherfield estate, Milton Keynes. Each of the residents used Super 8 film and instant cameras to record their differing observations on the same walk around the estate. The results of the project were displayed in multi-channel wall mosaics and DVDs, both at the gallery and in a space on the estate, inviting viewers to construct their own meaning from the information presented, as if they too were participating in the walk. To accompany these works, a number of Willats' drawings were on display. Willats employs the methods of cybernetic and philosophical models, information theory, systems analysis and semiotics in making his work, and a number of his working drawings were shown. Alongside these could be seen drawings of modernist domestic objects, which bridge the gap between people's domestic realities and the social organisational structures in which they live. The exhibition catalogue includes contributions from Emily Pethick, Director of Casco Projects, Utrecht, and Chris Hammonds, Director of MOT, together with a conversation between Stephen Willats and Milton Keynes Gallery Director, Michael Stanley. Stephen Willats was born in London in 1943. Solo exhibitions include From my mind to your mind, Victoria Miro Gallery, 2006; Messages from the Polemical City, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin, 2004; Changing Everything, South London Art Gallery, 1998; Museum Mosaic, Tate Liverpool, 1994; MetaFilter and Related Works, Tate Gallery London, 1982; and 4 Inseln, in Berlin, National Gallery, Berlin, 1980. Group exhibitions include Art & The 60's: This Was Tomorrow, Tate Britain, 2004, The Gap Show, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, 2002; Protest and Survive, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 2000. His seminal work, Multiple Clothing, was re-presented at Tate Modern in April 2006. Milton Keynes was formally designated as a new town on 23 January 1967, and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2007. The town is made up of a number of districts covering an area of 34 square miles and early developments were designed by acclaimed architects including Richard MacCormac, Norman Foster and Henning Larsen. The Netherfield housing estate was originally devised as a temporary housing solution, and built in1972-77. It was the earliest completed housing estate in Milton Keynes.
Exhibition supported by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts and Milton Keynes Community Foundation

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Phoebe Unwin: A Short Walk from a Shout to a Whisper

Milton Keynes Gallery presented the first major exhibition in a public gallery by the British painter Phoebe Unwin. Unwin's paintings shift between figuration and abstraction, capturing chance observations of reality, constructs of memory and indirect references to particular places and events. Throughout her practice, Phoebe Unwin works incessantly in an A3 drawing book, creating a personal register of images and marks. Individual pages are worked up simultaneously creating visual dialogues, some obvious, some obscure as Unwin teases and collages images, shapes and forms from the format of the page and materials at hand in pastel, pencil and acrylic. The entire contents of each drawing book, as in The Grand and the Commonplace, 2006, are sometimes displayed collectively as an individual work. On the one hand Unwin's practice appears highly conventional; the drawing book providing impressions for future paintings, often larger in scale and rendered in oil and acrylic. On the other, her approach seems more akin to a literary tradition of composition making or a musical fugue – fuelled with visual echoes and counterpoint. Unwin's paintings each have their own autonomy yet possess a clear genetic and familial link such that the entire breadth of her output has no specific hierarchical order. There are recurring motifs that suggest an autobiographical thread; sunglasses, modernist geometrical forms and portraits – one of the images depicts a person blushing in the dark, a glowing face with black impasto eyelids. Throughout her work the artist creates a counterpoint between explosive abstracted paintings and a darker, often sinister psychological interior space.

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Alex Frost: Adults

British artist Alex Frost works in a variety of media. This exhibition presented a selection of recent sculptures, drawings and mosaic panels. These reflected Frost's interest in the conflation of modern technology, the serial and the multiple with a distinctive hand-made aesthetic. His work ranges from the miniature to the monumental, from intimate decoration to architectural intervention, and locates itself in many differing contexts; the space of the studio, the gallery, wastelands, parks, and cultural centres. Frost's Adults are rock-like sculptures, malformed and enlarged versions of food packaging that are at once sophisticated and clumsy. The sculptures are informed by the well-intentioned community projects that he was involved with as a teenager in north London. Format Wars is a single work divided into two parts that augments the Adults series. As a two part work it conveys a variety of oppositions such as the domestic versus the public, the digital versus the analogue, the intimate versus the exposed, the defined versus the unclear. This is emphasised by one part being placed within the gallery and the other mounted high on the gallery's exterior wall. Embedded within the ceramic-tiled surfaces are the symbols for the HDDVD and Blu-ray formats. Such collision between Frost's reference to the stuff of domestic DIY with the promise and sophistication of digital advancement is both playful and poignant. Frost's use of mosaic bears a formal relationship with the digital or bitmap imagery that he employs for creating his 'blind drawings'. In these, photographs are converted into bitmap prints and each pixel 'punctured' with a pin from the reverse allowing the application of metallic enamel paint to seep through to create a bejewelled surface. Alex Frost: Adults was a collaboration with ArtSway, Hampshire. Alex Frost was in residence at ArtSway, which is based in the New Forest, from 10 August - 12 October 2007, with an exhibition from 23 February - 6 April 2008. A publication is available for Frost's ArtSway exhibition, published in collaboration with Milton Keynes Gallery, ArtSway and Sorcha Dallas. Alex Frost is represented by Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow.

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Pascale Marthine Tayou

The first solo exhibition in the UK by Pascale Marthine Tayou comprised a series of new and recent installations and an offsite work placed in the specific context of Milton Keynes. Marthine Tayou was born and raised in Cameroon and has lived in France and Belgium. His nomadic movement between places is reflected in his practice; in the materials he uses, his artistic sources and his thinking. Through his work, Marthine Tayou identifies points of economic and cultural exchange, largely between his African ancestry and the contemporaryWestern culture in which he lives and works. The exhibition conflated traditional imagery and objects from Cameroon with the artist's evolving interest in commerce and economic transaction. Wall Street took the form of a colossal wall-based installation of logos of companies that permeate the Cameroon landscape. The vibrant colour and placement of neon signs was at once a monument to commerce and an indictment of the homogenisation of global culture. Also featured were Marthine Tayou's remarkable crystal sculptures. Clad in clothing and artefacts sourced from the artist's home village, these poignant sculptures brought together the language of the Western tourist trade with traditional African imagery.

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