Upcoming
John Walter, Booze Guitar, Matt’s Gallery, 92 Webster Road, London, 8-16 December, Private View 7 December 6-9pm
In 2019…
Matt’s Gallery thanks Ron Henocq Fine Art for their generous support.
Artists’ News
Lindsay Seers, Every Thought There Ever Was, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, until 23 December 2018
It’s your last chance to see this major new work by Lindsay Seers at Focal Point Gallery, which closes in late December. Incorporating industrial robotics in conjunction with a three-screen video projection, the work is shaped by philosophical ideas and scientific research concerned with the phenomenon of consciousness. Through digital animation, special effects, drawing and sound design, Every Thought There Ever Was explores the extraordinary brain functioning that occurs in the condition of schizophrenia. Two screens, supported by robot arms, move with the images, bringing agency to them as an active element in the work.
The work draws on an experimental treatment known as Avatar Therapy, in which those living with schizophrenia can speak to their persecutors in a digital world. Guided by first person accounts and a collaborative drawing exchange, Seers’ work has been shaped by conversations with scientific partners including Anil Seth at The Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and Chris Frith, Emeritus and Professor of Neuropsychology, UCL to explore the current studies and thinking on the condition.
Pursuing her on-going fascination with how an individual’s biography embodies history, Seers takes Victorian surgeon James Miranda Barry as her narrator. Barry transcends time through a connection with the offspring she gave life to by performing a groundbreaking emergency Caesarian section operation. Barry’s future life sees her manifest as an Avatar with an ability to cure.
Every Thought There Ever Was is funded by Wellcome and is co-commissioned by Matt’s Gallery, London; The MAC, Belfast; Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea; Hospitalfield, Arbroath; and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.
The exhibition will continue at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea to December 23rd 2018. In 2019 it will tour to Hospitalfield and in 2020 to John Hansard Gallery, following its premiere at The MAC, Belfast earlier this year.
David Troostwyk, An exhibition of paintings and other works by David Troostwyk, Camberwell Space, London, 24 January – 22 February 2019, Private View 24 January 6-8pm
“For me, the act of painting was never considered, never possible unless only painting could provide the means of sustaining legitimate calls of the mind.”
– David Troostwyk
This exhibition introduces the work of David Troostwyk (1926-2009) to a new audience, underlining its originality and vitality. David Troostwyk’s work with text, objects and painting displays a reduced elegance and focus on the way art can communicate ideas. Although pared-back, his work was moral. His succinct pictorial and linguistic vocabulary was in part indebted to his youthful employment in advertising for the London Display Company, and as a coach-painter. As a childhood evacuee from war-torn Europe, his work drew on the deep, and sometimes troubling, responses he had to 20th Century history and his inner emotional life.
A leading British conceptual artist who worked with painting and text, his work is held in the Tate Gallery Collection, Arts Council Collection, Southampton City Art Gallery as well as private collections. Troostwyk studied at St Albans Art School (1950-53) and the Royal College of Art (1953-56). He became Head of Painting at Winchester Art School (1964-67) and later taught at various London art schools, most notably at Camberwell College of Art (1965-89).
This exhibition has been selected by British painter and Camberwell College of Arts Fine Art Programme Director Daniel Sturgis. A publication will accompany this exhibition with a new text by Daniel Sturgis, who will also be in conversation with Matt’s Gallery Director Robin Klassnik (who first showed Troostwyk’s work in 1979) at a public event at Camberwell College of Arts on 7 February 2019. David Troostwyk is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London. The works in the exhibition are shown courtesy of the Trustees of the estate of David Troostwyk.
Leah Capaldi, Shooting and Fishing, showing in Alter Heroes Coalition, Mimosa House, London, extended until January 2019
This group show at Mimosa House has been extended until January and features a new 2-channel video sculpture by Leah Capaldi. Alter Heroes Coalition presents a selection of artworks, artefacts, texts and images, exploring the concept of an alter ego. The artists included in the show reinvent themselves as unconventional and empowering heroes reflecting on cultural displacement, belonging and unbecoming. Collectively, they suggest ways of inhabiting and negotiating different personas and healing split identities.
Featuring: Tomaso Binga, Leah Capaldi, Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Gery Georgieva, Yolanda López, Kent Monkman, Tabita Rezaire, Super Sohrab and Super Taus
Melanie Jackson, Snow Crash, IMT Gallery, London, 11 January – 10 March 2019
Melanie Jackson’s work is included in an exhibition at IMT Gallery, alongside Diann Bauer, Amanda Beech, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Claire Potter, Tai Shani, Linda Stupart, Ayesha Tan Jones, Lynton Talbot. More details to follow in the new year.
David Osbaldeston, The Serving Library V David Osbaldeston, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, until 15 December 2018
The Serving Library v David Osbaldeston at Bonington Gallery showcases TSL’s collection of framed objects; each one the source of an illustration that has appeared in one of the journals. The 100+ collection includes items as diverse as record sleeves, watercolours, woodcuts, polaroids, drawings, screen-prints, airbrush paintings, a car number plate, and a Ouija board. Together, these varied objects decorate the walls of the library to serve as a toolbox for teaching.
The space is further populated by a new work by occasional Serving Library contributor David Osbaldeston, who – in response to a theme of translation – has produced a new series of images exploring how visual essentials such as black, white and repeating shapes progress through a sequence of depicted forms. As a system of signs that become open to subjective interpretation, each image is assisted by a single word, which could be seen either as an associative descriptor or erratic linguistic type.
Founded in New York in 2011 and based in Liverpool since 2016, The Serving Library (TSL) is a non-profit organisation that serves as a publishing platform, a seminar room, a collection of framed objects, and an event space. The enterprise is rooted in a journal published biannually as Dot Dot Dot from 2000–10, Bulletins of The Serving Library from 2011–17, and now annually as The Serving Library Annual, released simultaneously online (for free) and in print (for a fee) every autumn.
Benedict Drew, THE ANTI ECSTATIC MACHINES, LOWER.GREEN, Norwich, 8-22 December 2018
Shown at Matt’s Gallery earlier this year, Benedict Drew’s THE ANTI ECSTATIC MACHINES will be part of this group exhibition at LOWER.GREEN in Norwich.
ECSTASY IN NORWICH draws on ideas presented by the life and beliefs of the celebrated female mystic Julian of Norwich. This group show will take place in two stages. The first stage, for the first week, opening Friday 7 December, will be a curated group exhibition of artists based in Norwich and across the United Kingdom and Europe. These are:
Juliette Blightman, Benedict Drew, Kira Freije, INGRESS (Laura Bygrave, Nicky Deeley and Karis Upton), Bea McMahon, Jeremy Millar, Erica Scourti, Tai Shani, Anna Townley.
The second stage, beginning in the second week, opening Saturday 15 December, will be a presentation of artworks selected by open submission responding to Julian’s sixteen ‘showings’ (visions). Details of the open submission process can be found on the LOWER.GREEN website.
Imogen Stidworthy, Dialogues with People, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany, until 13 January 2019
The first major solo exhibition in Germany by British video and film artist Imogen Stidworthy. With her films and installations, Stidworthy asks how social relationships take shape when words fail, are unstable, or absent. What other forms of meaning and communication emerge at the borders of language?
The exhibition focuses on nine video installations produced over the past twenty years, alongside new work. They involve close personal exchanges with figures such as Belgian wiretap analyst Sacha van Loo (Sacha, 2011), the Korean shaman Sun Deok (Speaking in the Voices of Different Gods, 2012/18), and Iris Johansson, a Swedish therapist and writer who is autistic and was nonverbal until the age of twelve. These works share a preoccupation with different forms of voicing, in relation to our sense of self and our connection to others. They sound the spaces between voice, speech, and somatic languages, and the uncertainty of sharing a common ground.
Jordan Baseman, The Unconformity 2018 Artist in Residence, Queenstown, Tasmania, Australia
Throughout December Jordan Baseman will be undertaking The Unconformity 2018 Artist in Residence program in Queenstown, Tasmania, Australia. This time will allow Jordan to conduct a series of recorded interviews with local community and the filming of landscapes/sites to assist in the development of a film based on the local Pioneer Cemetery, which is of high cultural heritage significance to the region. During Jordan’s residency he will be working closely with local historic societies, libraries and archives reviewing existing material, gathering visual and textual information. Collated research will be used towards a film for presentation in 2019.
Wellcome have commissioned Jordan Baseman to produce an ambitious digital commission to mark the centenary of the 1918 influenza pandemic, known as Spanish Flu. The work, Radio Influenza, is delivered daily as an audio soundtrack over the full course of a year – you can access these via the website, podcast apps, or follow on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. The commission, which started on 1 November 2018, captures the everyday experience of how news, rumour and health information and dis-information was shared and experienced through newspaper accounts at the time.
The 1918 influenza pandemic was one of the most significant and wide-reaching international health crises of the twentieth century, which killed at least 50 million people worldwide. This year Wellcome is marking the centenary by funding a wealth of projects exploring local, national and international response to the reality and devastation of the Spanish Flu. Baseman’s work will draw on original source materials from 1918-19 and follow the patterns and rhythms of everyday life over the course of a year. From individual, local stories to national and international responses, the project will represent the devastation of the epidemic through the everyday, exploring how information about it filtered into every aspect of life. Using contemporary reporting from the British Newspaper Archive held by the British Library, it will track scientific developments and failures, the public’s hopes and fears, and governments’ action and inaction.
John Walter, CAPSID, HOME, Manchester, until 6 January 2019
John Walter, whose exhibition closes the 2018 programme at Matt’s Gallery, also has a major exhibition in Manchester, which continues until January 2019.
CAPSID is a multi-media maximalist installation, which presents a compelling, sometimes riotous and often surreal world. CAPSID is the result of collaboration between Walter and molecular virologist Professor Greg Towers of University College London.
This major exhibition addresses a crisis of representation surrounding viruses such as HIV, by bringing new scientific knowledge about viral capsids to the attention of the wider public using methods and references pulled from a simmering maelstrom of popular culture; from the cartoon antics of Adventure Time to Vegas hotel carpet design. In turn, this scientific knowledge is enabling Walter to innovate artistic concepts such as collage, colour field painting and pattern-making. The exhibition also features the new HOME Artist Film commission, A Virus Walks Into A Bar.
Imogen Stidworthy’s video work, I Hate, 2007, is being exhibited as part of Space, Light and Time: Edward Woodman, A Retrospective at John Hansard Gallery. Edward Woodman (b. 1943) is one of the foremost photographers in the history of British contemporary art. In a career that spans six decades, Woodman’s journey as a photographer has taken him from making portraits of movie stars in the 1960s and recording political rallies and riots in Brixton in the 1980’s, to documenting Damien Hirst’s seminal exhibition Freeze in 1988 and overnight photoshoots in Zaha Hadid’s architecture studio. Space, Light and Time: Edward Woodman, A Retrospective highlights Woodman’s deep and longstanding collaborations with artists. Alongside these acclaimed collaborations, the exhibition also includes rarely seen examples from Woodman’s early career as a photojournalist up to his most recent and highly personal photographs that explore photography’s relationship with memory and illusion.
Alongside Hail the new Etruscan #2 at Matt’s Gallery, in January Oona Grimes’ fourth solo exhibition at Danielle Arnaud also opens. Hail the new Etruscan #1 presents a new body of work developed during her recent residency at the British School in Rome, where she was the Bridget Riley Fellow 2018. The work is influenced by Grimes’ long held fascination with Italian cinema, from Italian Neorealism to late Fellini films, as well as the ‘sea of visual treats’ she experienced in Rome.
The exhibition sees Grimes make a significant shift in her practice, to embrace filmmaking for the first time. In her ‘iPhone rushes’ the artist re-enacts scenes from familiar films, such as Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. (1952), when the protagonist is reduced to begging in front of the Pantheon. Using 16mm film cut with iPhone clips, Grimes makes visible the language of film—both the learning and losing of it—revelling in the omissions, the discontinuity, the patches and the bad repairs. These low-tech re-enactments are a way for Grimes to ‘own the discourse’. ‘I wasn’t acting,’ she says, ‘I was drawing the moment. I saw them as studies, and just cut them together as if watching behind the scenes preparation.’ The films are complemented by two new series of drawings—le comparse (2018), a series of A4 coloured pencil drawings of extras from Italian films and ragazze e raggazzi romani (2018). The latter celebrate the flatness of frescoes and the blackness of analogue film.
Elizabeth Magill, HEADLAND, The New Art Gallery Walsall, until 20 January 2019
“A kind of concentrated ambiguity regarding the natural world…” characterises Magill’s paintings. Throughout her career Magill has been drawn to the language of painting using nature and landscape. She draws from them a gorgeous and engrossing multiplicity of visual and sensory ‘description”, Declan Long.
Although predominately living and working in London, Magill’s work is redolent of place – and in particular, drawing from her early beginnings in the North of Ireland. Her approach to image making is always experimental, allowing for previous attempts to give way to newer ones to form an unfolding openness. Magill explains that “although my work refers to landscape it is more like an exterior view, an attempt to create a setting or space to place things a kind of deposit of thoughts and observations within the framework of a personal and painting practice”.
Elizabeth Magill will be in conversation about her work on Thursday 17 January 6.30-8pm. Tickets are £3, please book your place by calling the Gallery on 01922 654400.
Bloomberg New Contemporaries (selected by Benedict Drew, Katy Moran and Keith Piper), South London Gallery, London, 5 December 2018 – 24 February 2019
The South London Gallery opens its doors to Bloomberg New Contemporaries for the first time in a decade. BNC 2018 guest selectors Benedict Drew, Katy Moran and Keith Piper have chosen 57 artists for the annual open submission exhibition, which showcases some of the most dynamic work being made today. BNC 2018 will be presented across both SLG sites.
Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen, Aalto Natives, MAXXI, Rome, until 24 February 2019
Low Form. Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at MAXXI, Rome continues, featuring a version of Mellors’ and Nissinen’s The Aalto Natives. An exploration of the technological and surreal imaginary of the artists of today, from computer-generated dreams to creative algorithms and avatars that question the meaning of existence. More than just an exhibition, but a workshop for study and debate on themes and issues associated with our relationship with technology and the incredible scenarios opened by its evolution: Low Form. Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence is an immersive, multimedia and multisensory display.
In an era in which technologies evolve increasingly rapidly and we are questioning how far the relationship between man and machine can go, the exhibition presents the visions of 16 international artists showing a present and a future, the representation of which is the offspring of technological unconsciousness and a dilated imaginary, in which traditional analogical references and the contemporary hyperconnected digital consciousness are combined.
Artists: Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman, Carola Bonfili, Ian Cheng, Cécile B. Evans, Pakui Hardware, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Nathaniel Mellors & Erkka Nissinen, Trevor Paglen, Agnieszka Polska, Jon Rafman, Lorenzo Senni, Avery K Singer, Cheyney Thompson, Luca Trevisani, Anna Uddenberg, Emilio Vavarella
Anne Bean and Richard Wilson, Bow Gamelan Ensemble: Great Noises that Fill the Air, Cooper Gallery DJCAD, until 15 December 2018
Bow Gamelan Ensemble: Great Noises that Fill the Air at Cooper Gallery DJCAD is the first retrospective of Bow Gamelan Ensemble (Anne Bean, Paul Burwell, Richard Wilson), who have since 1983 inspired artists with their radical collaborative and cross-disciplinary practice. Utilising found objects, invented instruments and everyday sound, Bow Gamelan Ensemble define an urgently creative and discursive space resonating with collaboration, improvisation, conviviality and provocation.
Graham Fagen, Another Country, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, until 17 March 2019
Two photographic works by Graham Fagen can be seen in Another Country, an exhibition that examines contemporary immigration to Scotland, exploring themes of integration, nationality and identity. It brings together eleven leading artists from distinct ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds, all born or currently living in Scotland. All sides of the debate are being considered but central to the exhibition are New Scots themselves. The exhibition does not aim to instruct the visitor but rather encourage discussion, and throughout its duration it offers the opportunity to create sustainable dialogue with audiences that will increase understanding and lead to new insights into community building.
Artists: Graham Fagen, Owen Logan, Andrew Gilbert, Toby Paterson, Julie Roberts.
Richard Wilson, 20:50, showing in Space Shifters, Hayward Gallery, London, continues until 6 January 2019
This major group exhibition brings together sculptures and installations that explore perception and space. Featuring 20 artists and spanning a period of roughly 50 years, the exhibition includes innovative, minimalist sculpture from the 1960s as well as recent works that extend the legacy of this ‘optical’ minimalism in different ways. It also features new commissions that have been made in response to the architecture of the Hayward Gallery.
Artists: Leonor Antunes, Larry Bell, Fred Eversley, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jeppe Hein, Roni Horn, Robert Irwin, Ann Veronica Janssens, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Alicja Kwade, John McCracken, Josiah McElheny, Helen Pashgian, Charlotte Posenenske, Fred Sandback, Monika Sosnowska, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, De Wain Valentine and Richard Wilson.
Marianna Simnett, Blood in My Milk, The New Museum, continues until 6 January 2019
Composed of new multi-channel edits of four of Marianna Simnett’s most important works to date — The Udder (2014), Blood (2015), Blue Roses (2015), and Worst Gift (2017), which was first shown at Matt’s Gallery, London — Blood In My Milk is a survey of her filmic universe and a continuation of her ongoing investigation of anxieties around the body and the self. Experienced as a single storyline unfolding across five screens and featuring never-before-shown material, this new work chronicles Simnett’s exploration of organs, body parts, and infection through the lens of medical treatment and procedures. A tour de force of the past five years of Simnett’s work, Blood In My Milk constitutes the artist’s first encompassing visual epic, bringing her many characters in dialogue with one another across time and space.
Job Opportunity – Public Engagement Officer for Jordan Baseman, Marked, Deadline: Monday 17 December 2018
Matt’s Gallery are seeking to appoint a freelance public engagement officer to work closely with artist Jordan Baseman on his upcoming project, Marked, a new work supported by Wellcome. More details can be found here.
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