Exhibitions

New City Art Prize

Shortlisted artists: Beatrice Gibson, Siobhán Hapaska, Jimmy Merris and Roger Palmer  An exhibition of work by the four artists shortlisted for the inaugural MK Community Foundation £10,000 New City Art Prize for the Visual Arts. The prize aims to raise the arts profile within Milton Keynes by highlighting some of the best examples of new art from across the UK. The winner will be announced on the morning of 5 December 2014. The shortlist was selected by a Jury comprising Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain, Candida Gertler of Outset, artist Roger Hiorns, former Turner Prize nominee and MK Gallery exhibitor in 2006, Adrian Searle, Chief Art Critic of the Guardian Newspaper, Anthony Spira, Director of MK Gallery and Julia Upton, Chief Executive MK Community Foundation. London based Beatrice Gibson (b.1978) is an experimental and process-led filmmaker, who was nominated for the Jarman Award (2013) and shortlisted for the MaxMara Prize for Women Artists 2013-15. Her work often explores the relationship between music-making and film, particularly experimental notation. Siobhán Hapaska (b.1963) is a sculptor known for making multi-layered work combining disparate images, forms and narrative styles, ranging from the figurative to the abstract, using such diverse materials as olive trees, (fake) animal fur and industrial metals. Jimmy Merris (b.1983) works primarily with video, but also performance, assemblage and print. Some videos, shot in low resolution, often involving a collaged pop soundtrack  are short, tragi-comic vignettes of everyday life. Since the 1970s, Roger Palmer (b.1946), has worked primarily in the medium of large black and white photographs, often hung without frames. Throughout his practice, he has maintained a steady output of thoughtful, austere, poetic and pared down work with a strong political backbone and sense of history. Anthony Spira, Director of MK Gallery said: “We are delighted to be launching this important new art prize with a shortlist of this calibre. In some respects, the exhibition will reflect the diversity of art practice in the UK today and will also hopefully provide inspiration for artists in MK.” Julia Upton, Chief Executive of MK Community Foundation said, “Art and culture has always been an important element that contributes to the success of Milton Keynes’ development, and today we are recognised as one of the world’s most innovative new cities. Creating the Community Foundation’s UK Art Prize will bring a new focus on arts excellence that will contribute to MK’s reputation of fostering arts and culture which is important for the overall quality of life.”

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Flashback

On Thursday 8 October, 2015, exactly 16 years since MK Gallery first opened to the public, MK Gallery launches Flashback, an archival project exploring the organisation’s rich exhibition history. Flashback is an onsite and online display providing an opportunity to consider the wealth of international art that MK Gallery has brought to Milton Keynes to date, while the gallery undergoes a major renovation and expansion. Between now and March 2017, Flashback will present material relating to some of the world’s leading contemporary artists, from Andy Warhol and James Lee Byars to the radical Italian ‘Arte Povera’ artists Guiseppe Penone and Gilberto Zorio. Also featured will be numerous emerging artists, some of whom were subsequently nominated for the Turner Prize award, including Phil Collins, Roger Hiorns and Cathy Wilkes, as well as some of the best artists from Milton Keynes. The first archival display, Flashback: 1999 (8 October - 29 November 2015), focuses on the opening of the building and the inaugural exhibition by internationally acclaimed British artists Gilbert and George. Attracting significant national and regional attention, the artistic duo’s exhibition placed MK Gallery firmly on the UK cultural map. Successive monthly displays will each review a calendar year of exhibitions concluding with 2015. This will provide an opportunity to remind ourselves of the endlessly diverse ways in which artists investigate the world, exploring their interests, ideas and issues, through painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, film, video, performance, dance, spoken word and installation art. Some of the more unexpected exhibits to have appeared in MK Gallery over the years include a black London taxi cab, a white hearse containing a coffin made of cigarettes, a VW camper van, a mobile bar, recreations of an artist’s sitting room, a 1970s tv studio, and a Google office environment, a giant drawing made from acacia thorns, massively scaled red plastic fingernails, a pyramid of every African nation’s flag, and installations that are only completed by the visitor playing the grand piano or full drum kit provided. Speaking of the Flashback project Claire Corrin, MK Gallery’s Exhibition Organiser said: “We’ve had an exciting time rummaging through the archive and selecting the most interesting material. There will be plenty to interest people, from photography to press coverage and print (posters, adverts, and catalogues).There will also be screenings of filmed talks and events, including interviews with artists and curators. We’d love people to share their memories or any exhibition ephemera that they might find for use in the Flashback website so that we can provide a more comprehensive survey of the gallery’s history.”

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States and Spaces: A Survey by Project Art Works

Through inclusive curatorial initiatives, Project Art Works conducts practice led enquiries into the lives of people with complex needs. The exhibition at MK Gallery will present an ambitious survey of projects developed and produced by Project Art Works and associated artists over the last ten years.  This first major survey of its work focuses on innovative, collaborative investigations of built space and their impact on the perception of people with neurological impairments.  Selections from a huge body of work include immersive and sensory installations, film, physical works and sound. The interest and motivation in much of Project Art Works practice, is the ‘unknowability’ of another persons experience of the world, especially if they are unable to communicate using language.   Through collaborative projects, it explores different forms of response and communication using visual art based materials and data. The exhibition incorporates work from a long-term project between MK Gallery and Project Art Works centering on the exploration of constructed and open space and referencing the urban grid of Milton Keynes, perception and visibility in the city. Cube Gallery Cathedral of Trees An immersive and ethereal sound installation of The Cathedral of Trees in Milton Keynes from recordings taken during a visit by an unusual band of collaborators during September 2011. Also sharing the space, a floating object and paper based works that chart experiential surveys of the land between the gallery and this arboreal sanctuary in the city. Middle Gallery Not Knowing of Another The Not Knowing of Another is a multi screen video and sound installation by Kate Adams that reveals synchronized and alternative viewpoints of a short walk through an industrial building, over a railway bridge and finally out on to an expansive beach at sunset. “…it is a noble project, given that consciousness is such a notoriously elusive subject for any artist to tackle.” The Independent’s Pick of the Week July 2008 Long Gallery Physical presences A range of works from the Project Art Works archive that reveal topographies of engagement through constructed spaces, expansive paintings and a series of etchings tracing presence and physicality.

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Daria Martin: Sensorium Tests

Daria Martin’s first survey exhibition in a UK public gallery presents a selection of short 16mm films made over the last 10 years, including the premier of an ambitious new work, Sensorium Tests. Throughout this period, Martin has pursued a sustained enquiry into numerous pressing issues relating to film, art and culture, including enchantment, voyeurs and artificial intelligence.  The exhibition includes the following films: Closeup Gallery (2003), in which a magician and his assistant engage in a strange game where cards dance, as if equivalent with inner worlds; Soft Materials (2004) where intimate relationships between man and machine are nurtured in an artificial intelligence laboratory; Harpstrings and Lava (2007) a dark narrative that animates dream images through clashing textures and structures; and the new film Sensorium Tests (2012), which revolves around a recently recognised neurological condition called ‘mirror-touch synaesthesia’. People affected with mirror touch synaesthesia experience a physical sense of touch on their own bodies when they see other people, or sometimes even objects, being touched.  Using staged scenarios based on a real life experiment into this condition, the film explores how sensations might be created and shared between people and objects. Encountering art has always produced varying degrees of engagement and interaction, whether triggering personal memories, associations or feelings, or more recently in literal, physical responses to immersive, participatory installations. In some ways, Martin’s work turns these distinctions on their head, using mirror-touch synaesthesia to render virtual or remote activities indistinguishable from literal actions. Martin’s work often raises questions about what it means to be ‘touched’ by cinema and alternates playfully between luring the viewer through sensuous images and lush archetypes, and pushing them back into an awareness of artifice. This intentionally crafted push and pull, Martin says, is a reflection of the essential contradictions of the medium of film: its ephemerality together with a physical realisation of fantasy. Combining elements of painting, sculpture, performance art, dance, music and science, Martin’s films re-enact on a modest basis the historical ideal of the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ or total artwork in order to create new frictions. Her casts frequently include musicians, choreographers and actors, and practitioners of professions or members of subcultures not normally placed before the camera. The cast of Sensorium Tests comprises the Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca as well as several non-actors, including the synaesthete James Wannterton, who ‘tastes words’.

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Olivia Plender: Rise Early, Be Industrious

This exhibition by British artist Olivia Plender (b.1977) brings together sculpture, embroidery, posters, board games, architectural models and a video produced over the last ten years. Devised as a ‘museum of communication’, four room-sized installations are organised thematically, drawing on a broad range of references to explore how attitudes towards mass education have evolved over time. The Cube Gallery revolves around board games and printed material to encourage play and participation as a way of learning while the Middle Gallery looks to early twentieth century world fairs to examine the representation of the work ethic and trade. The Long Gallery re-creates a 1970s style TV studio which provides a platform for discussion around the use of television as a cultural and educational device and the Entrance Space imitates a Google-style working environment to demonstrate how distinctions between work and leisure, public and private have collapsed in recent times. With its strong architectural dimension, involving the construction of platforms and models and a deliberate emphasis on play and game-like structures, the exhibition invites visitors to participate and ‘perform’ while considering how social roles and models of society have been constructed over the last few hundred years.  

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Pushwagner: Soft City

This is the first solo exhibition outside of Norway by artist Pushwagner (born Oslo, 1940), bringing together drawings, paintings and prints made over the last forty years. His visionary practice resonates with the glamour of Pop Art, the language of science fiction, the anti-materialism of the Beat poets and the hallucinations of Vincent Van Gogh. The exhibition includes his defining creation, the graphic novel ‘Soft City’, which encapsulates a generation’s disenchantment with capitalism and life in the modern city. It also includes a series of prints that depict the trappings of power, featuring one of the principal characters in Pushwagner’s mythology: ‘The Boss’. This omnipotent bureaucrat sits behind a massive desk of levers and switches and controls the world via a giant screen. In the Long Gallery, the Apocalypse Frieze comprises obsessively detailed paintings where factories double up as death camps and the ravages of war are perpetuated under the watchful eye of robotic men in suits. Pushwagner’s epic satire exaggerates and ridicules the symbols of capitalism, war, industry and leisure. This critique of power and greed, most dramatically expressed through the giant mouth on the Gallery’s façade, takes on a particular resonance in the context of today’s financial crises. Following its presentation in Milton Keynes, the exhibition will be presented at Haugar Vestfold Art Museum, Norway (22 September - 30 December 2012) and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Netherlands (2 February - 28 April 2013).

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James Welling: Mind on Fire

American artist James Welling (b.1951) emerged as an important figure in the 'Pictures Generation', an influential group of artists working in New York in the 1980s, famous for their pioneering use of photography. This exhibition brings together a hundred and fifty of Welling’s early, experimental and abstract works from this period. Welling tested the mechanical and technical parameters of photography, from making his own camera out of a shoe box to using a wide range of film and papers or even making photographs without using cameras at all. This period of intense experimentation generated numerous collages, paintings, notes and ephemera before culminating in a number of iconic series: minutely crumpled aluminium foil evoking starry skies or lunar landscapes; luxurious drapes sprinkled with dough suggesting snow-capped mountain ridges; and abstract colourfields appearing as sun-drenched horizons. By focussing on simple, repetitive motifs Welling sought to remove photography from its subject, in order to trigger personal associations in the viewer and to explore how we see, rather than what we see.

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Hemmed In: Embroidery and Needlework from MK and Beyond

Hemmed In: Embroidery and Needlework from MK and Beyond presents work from the 1930s to the present by over fifty practitioners, organised with MK Embroiderers Guild and Jamie Chalmers, otherwise known as Mr X Stitch. Ranging from the local to the international, the exhibits include needlework through unusual media, techniques and unexpected subject matter, including street art, rock music and internet spam. The exhibition at MK Gallery runs from 7 December 2012 – 6 January 2013, and admission is free. MK Embroiderers Guild (MKEG) is Milton Keynes’ local branch of the nation’s leading craft organisation. For the exhibition, the MKEG have challenged their members to represent ‘Milton Keynes in an eight-inch square’, to create small, needle and thread portraits of their favourite places in the city. The results constitute a real celebration of the city in stitch. In addition to work by the members, the exhibition includes a number of rare and significant pieces on loan from national collections, including such luminaries from the embroidery world as Rebecca Crompton, Rachael Thompson, Julia Caprara and Beryl Dean. In contrast, the work selected by Jamie Chalmers, an active leader in the “new embroidery movement” is far from “Hemmed In”, either in scale, media or content. Chalmers aims to bring the world of cross-stitch and embroidery to a new audience and to restore embroidery to the heart of the art world. The works on view at MK Gallery will offer an expanded, radical and alternative view of contemporary embroidery from stitchers across the world, and demonstrates the unusual directions it is taking internationally. It will include an embroidered car door from Severija Inčirauskaité-Kriaunevičiené from Lithuania, Erin M. Riley’s Shotgun tapestries and Tilleke Schwartz’s hand embroidered masterpieces. Although contemporary artists today work across a wide range of genres from video to textiles and photography to sculpture as exemplified by artists such as Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin, the exhibition charts the evolution, throughout the twentieth century, of embroidery from domestic decoration to high art.

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Silvia Bächli & Eric Hattan: What about Sunday?

This January, MK Gallery presents What about Sunday?, the first UK exhibition by Swiss artists Silvia Bächli (born 1956) and Eric Hattan (born 1955), including drawing, video installation and sculpture. Featuring both individual and collaborative pieces, the exhibition suggests numerous parallels in their work despite their contrasting techniques and approaches. Silvia Bächli works primarily in drawing and painting on paper and includes around 100 works made over the last 25 years, not previously exhibited. Her drawings are both carefully considered and spontaneous, hinting at fleeting moments or movements, often evoking bodies or landscapes, without ever explicitly stating them. They are playful technically, revelling in the unpredictable encounters of brush, watercolour and paper and the variable effects of density, light and shade. Often assembled in clusters or ensembles, displayed on walls and tables as installations of drawings, the cumulative effect is like large and disparate pieces in an incomplete puzzle. Hattan’s videos, installations and performances are similarly responsive to his surroundings, selecting and rearranging everyday items and finding beauty and humour in them. Through gentle manipulation, by displacing, folding or turning things inside out or upside down, Hattan directs our attention to overlooked details, to how things are made and to why they are there. Whether uprooting a lamppost, gluing objects to the ceiling or hanging Swiss bells round the necks of a flock of sheep, Hattan’s interruptions and disruptions are the result of a curiosity and a questioning of our environment and conventions. The exhibition also includes collages made collaboratively over the years from discarded snapshots by Hattan and rejected drawings by Bächli, unlikely pairings and unexpected correspondences humorously brought together like a game of consequences. By bringing these two artists together, the exhibition focuses on their ways of looking, with partial visions, perspectival distortions and, in some cases, optical illusions that continually keep us guessing, reconsidering and simply re-inventing the world around us. A new permanent public art work by Eric Hattan has been commissioned by MK Gallery with the support of The Parks Trust, Milton Keynes. The work will be located in Campbell Park, a few minutes walk from MK Gallery in the centre of Milton Keynes. A publication accompanies the exhibition, featuring short texts by writers selected by the artists in response to a series of photographs taken by Bächli and Hattan during their research visits to Milton Keynes. Includes texts by Samantha Bohatsch, Edwin Burdis, Chris Fite-Wassilik, Bruce Haines, Juli Kreten, Bera Nordal, Andrew Shields, Harriet Zilch, Nina Zimmer, Emil Sennewald, Markus Stegmann, Jürg Halter, Eva Kuhn, Jonas Storsve, Richard Wentworth and Raoul de Keyser. The publication is designed by Astrid Seme and published by Mark Pezinger Verlag. The exhibition is generously supported by Pro Helvetia, the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain and the Embassy of Switzerland with additional in kind support from Stagsden Christmas Trees.

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Andrea Büttner

This exhibition presents a major survey of recent and new work by Andrea Büttner (b. Stuttgart, Germany, 1972), including video, sculpture, reverse glass painting and woodcuts. Büttner studied art history and philosophy and art, and completed a doctorate on the subject of shame and art in 2010. The broad range of work on display includes an interview with nuns discussing happiness and spirituality; an inventory of symbols such as a veiled figure, a donkey and a beggar; an ensemble of tables that evoke refectories, canteens and soup kitchens; and portraits of youths scrutinising some art. Running throughout such disparate techniques and subjects are a number of red threads: representations of hunger and poverty across art history from Ernst Barlach to Vincent Van Gogh; an interest in materials and textiles from nuns’ habits to backrests and tents; and a grid-like motif that evokes institutional models and modernist design. All of these substantial themes carry a variety of personal, historical and symbolic associations presented from numerous different perspectives. The exhibition is accompanied by the artist’s first monograph, produced in collaboration with MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt with support from the Andrea Büttner Exhibition Circle of Friends, including Shane Akeroyd, Elisabetta Buonaiuto, André Gordts, Phillip Keir, Valeria and Gregorio Napoleone, Barry Rosen, Federico Santilli, Bina von Stauffenberg and those who wish to remain anonymous.

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MK Calling 2013

MK Calling (28 June – 8 September) is the Gallery’s summer programme of exhibitions and performances, featuring 100 artists, musicians and performers from Milton Keynes. This dynamic season of painting, video, dance, music, poetry and much, much more will showcase MK’s finest emerging and established talent. The MK Calling preview and MK Gallery’s Summer Party with free hog roast and live jazz will take place on Thursday 27th June from 6-10pm. Everyone is welcome. There will be speeches by Anthony Spira (MK Gallery’s Director), Hedley Swain (Area Director, Arts Council South East) and Peter Geary (MK Council Cabinet Member for the Arts) at 7pm. Earlier this year an Open Call for Submissions resulted in 300 proposals being received from artists and creatives connected to Milton Keynes. The range and quality of work was so extraordinary that the selection process was extremely difficult. MK Gallery invited external experts to assist in this process: David Rayson, artist and Head of Painting at the Royal College of Art, London; Professor Gill Perry, Head of External Collaborations at The Open University; and Emma-Jayne Taylor, Director of Artworks MK, Milton Keynes. Speaking about the exhibition, MK Gallery’s Director Anthony Spira, said: “We were thrilled by the response to the call out and delighted by the diversity of proposed work and events. As well as the exhibitions, performances, screenings etc this is one of many Gallery projects that provide opportunities for artists and audiences in Milton Keynes to meet, network, share ideas, and participate in workshops, training and mentoring.” Simon Wright, MK Gallery’s Events Manager added: “We’re working with an amazingly talented group of artists and performers to deliver the MK Calling Season of Events in July and August. Highlights include an evening about body art/tattooing, a UK music première featuring a 26 piece electric guitar orchestra and a cycling exhibition tour linking MK Gallery and Artworks MK, ending up in a pub! Hopefully there will be something to entertain, challenge and inspire everyone.” In addition to the exhibitions and events at MK Gallery, Artworks MK will host a presentation of nine artists from 6 July to 8 September 2013. The preview will take place on Saturday 6 July from 12–3pm, with a free social eating event organised by MK Calling artists TendayiVine and Tracey Suen. All welcome. More information can be found at www.artworksmk.co.uk. Artworks MK’s regular opening hours are Monday – Saturday 10am -4pm. MK Calling is the first of a two-part programme by MK Gallery about art in Milton Keynes. Part two, titled Treasures in MK, features works from 50 private and public collections in and around the city and will take place from January to April 2014. In addition to presenting fascinating exhibitions in their own right, the intention is that the ‘producers’ in MK Calling meet the ‘consumers’ from MK Treasures to build and develop a strong cultural and creative eco-system within the city in the lead up to the Gallery’s ambitious £10m expansion, scheduled to open in 2017 to celebrate the city’s 50th anniversary.

MK Calling Participants

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Peter Dreher

This autumn MK Gallery presents an exhibition of work by Peter Dreher (b.1932), a painter from South West Germany who has produced a daily painting of the same, empty glass for the last 40 years. This remarkable series, of which there are over 5,000 examples, is titled Every Day is a Good Day, taken from a Zen-Buddhist saying that suggests everything is of equal importance. Dreher’s practice is contemplative, diaristic and obsessive. His work highlights minute changes in our surroundings, deliberately marking the passage of time and ultimately providing evidence of the artist’s existence. His work inevitably recalls the subtle shifts and gradations in Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes as well as the rigorously serialised approaches of Dreher’s contemporaries such as the conceptual artists Hanne Darboven, On Kawara or Roman Opalka. The exhibition at MK Gallery will be organised in three groups: the Long Gallery will include around 150 of the glass paintings from the 1970s to the present day, as well as related engravings, watercolours and drawings; the Middle Gallery will bring together still lifes, including paintings of flowers, foliage, vegetables, skulls and a large series of detailed and close-up pencil drawings of an aubergine; and the Cube Gallery will feature architectural scenes made up of separate canvases, each of which was painted in a single day.

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