Current
Matthew Krishanu, House of Crows, Matt’s Gallery, London, continues until 7 April, open daily 12-6pm
Matthew Krishanu, House of Crows, 2019, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London. Photo by Robin Klassnik.
Matt’s Gallery’s current exhibition at Webster Road centres around two series of images that the painter Matthew Krishanu has been developing over a number of years: House of God, which depicts landscapes punctuated by the crosses of churches, and Crow, a series begun in 2012. The show is open every day 12-6pm until Sunday 7 April.
Upcoming
Brian Catling, CUDDY, Matt’s Gallery, London, private view 14 April 2-6pm, exhibition open daily 12-6pm, 15-21 April 2019
Brian Catling, CUDDY, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
“CUDDY, like all my work, is a moment between dream and storage. But this one is intimate, clandestine and odd.”
Over seven days in April Matt’s Gallery presents CUDDY by Brian Catling. Catling is a sculptor, painter, performance artist and poet, and the acclaimed author of The Vorrh Trilogy.
Ron Henocq, Emojimio, Matt’s Gallery, London, private view 3 May 6-9pm, exhibition open Wed-Sun 12-6pm, 4-26 May 2019
Ron Henocq, Emojimio, detail, 2019, lino print. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
Emojimio is an ambitious site-specific installation conceived especially for our 3x3x3 metre cubic gallery space. In a new departure for Henocq, he will let his lino-cut motifs, characters and icons escape the page and the frame and roam the walls of the gallery creating a mise en scène of suggested narrative and stories.
Offsite
Beth Collar, Daddy Issues, CGP London // Dilston Grove, Southwark Park, London SE16 2DD, continues until 28 April, open Fri-Sun 11am-5pm
Beth Collar, Daddy Issues, 2019, installation view, Dilston Grove. Image courtesy the artist, Matt’s Gallery, London, and CGP London. Photography by Damian Griffiths.
Matt’s Gallery and CGP London‘s collaborative commission for Dilston Grove until 28 April. Beth Collar’s Daddy Issues occupies the modernist former church in Southwark Park until 28 April 2019. Collar, whose exhibition Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking took place at Webster Road in May 2018, has produced a new body of work for the space, which is open to the public Friday – Sunday 11am-5pm during the exhibition.
The exhibition is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.
Matt’s Gallery thanks Ron Henocq Fine Art for their generous support.
Artists’ News
Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers, Tate Britain, London, continues until 6 October 2019, open daily 10am-6pm
Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers, 2019. Installation view. Photo © Tate (Matt Greenwood).
Mike Nelson’s 2019 Tate Britain Commission is now open to the public. Making work in response to the unique architecture and history of their Duveen Galleries. Nelson has transformed the grand spaces of the Duveen Galleries into something between a sculpture court and an asset strippers’ warehouse. He has carefully selected objects from the post-war Britain that framed his childhood – including enormous knitting machines, woodwork stripped from a former army barracks, graffitied steel awnings and doors from an NHS hospital.
Nelson’s project has been informed by the Duveen Galleries’ origins as the first purpose-built sculpture galleries in England, intended to rival the sculpture court at the British Museum and the V&A’s Cast Courts. It turns the neo-classical galleries into a warehouse of monuments to a lost era and the vision of society it represented.
Imogen Stidworthy, Dialogues with People (…), Netwerk Aalst, Belgium, 6 April – 30 June 2019
Imogen Stidworthy, Iris [A Fragment], video still, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
With her films, sound works and installations, Imogen Stidworthy asks how we experience and shape an understanding of our selves and our social relationships when words are not a given. What other forms of meaning and communication emerge at the borders of language? Her works share a preoccupation with different forms of language, whether shaped by cultural practices, or conditions such as aphasia and non-verbal autism. They involve people whose language is in some sense detached from ‘meaning’, opening the way to new channels of voicing and communication. These voices engage us in different modes of listening and reflect our relationship with our own tongue, in new and surprising ways.
At Netwerk Aalst, Imogen Stidworthy presents seven installations. The exhibition takes the form of two interdependent sequences of three and four works, respectively. They run as continuous loops, in which only one work at a time is active, on the upper and lower floors of Netwerk Aalst. The two zones are interconnected vertically via a temporary staircase. Dialogues with People (…) is the second iteration of this exhibition format of sequential loops, which Imogen Stidworthy has conceived specifically for her current artistic research on the borders of language. The first iteration of this exhibition, with a different constellation of art works, previously appeared at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart.
Benedict Drew, The Whole Fantasy (with holes), Forma, digital commission, from 29 March
Benedict Drew, The Whole Fantasy (with holes), 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
Forma is pleased to be working with Benedict Drew on a new project The Whole Fantasy (with holes) that will unfold through 2019. Starting with digital works, music and a takeover of Forma’s website and social media, Drew will develop a growing body of work experimenting with painting, film, installation and musical compositions. As the project develops Forma will respond to Drew’s practice, creating opportunities for audiences to engage with this new body of work.
The Whole Fantasy (with holes) will explore contemporary narratives in our political climate, here in the UK and globally. Launching on March 29th, the original Brexit day, Drew will question what is fuelling a nationalist and populist turn in the UK, with parallels internationally across Donald Trump’s US Presidency, and recent elections in Brazil and Europe; asking how a “false memory” of a country is mobilised by certain entities and political movements to justify extremism and rejection of the other. Drew will consider how cultural distribution and communication channels are appropriated, corrupted and reshaped to craft fantasies that are shared and (mis)remembered.
Drew will approach these complex subjects by wrestling with the means of cultural production that surrounds them. This includes the media broadcasts that underpin such narratives; the language used to advocate for them; the way words and ‘truth’ have become malleable tools and also how architecture and design can become complicit in forging these fantasies. By investigating how such oppressive forces gain agency, Drew will uncover a homologous cultural space where the subject can survive, thrive and dream up a resistance.
Roy Voss, The Way Things Are, The Gymnasium Gallery, Berwick-upon-Tweed, 6 April – 2 June 2019, open Wed-Sun 11am-4pm
Roy Voss, The Way Things Are, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 2018. Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy of the artist, De La Warr Pavilion and Matt’s Gallery, London.
Stretching the length of the Gymnasium Gallery, The Way Things Are is a sculpture, precisely and elegantly constructed in poplar wood that approximates to the form of a pier. Inspired by Victorian lithographs, contemporary architects’ drawings and the artist’s own recollections, The Way Things Are extends the artist’s interest in romantic longing; between desire and lived experience, between memory and fact.
Voss finds something simultaneously prosaic and profound about the British seaside pier. If the coastline is a boundary, a marker for the edge of ordinary experience, then the pier forms a space beyond this.
Roy Voss, The Way Things Are (2017) is commissioned by De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill), Grundy Art Gallery (Blackpool) and Berwick Visual Arts (Berwick).
Nicola Bealing, A New Song (To An Old Tune), The Foundling Museum, London, 24 May – 1 September 2019
Nicola Bealing, Shameless Joan, 2018. Monoprint 100x80cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Graham Fagen, From Me to You, Maus Contemporary, Birmingham, Alabama, USA, 19 April – 25 May
Graham Fagen, Petrol Bomb – Scottish. Date 1979-81 (detail), 1999. Image courtesy of the artist.
Graham Fagen’s solo exhibition, From Me to You will open at Maus Contemporary in April (with an opening reception on 26 April, 6-8pm).
From me to you?
What shapes and forms us and how do we share our thoughts on what we think should shape and form us?
How do we know what is right and wrong?
All my art work is, to a greater or lesser degree, about such questions.
How an object, such as a cross, can suggest meaning. How the colour, shape and form can give a different meaning to different people.
How toys we used as children are understood as weapons when we are older.
The things we do, the things we believe.
From me to you!
– Graham Fagen, March 2019
Nicola Bealing, Body and Soul, The RWA, Bristol, 2-25 April 2019
Nicola Bealing, Dirty Man, Clean Man, 2014. Oil on linen 121x91cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul,” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher.
An exhibition by thirteen invited Academicians whose use of the human body is an important aspect of their practice. The show displays paintings, drawings, printmaking, ceramics, bronze casting and wood carving.
The artists exhibiting are Malcolm Ashman, David Backhouse, Nicola Bealing, James Butler, John Butler, David Carpanini, Leslie Glenn Damhus, John Huggins, David Inshaw, Angela Lizon, Andrew Munoz, Anne Rothenstein and George Tute.
“The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait,” – Paul Auster, writer and director.
Alison Turnbull, In the Labyrinth, Large Glass, London, continues until 5 April 2019
The inspiration for the show comes from Charlotte Higgins’ book ‘Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths’.
Marianna Simnett, SEIZURE, Copenhagen Contemporary, continues until 26 May 2019
Marianna Simnett, still from The Needle and the Larynx, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries, London
SEIZURE is the first solo exhibition in Scandinavia by Marianna Simnett. In her mesmerising installation Faint with Light and video parable The Needle and the Larynx, normative bodies and genders undergo radical transformations. The artist’s own body, mutated and remodeled, becomes the site in which her hypnotic fantasies are played out.
The exhibition presents two of Simnett’s most arresting works, in which the body either metamorphoses or momentarily vanishes. A seizure, according to the writer and mythographer Marina Warner, describes the effect of the passions on the body. Inner forces such as madness and folly, personified in tragedies of the Greek poet Homer as feminine, snatch and grab the interior of the human creature and take possession. Together, Simnett’s works function as a portrait of an untamed body.
Jordan Baseman, Radio Influenza, digital commission, Wellcome, ongoing
Jordan Baseman, Radio Influenza, sticker designed by Phil Baines. Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.
Jordan Baseman’s ambitious digital commission continues, marking the centenary of the 1918 influenza pandemic known as ‘Spanish Flu’. 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 Wellcome 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. Wellcome is marking the centenary by funding a wealth of projects exploring local, national and international responses to the reality and devastation of the Spanish Flu. Baseman’s work draws 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.
Graham Fagen, The Slave’s Lament, The Holburne Museum, Bath, 23 May-8 September 2019
Graham Fagen, The Slave’s Lament, 2015, video still. Image courtesy of the artist.
Written in 1792, The Slave’s Lament is Robert Burns’ only work to shed light on the appalling realities of the transatlantic slave trade. Despite being more than 200 years old, the song brings the social, political and human tragedies of today into sharp focus.
Performed by the Scottish Ensemble and reggae singer Ghetto Priest, artist Graham Fagen’s contemporary interpretation connects Scottish and Caribbean history through these seemingly disparate musical cultures. Presented across four screens, the work is both haunting and melancholy, yet common ground is found between Burns’ verse and Jamaican reggae. By showing the work at the Holburne, histories of the city and of the collection are brought into the contemporary.
Commissioned by Hospitalfield, Arbroath and exhibited at Scotland + Venice 2015, when Graham Fagen represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale.
Dean Kenning, The Origin of Life, Beaconsfield, London, continues until 22 April 2019
Dean Kenning, The Origin of Life, 2019. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Beaconsfield.
The beautiful old creaking floors of the former Lambeth Ragged School are brought into play with an interactive sound installation, where flaccid rubber ‘fingers’ concoct random symphonies triggered by the movement of visitors in an automated parody of creative autonomy and vitalist impulses.
Dean Kenning will be exhibiting at Matt’s Gallery for the first time later this year. Kenning explores political and philosophical material through kinetic sculptures, videos and diagrams, often employing DIY, allegorical and autodidactic methods and modes of representation to engender visceral, uncanny and humorous encounters.
Lucy Gunning, Roy Voss, John Walter and Oona Grimes part of 1d for Abroad, Tintype Gallery, London, until 6 April
Oona Grimes, Where’s Peter’s postcard?, 2019. HD video still. Courtesy of the artist and TINTYPE.
Several artists with whom Matt’s Gallery have worked are part of a group show at TINTYPE in North London. With thirty-one artists participating, 1d for Abroad is a playful postcardian offering – a response to the role postcards play in people’s lives; an experiment with the formal elements of a simple postcard; postcards as documenters and disseminators of fugitive events; postcards as significant visual markers or references.
Michael Curran on Isotopica, Resonance FM, listen online
Michael Curran, The 9 lives of Muriel Spark, book cover. Courtesy of the artist.
Michael Curran talks about the life and works of writer, poet and essayist, Dame Muriel Spark on Simon Tyszko’s Resonance FM show Isotopica. This follows Curran’s recent project The Public Image – Scottish Lady Tiger at Generator Projects, Dundee, part of which was the creation of an LP The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, featuring sound artists: Viralux (Trish Lyons & Gordon Dawson) [BOX] aka Neil McIntee, UrbanFarmHand (Ben Seal) Somerset Moan (Emil Thompson), Ana Cavic, AD Crawforth and New Root Canal (Rufus Mich), all of whom were chosen by Michael Curran and curator Hari MacMillan.
David Austen, Underworld, Dundee Contemporary Arts, continues until 9 June
David Austen, The light that fell upon us burned, 2016. Gouache on paper, cut and pasted (32 parts). Courtesy the artist and Ingleby Gallery.
Since the 1980s David Austen has worked as a painter, sculptor, printmaker and filmmaker. The stylistically diverse elements of his work come together to reveal an often dark yet endearing vision of the world. The artworks in this exhibition, from oil paintings on heavy flax canvas and delicate watercolour works on paper to suspended sculptural objects and cinematic film projects, create an otherworldly space inhabited by Austen’s strange and lovelorn characters. This exhibition will offer up a new constellation of work by British artist David Austen, bringing the breadth of his artistic practice to audiences in Scotland for the first time.
Underworld seeks to create a mythical space for viewers to journey through, punctuated by the artist’s poetic musings on the known world, the imagined world, the bright celestial heights above us and the shadowy, unknowable depths below.
Mike Nelson, Protocinema, Istanbul, Turkey, opens 2 May 2019
Mike Nelson’s commission for Protocinema will open in May this year in Istanbul. Protocinema commissions and presents Site-Aware Art around the World. They produce context-specific projects of the highest artistic quality that are accessible to everyone. Through their public programming, Protocinema evokes empathy towards understanding of difference, across regions. Founded by Mari Spirito in 2011, Protocinema is a non-profit 501(c)3, free of ‘brick and mortar’, sites vary to respond both to global concerns and changing conditions on the ground.