London Excursion 2017

12 Carlton House Terrace London SW1Y 5AH

Frans Masereel: The City

Presented in the ICA Upper Gallery is Frans Masereel’s early 20th century ‘wordless novel’ The City. On display are 50 individual woodblock prints from the original edition published in 1925. Alongside this, a second edition (1987) of The City is openly displayed, allowing audiences to read the publication in its entirity.

Universally acknowledged as a precursor to the contemporary graphic novel, The City details the daily encounters of multiple individuals within an anonymous metropolis – observations that are born from Masareel’s experiences whilst living in Berlin, Geneva and Paris. These evocative monochromatic illustrations provide a definitive record of the banalities of everyday life, depicting the social hierarchy, objectification of women, bureaucracy, rituals and practices that defined urban life in the early 1920s and that are arguably still evident today.

Stuart Middleton: Beat

Stuart Middleton’s exhibition will feature a new video and a site-specific installation developed in response to the architecture of the Lower Gallery. This will involve the removal of existing walls and suspended ceiling in addition to the construction of a wooden platform made from reclaimed domestic floorboards. The structure references the buildings used in modern industrial agriculture to house livestock, upcycled interior design projects and historical site-specific artworks. The scale of the installation foregrounds a critical position on the concept of 'landscape' as a product of human design composed from conflicting ideological positions.

Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty

1895, the trial of Oscar Wilde. 2017, the pardoning of gay men by the ‘Alan Turing Law’. How far have we come in 122 years?

Listen to the stories of gay men and women. Explore Sarah Waters’s manuscript notebook for Tipping the Velvet. Take a closer look at the diary of Kenneth Williams.

50 years after the Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised homosexuality, we look at the build up to this monumental step, its impact, and ask what challenges still remain.

Join in the conversation #BLGayUK

16-18 Berners Street London W1T 3LN

ANA MENDIETA: METAMORPHOSIS

Alison Jacques Gallery presents the gallery’s second solo exhibition by Cuban-born artist, Ana Mendieta (b. 1948 Havana, Cuba; d. 1985 New York City, NY). This is the first solo show of Ana Mendieta’s work in the UK since her retrospective Traces, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal at the Hayward Gallery in 2013. This exhibition focuses on the themes of metamorphosis and transformation in Mendieta’s work, from her early performances at the University of Iowa in the 1970s, to her later sculptural work in the first half of the 1980s. This thematic focus includes groundbreaking work in performance and photography, film, drawings and leaf sculptures.

The theme of metamorphosis and transformation also includes camouflage, with a particular focus on the relationship of the body to nature. From 1974 until the early 1980s Mendieta worked outdoors, including a secluded location in rural Iowa, experimenting with natural materials such as moss, mud, grass and water. Later, as we see in the film Volcán (1979), she incorporated gunpowder into the work, which often resulted in smoking or burning, further emphasising the ephemeral nature of her work. Mendieta described her Siluetas – traces of her body that she outlined onto the ground or impressed into the earth – as ‘earth-body sculptures’. Like her peers Alyce Aycock, Michael Heizer and Robert Morris, whose work focused on associations with the landscape and who often studied archaeological sites, Mendieta made several trips to the ruins of pre-Columbian civilisations in Mexico as well as a visit to the Escaleras de Jaruco caves in her native Cuba. The burial mounds at Yágul, Oaxaca, and the prehistoric caves in Cuba, provided the subject matter as well as the backdrop for Mendieta’s practice, demonstrating the importance of ritual in her work.

Whilst the Siluetas often highlight the absence of Mendieta herself, her body features prominently in this show. Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972, documents Mendieta’s gradual transfer of male facial hair to her own face, signalling an appropriation of power that she believed to be inherent in a person’s hair. The pioneering nature of these performance photographs, which reference identity politics and gender transformation, precede the work of Cindy Sherman and clearly set a marker for other artists examining themes of self-transformation such as Gillian Wearing.

11 Cork Street W1S 3LT

Found in America - Chamberlain, Flavin, Indiana

ELY HOUSE 37 DOVER STREET

Gilbert & George                                    DRINKING PIECES & VIDEO SCULPTURE 1972-1973

MARZONA COLLECTION                                    MINIMAL ART FROM THE MARZONA COLLECTION

Joseph Beuys                                    SCULPTURE AND EARLY DRAWINGS

3 & 11 Duke Street St James's

Bruce Conner - A MOVIE "When I look at MTV, it seems they must have been students of Conner… In the history of art, Bruce Conner will have to be recognised as being one of the great innovators of the Twentieth Century."- Dennis Hopper

After the presentation of Bruce Conner's CROSSROADS in June 2015, Thomas Dane Gallery introduces A MOVIE (1958), the artist's first ever film work, to its London audience.

Hitherto known for his found assemblage works, Conner was one of the most versatile and unpredictable artists of the post-war era, working in photography, painting, drawing, sculpture and film. A MOVIE is the first ever "assemblage film", combining different sources with rapid-fire editing techniques invented by Conner himself, establishing the artist as a pioneer of the genre.

Without ever owning or making use of a camera, Conner re-interpreted Jean Dubuffet's open-ended concept of assemblage to the filmic medium: found footage, some of it being discarded 16mm films purchased at flea markets, or scavenged from camera shops, was assembled to make a moving image work.Defying premeditations of typical filmmaking, Conner counters conventions of the everyday cinematic experience, as he marks the opening of A MOVIE by inserting the headers 'End of Part Four' - a random signifier that from the very beginning turns the structure of film on its head. The subsequent numerical countdown in the formal film leader is followed by the unexpected interruption of a woman taking off her tights. Here, Conner already denies the viewer the thrill of voyeuristic fulfilment, typical for these 1950s striptease scenes. According to Jean-Luc Godard "all one needs to make a movie is a girl and a gun," - a quote that perfectly encapsulates A MOVIE's seemingly casual yet infamous montage. 

Upon first review, what follows this unusual opening may appear as a cacophonous juxtaposition of narrative and spatially unrelated shots of iconic imagery: clips of mass destruction, car crashes with drivers dismembered and mutilated, shivering malaria victims and Mussolini's body being hung up at the Piazzale Loreto are interspersed with delicate images of acrobats walking a tight-rope or parachutes floating in wide skies. Over the course of 12 minutes, these scenes (some of them signifiers of American mass culture, which Conner felt alienated from and stood in opposition to throughout his entire career) unfold into a kinetically masterminded apposition.

Much in alignment with his contemporaries like Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, film as a pure medium had great significance to the artist and his undertakings in the world of moving image reflect the 1960s structural filmmaker's strive to bring material qualities of film to the foreground. However, contrary to Warhols' tendency to focus on silence and stasis, Conner put emphasis on the medium's ability to translate energy, reminding the viewer that film is nothing but celluloid - a carrier material that reacts to light. A MOVIE's actual subject matter is the editing itself: splicing film, rhythmically and kinetically re-assembling clips replaced glue as the means of holding an assemblage together.

Where Conner's imagery unapologetically addresses the viewer's emotions, he extends and exalts the visual impact by his choice of music. Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome, with its intrinsic dynamism, could easily destroy the potency and coherence of image; but instead Conner's astute choice of sound excerpts and enhances the drama inherent in each found scene.

Conner's cinema refashions film and television images into haunting and illuminating textures that unleash and channel the inner, unconscious forces at work within cinema and popular media. A MOVIE is a masterpiece of sensory evocation and carries in its seeming simplicity the weights of Conner's criticism on consumer society and its destructive patterns.

Mason's Yard

Wayne Thiebaud - 1962 to 2017 ‘Throughout, although Thiebaud is of course not a Conceptualist, his capacity for creating quasi-serial images that make us think of the difference/likeness between art and life renders him philosophical, thought-provoking and inquisitive. Rather than a de facto “realist”, we might better conceive him as an artist who interrogates reality refracted through a deeply knowing lens.’ (David Anfam, 2017)

White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Wayne Thiebaud. One of America’s foremost painters, Thiebaud’s career spans seventy years. This comprehensive presentation includes a selection of paintings and works on paper that date from 1962 to 2017.

Thiebaud deals with a uniquely American vernacular in his paintings of everyday food, urban and rural landscapes and people. Often modest in scale, his subject matter is isolated and reduced, becoming the focus for painterly exercises in colour, volume and style. In the artist’s most well-known images of cakes, pastries and pies, begun around 1953, a heightened tactility and viscosity of paint is analogous to the actual objects depicted, a technique he has called ‘object transference’. In these paintings, icing swirls are recreated on the surface of the canvas through thick impasto or, in the painting Bakery Case (1996), paint is thickly applied to literally suggest icing swirls. As John Yau has written: ‘Thiebaud conflated the forms and colours of the observable world with those of an imagined one so that they were virtually indistinguishable from each other.’ (Thiebaud, Rizzoli, 2015)

Although emerging concurrently with Abstract Expressionism and then Pop Art, Thiebaud’s work stands apart, closer in approach to Edward Hopper’s paintings of urban life or the focused still lifes of Cézanne or Morandi. Thiebaud creates a tension between surface and depth, using a colour palette that ranges from pastel hues to bright, bold tones. In works such as Cherry Topped Desserts (1986) or Cheese Deli (2016−17), bold colour recalls a Fauvist approach, freed from direct descriptive purpose. Ample, blank space is allowed within the compositions and dark shadows around forms are emphasised, a technique used in commercial illustration, which Thiebaud also studied. This creates a sense of grounding and stability within the image but also suggests the disconnection and isolation of modern life. In his portraits, Thiebaud employs a similar approach, placing his sitters against an expanse of blank, white space, with minimal props and pared-down settings, as in the two paintings Sterling Holloway (1965) and Green Dress (1966/2017).

Thiebaud’s landscapes employ dramatic compositions, often aerial views of cliffs or fields with rivers or lakes bisecting the image. Farmed fields are depicted as patterned rectangles, slices or squares set against each other in vivid colours such as in the recent painting Fall Fields (2017). In the painting Y River (1998), the composition is bifurcated by a luminous waterway, snaking vertically upwards, tipping the perspective of the picture plane. Thiebaud relates these images to the experience of driving in America: ‘It came about by driving across the country and actually going through those canyons. Those imposing structures seem to just fall in on you and make such a nice visual shape that I can't resist doing them.’ Likewise, in the work Lake Edge (1997), the dramatic, snaking edge of land meeting water is the focal point of the image. To its left is a blank expanse of still water and to its right, a series of closely packed agricultural fields, represented through various delicate patterns. By contrast, in the painting Sandy Cliff (2013), washed-out purples, whites and skin tones depict the edge of a cliff, so abstracted and simplified its forms and undulations take on anthropomorphic qualities.

Wayne Thiebaud was born in 1920 in Mesa, Arizona and lives and works in Sacramento, California. He has exhibited extensively including solo exhibitions at Laguna Art Museum, CA, Springville Museum of Art, UT, Palm Springs Art Museum, CA, Loveland Museum, CO and San Jose Museum of Art, CA (a touring exhibition between 2008 – 10); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2003); De Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco, CA, Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (a touring exhibition between 2000– 01); SF MOMA, San Francisco, CA, Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA, Milwaukee Art Museum, WI, Columbus Museum of Art, OH and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO (both 1985 – 86).

We’ll visit The Photographer’s Gallery June 3!

She Who Sees The Unknown: Ya'jooj Ma'jooj Morehshin Allahyari

Deutsche Börse- Photography Foundation Prize

We’ll visit the RA june 3:

On Show: America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s Artists responded to rapid social change and economic anxiety with some of the 20th century’s most powerful art - brought together now in this once-in-a-generation show.These 45 truly iconic works paint an electrifying portrait of this transformative period. These are works which have rarely been seen together, by artists ranging from Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper to Thomas Hart Benton, Philip Guston and more. Perhaps the most celebrated work of them all, Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic (1930), has never left North American shores before. £13.50 (without donation £12). 

At Isokon Building/gallery (Hampstead)

Only open on the weekends 10-11 june, 11.00-16.00

At Saatchi Gallery.

Opening hours: 10am-6pm, 7 days a week, last entry 5:30pm

Duke of York's HQ King's Road