Upcoming
Dean Kenning, Psychobotanical, Matt’s Gallery, London, private view 7 June 6-9pm, exhibition open Wed-Sun 12-6pm, 8-30 June 2019
For the 3x3x3 metre gallery space at 92 Webster Road, Kenning plans to extend and tumefy an on-going series of sculptural pieces, which feature throbbing plant-like protuberances. Encircling this motorised work the gallery’s walls will play host to an assembly of the artist’s diagrams and other text-based graphic works.
Luke McCreadie, A length of spit dangled from a mouth., Matt’s Gallery, London, private view 5 July 6-9pm, exhibition open Wed-Sun 12-6pm, 6-28 July 2019
McCreadie probes longstanding sculptural concerns through the lens of present-day imaging technology and fabrication techniques. Digital animation, CNC laser etching and 3-D printing sit alongside more traditional practices grounded in casting, welding, hand-worked wood and metal. Glossy, awkward, dumb, the works seek to operate at the intersection of several languages: spoken, written, sculpted and programmed.
Matt’s Gallery thanks Ron Henocq Fine Art for their generous support.
Artists’ News
Leah Capaldi, Brian Catling, Robin Klassnik and Kathryn Klassnik, Dog Show, Southwark Park Galleries, 18 July-8 September 2019, private view 14 July, 3-6pm
Opening in July at Southwark Park Galleries (formerly known as CGP London) is Dog Show, a contemporary art show about dogs, chosen by dogs. Dog Show will feature several Matt’s Gallery artists and associates, including Leah Capaldi, Brian Catling, Kathryn Klassnik, Robin Klassnik and their Old English Sheepdog Matt E. Mulsion, who gave her name to Matt’s Gallery back in 1979. More information about the show will be posted on the Southwark Park Galleries website very soon.
Nathaniel Mellors & Erkka Nissinen, Bad Mantras, The Box, Los Angeles, opening reception Friday 7 June, 6-9pm, 7 June-20 July 2019
BAD MANTRAS by Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen, Mellors’ second exhibition at The Box, LA is a dark satire of contemporary western politics and cultural assumption. We enter a space/time k-hole/black-hole where autocracy and corruption has led to a world of dysfunction and absurd inversion…
…Where humans are subjugated to puppets and a giant talking egg is GOD.
…Where nationalism manifests in cosmic/comic acts and the world is remade as just one country … FINLAND.
…Where liberal-democracy has become a terrified technocratic autocracy and to make matters worse the God-like creators of Planet Finland will be back any moment now to check-in on the culture they think they’ve created…
This may not go so well.
At the core of Mellors and Nissinen’s exhibition is The Aalto Natives, a project originally conceived for the Finland Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale. This is a comedy which fuses creation mythology and religion with contemporary themes through the archetypal narrative of Atum and Geb, the father and son creators of “New Finland”.
Nathaniel Mellors, ME UOMO, Museo Burel, Belluno, Italy, 15 June-27 July 2019
Nathaniel Mellors has a solo exhibition, which opens on 15 June at Museo Burel in Belluno, Northern Italy and continues until late July. More details will be announced on the Museo Burel website soon. The exhibition will feature Mellors’ video work The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview, 2014 which is shown for the first time with Italian subtitles.
Anne Bean is a legendary and very active exponent of live art and performance in the UK, who since 1970 has presented numerous solo and collaborative projects throughout Europe, USA, Africa, Mexico, Japan and even Iraq. Based in London, this many-faceted artist has resisted a conventional art world career and from the beginning has followed her own personal trajectory of enquiry: ‘What is Art and What am I Doing in It?’
This exhibition includes iconic photographs and works resulting from Bean’s early performances in the 1970s. They emerge from her fearless dialogues with the elements, fire and water; from risk-taking, often perilous performances that tested her endurance and fearlessness as evidenced in Shouting ‘Mortality’ as I Drown (1973/performed for camera 1977). Many of these images were produced in a collaborative process far beyond mere documentation, and Bean often later re-engaged with the images, attacking the printed photographs with flame or corrosives or cutting up, collaging and inscribing them.
There is a preview event on Thursday 6 June, 5-8.30pm and a closing event on Saturday 22 June at 3pm, featuring a dialogue between Anne Bean and Toine Horvers and a short performance by the artist.
This exhibition of Nicola Bealing’s work will focus on mono prints that were made over the last three years with the help of master printmaker Simon Marsh. The variety of imagery reflects themes and preoccupations which were happening in the studio during that time. Here, Nicola reflects on the process she has used:
‘Mono printing is printmaking at its most pared down and foolproof: an image is made on a plate in ink or paint, then transferred directly on to paper. The apparent simplicity of the process calls for intense focus, both happy and unhappy accidents can happen randomly. All printmaking is a kind of magic, but I’ve always been drawn to mono printing for the speed at which the magic happens and the way in which it can work as a springboard to bounce ideas and problems out of the studio.’
Imogen Stidworthy’s exhibition, which comprises of seven installations across the upper and lower floors of Netwerk Aalst continues until the end of June. 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.
To mark the final weekend of the exhibition, on 29 June curators Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ join Imogen Stidworthy alongside writer and publisher Sandra Alvares de Toledo and architect, writer and forestier Wim Cuyvers to address the question, “Where does the social begin?”. In an afternoon of conversation between 2-6pm, which includes a walk through of the exhibition with the curators, there will be discussion of how we conceive and practice different forms of social and common space. More details on the Netwerk Aalst website.
An exhibition inspired by a novel, a city and a scene.
Displaying the raw energy that he would later develop to establish himself as one of the most original writers of his generation, Roberto Bolaño’s early experimental novella Antwerp remains unclassifiable. Written in 1980, but only published in 2002 shortly before the author’s death, Antwerp is a highly-fragmented story, displaying deep irreverence to the form of the novel. Avoiding linear narrative, it progresses using a multiplicity of perspectives, with images, scenes and characters called up in different forms each time. The whole remains elusive.
Artists include: Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Imogen Stidworthy, Sophie Podolski, Cevdet Erek, Michèle Matyn, Andrea Fraser, Luc Deleu, Georges Smits, Allan Sekula, Laure Prouvost, Luc Tuymans, Bart Prinsen, David Lamelas, Jimmie Durham, Katrin Kamrau, Ruth Sacks, Walter Swennen, Chantal Peñalosa, Nicolás Uriburu, Stephen Willats, Paul Hendrikse, Marlene Dumas, Rinus Van de Velde, Danny Devos, Eva Donckers, Alain Ayers, Mathieu Verhaeghe, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Adrien Tirtiaux, Laurie Parsons, Gordon Matta-Clark, Hugo Roelandt, Ria Pacquée and items from the Roberto Bolaño Archive.
This exhibition curated by Dominique Hurth brings together international artists and is an open field of experimentation for positions that investigate cityscapes in analogy to nature as a complex overlay of layers. A landscape in which the political clearly appears socially, personally, historically and from which one seldom enjoys the bird’s eye view.
Artists: Peggy Buth, Marianna Christofides, Dominique Hurth, Viktor Rosdahl, Gonçalo Sena, Imogen Stidworthy, with a text by Niloufar Tajeri.
Currently on display at Tate Britain is Rose Finn-Kelcey’s Bureau de Change, which was shown at Matt’s Gallery in 1988. The exhibition is free and open to the public during August, alongside the EY Exhibition, Van Gogh and Britain. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers was sold at auction in 1987 for the then record price for any artwork of £24.5 million. Finn-Kelcey thought that the fact that ‘most artists are unable to make a living out of their work struck me as ironic.[…] I realised that here was the imagery that would allow me to bring together both the material and the conceptual.’
The installation’s title and the coins that make its image, alongside the original sale of the painting, depict an idea of exchange value. The introduction of surveillance into the installation emphasises this value and locates the work somewhere between installation and performance, adding a further layer of meaning. Different ways of looking or assessing value are indicated not just by the theatrical lighting rig, the CCTV monitoring of the coin-image, or the presence of a uniformed guard, but also by the viewing platform (like an auctioneer’s podium) which is the only way that the installation can properly be observed by the visitor.
David Austen, Hayley Newman, Elizabeth Magill, The Aerodrome, IKON, Birmingham, 12 June-8 September 2019
Artists: Phillip Allen / Polly Apfelbaum / David Austen / Karla Black / Simon & Tom Bloor / Boyd & Evans / Marcel Broodthaers / Marcus Coates / Nathan Coley / Phil Collins / John Constable / Michael Craig-Martin / Abraham Cruzvillegas / Shezad Dawood / Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane / dRMM Architects / Alec Finlay / Anya Gallaccio / John Gerrard / Siobhán Hapaska / Roger Hiorns / Lonnie Holley / Thomas Houseago / Langlands & Bell / Elizabeth Magill / Aleksandra Mir / Jean-Luc Moulène / Paul Nash / Hayley Newman / Adrian Paci / Susan Philipsz / Paul Ramírez Jonas / Kristian Ryokan / Michael Sailstorfer / Jenny Saville / George Shaw / Michael Stanley / Linder Sterling / Graham Sutherland / Phoebe Unwin / Wolfgang Weileder / Cathy Wilkes / Stephen Willats / Keith Wilson / Richard Woods / Gilberto Zorio
Hail the new Etruscan #3 is the third in a series of exhibitions made since Oona Grimes’ Bridget Riley Fellowship at The British School at Rome – with #1 and #2 manifesting as solo exhibitions earlier this year at Danielle Arnaud and Matt’s Gallery respectively. Hail the new Etruscan #3 is a film installation with drawings and clay sculptures made specifically for The Bower. In the film, The Nest is Served, filmed on site, Grimes has extracted, reinterpreted and performed a vignette from Pasolini’s Uccellacci e Uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows), 1966.
A response to the characteristics of humour and laughter through a new series of large-scale printed works arranged as initiator and responder, with an additional selection of smaller works on found paper by the British artist.
Botanical Drift explores the hermeneutics, historicization, semiotics, and symbiosis of plant diversification, species cultivation, and destruction—past and present, extant and extinct—around the globe. Plant histories are explored as commodities and colonial as well as decolonial devices by significant and diverse feminist, art-historical, and anthropological voices—from Germaine Greer to herman de vries—bringing new perspectives through photo-essays, fiction, performance, and interventions in ecological, film, and translation archives. Reflecting on experimental ecology—the undiscovered, underestimated, and undesired non-European flora and fauna—it challenges perception and inspires potentialities to bring new understandings of the undergrowth of the Kew Gardens botany collection.
Contributions by David Edward Allen & Maria Buzhor, Rebecca Anderson, Bergit Arends & Sunoj D, Connie Butler & Hazel Dowling, Caroline Cornish & Mark Nesbitt, Alfred Döblin, Natasha Eaton, Germaine Greer, Kim Berit Heppelmann, Emma Waltraud Howes, Melanie Jackson, Alana Jelinek, Philip Kerrigan, Kay Evelina Lewis-Jones, Claire Loussouarn, Wietske Maas, Natasha Myers, Matteo Pasquinelli, Raqs Media Collective, herman de vries, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers, Tate Britain, London, continues until 6 October 2019, open daily 10am-6pm
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.
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, continues until 8 September 2019
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.
David Austen, Underworld, Dundee Contemporary Arts, continues until 9 June
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. The works in Underworld include those pictured, which were first exhibited at Matt’s Gallery in Austen’s exhibition The Drowned, which was the inaugural show in Matt’s Gallery’s 3x3x3m space at 92 Webster Road.