Exhibitions

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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Future City

This December, MK Gallery presents Future City, an exhibition and events programme that looks back at the utopian origins of Milton Keynes in order to consider aspects of its future, providing a backdrop for MK Gallery’s exciting expansion plans. The exhibition includes a range of inspiring material from the early days of Milton Keynes, including paintings, drawings and models by artists Boyd & Evans, Stephen Gregory and Helmut Jacoby. This accompanies an insight into the work of architectural practice 6a who have been appointed to design the Gallery’s expansion, with source material from the studio and elements related to previous projects. Alongside these displays is a community section and social space including iconic marketing material from early MK and new contributions from local residents including submissions by Milton Keynes school pupils in response to a ‘Design your MK Gallery’ brief. The exhibition will also provide context for some major wide-ranging, experimental and provocative discussions around Milton Keynes city centre, past, present and future. Speaking about the project, Anthony Spira, Director of MK Gallery said: “It is an honour to bring together such inspiring material and people who are crucial to the past, present and future success of Milton Keynes. We are delighted that the Gallery can play a role in this exciting development and that our expansion can make a real difference to the city centre.”

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Treasures in MK

Treasures in MK is MK Gallery’s surprising and extraordinary exhibition for the start of 2014. It features an exceptional range of art works - spanning almost an entire millennium - selected from over 50 collections within Buckinghamshire, mostly in private hands. This unique exhibition is effectively mobilising a community of art lovers at the heart of the newly emerging city of Milton Keynes. MK Gallery is renowned for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, but this exhibition combines historical items with the contemporary, in anticipation of the broader programme that will be presented on completion of the Gallery’s ambitious expansion plans. Like a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, the exhibition brings together an eclectic array of objects and focuses on the fascinating stories behind the works. Old Masters such as Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, William Hogarth and John Everett Millais rub shoulders with Modern Masters from Picasso and Matisse to Andy Warhol. Other extraordinary items include the Boarstall Cartulary from the 11th century which featured in the BBC’s History of the World; memorabilia from ‘godfather of British aviation’ Frank McLean’s hair-raising flights under the bridges on the River Thames; taxidermied pelicans from a private zoo; an Aston Martin DB4 on loan from Aston Martin Works Service and a unique self-portrait by David Bowie from a private collection. These extraordinary artworks and objects are supplemented with additional work from local collections such as the Open University, Waddesdon Manor and Buckinghamshire County Museum. Speaking about the exhibition, Anthony Spira, Director of MK Gallery said: “Treasures in MK is the second of a two-part programme about art in and around Milton Keynes. Earlier this summer, part one, MK Calling, featured over 100 artists from Milton Keynes in a festival of art, music, dance, poetry and much, much more. We hope that by working intensively with both artists and collectors around Milton Keynes, we can build and nurture a strong, dynamic and thriving artistic community in the build up to the much needed expansion of the Gallery’s facilities. This ambitious £10m project is scheduled to open in 2017 to celebrate the city’s 50th anniversary.”

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Melanie Smith

This spring, Milton Keynes Gallery presents the first major survey exhibition in the UK by Melanie Smith, one of Mexico’s most celebrated contemporary artists, including the premiere of a new film, Fordlandia (2014), commissioned by MK Gallery. Melanie Smith (born Poole, UK, 1965), has lived and worked in Mexico City for the last 25 years, and represented Mexico at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. She works in a variety of media – painting and photography alongside film, video and installation - and exhibits regularly in the United States, Europe and Mexico, with works held in major museum collections worldwide. This exhibition focuses on works made since 1994 that relate to the artist’s own experience of migration; travel, adventure and utopian aspiration combine with disorientation, dislocation and abstraction in the search for a brave new world. The video Spiral City (2002) shot from a helicopter as it circles above the urban sprawl of Mexico City shows an aerial view of the city’s streets and buildings slowly fading to white as the camera spirals higher and higher. The film Xilitla (2010) features the ‘Garden of Eden’ in the Mexican jungle populated with architectural follies by the British poet turned Surrealist collector, Edward James, between 1949 and 1984. The new film Fordlandia (2014) was shot in the Brazilian Amazon amidst the remains of an aborted city and rubber plantation built in the 1920s by the car manufacturer, Henry Ford. Alongside these films, a number of large museological vitrines contain hundreds of objects, paintings, photographs, collages and clips that build up an accumulated and evocative material culture, where archaeological remains and personal records mingle with tourist souvenirs as the eager process of excavation and discovery melds into a faded and enigmatic sense of the past.  

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Cadences

MK Gallery’s summer exhibition, Cadences (27 June – 7 September 2014), brings together a selection of 40 historical and modern works on loan from one of Holland’s most illustrious collections - the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam - alongside a contemporary film, Flight by Catherine Yass, a British artist who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002. The paintings, prints and ceramics from the museum range from Old Master artists Neri di Bicci, Adriaen Collaert, Hendrick Goltzius, Frans Huys, Willem van Mieris and Crispijn de Passe to Modern artists Constant, M.C. Escher, Lucio Fontana, Bruce Nauman and Bridget Riley. Many of the works share themes of flight, falling, destruction and gravity. The earliest work in the exhibition, by the Italian Old Master Neri di Bicci, is The fall of the rebel angels with St Michael fighting the dragon, (c.1480). Originally part of a larger alterpiece, it shows angels falling awkwardly from the sky whilst the Archangel Michael vanquishes Satan in the guise of a dragon. The exhibition also includes various representations of the Greek myth of Icarus, whose wax and feather wings melted when he flew too close to the sun, such as Frans Huys’s Armed Three-master with Daedalus and Icarus in the Sky c.1561-62 and Icarus ,1588 by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617). Related contemporary works include, Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970) showing the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader falling off the roof of a house or Tulips (1965), a film from Wim van der Linden’s acclaimed series Sad Movies where a petal falls off a tulip as the soundtrack reaches a climax. Other works in the exhibition revolve around flight such as Day and Night, 1938, by Dutch graphic artist, M.C. Escher (1898–1972), an optical illusion showing a flock of birds flying in opposite directions: black birds semi-silhouetted by day to the left and white birds by night to the right. Other examples include Bird, 1949, and Wounded Pigeon, 1951 both expressive, naive paintings by Constant A. Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005) and Wassily Kandinsky’s 1930 painting, Launisch of an ambiguous aquatic or air-bound vessel. Catherine Yass (b.1963) is a leading contemporary photographer and filmmaker, known for her films and light boxes of architectural space and its psychological impact. Her film Flight (2002), created as part of the ‘Artists on Site’ BBC Public Art Programme, was captured in just one take. Attaching a camera to a model remote-control helicopter, it swoops over roof tops, providing a dizzying and disorienting bird’s-eye view of London. Cadences will be accompanied by a diverse public events programme, including a solo-voice theatre performance by Melanie Pappenheim featuring three songs about hitting the ground. This musical and visual ensemble is co-commissioned by Milton Keynes’ biennial international festival – MKIF 2014 – and MK Gallery

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