NEWS
Lynn MacRitchie\’s Artists for Democracy podcast
2 March 2023
This month artist and writer Lynn MacRitchie talks about her formative involvement with the Artists for Democracy movement in London in the 1970s for the Art360 Foundation\’s podcast project. Her interview coincides with England & Co\’s exhibition, Artists for Democracy 1974-1977. MacRitchie recalls how she documented the AFD festival on video at the Royal College of Art in October 1974 – and how, more than 20 years later, she rediscovered the tapes.
Listen to Lynn MacRitchie: Artists for Democracy on Spotify.
Christine Khondji and The Future of Traditions
SOAS Brunei Gallery, London WC1
12 January – 25 March 2023
Christine Khondji is among 37 artists whose work is included in The Future of Traditions, Writing Pictures: Contemporary Art from the Middle East at the SOAS Brunei Gallery. The exhibition is guest-curated by Rose Issa and Bob Annibale and explores three generations of artists, from Iran and the Arab world, and traces the creation of an alternative and original approach to modernism and contemporary art.
A selection of rare, illustrated books and manuscripts from the Special Collections SOAS Library and artists books are also included in this exhibition.
Benjamin Creme: Creative Spirit
Until 10 December 2022
Scottish-born artist, Benjamin Creme (1922-2016) is represented in the exhibition Creative Spirits at The College of Psychic Studies in South Kensington. The exhibition brings together art and photography created by 100 mediums, dreamers and visionaries over the past 165 years.
This monumental painting, Chalice is the major work of this second phase of his artistic career and was exhibited in the Hayward Annual exhibition in 1974. From around 1964, Creme\’s work moved away from the modernist figuration he had practiced since the early 1940s, and his paintings merged with his philosophical interests and became symbolically abstract and totally esoteric in its meaning. Creme had long been interested in Theosophy, the study of religion, philosophy, and science, with its links to the occult and cosmology. Creme felt that his paintings had moved from the ‘sign\’ to the ‘symbol’, away from his earlier figurative works. His later paintings sought to give expression to what he described as ‘that inner reality that becomes accessible through meditation’. He wrote that ‘esotericism is about the evolution of consciousness, not of the physical form\’ and ‘to the esotericist, an artist is someone who attunes themselves to the vibration of reality and gives that expression.\’
Monica Ross: Ghost in the Spinning Mill
Until 18 December 2022
Monica Ross: Ghost in the Spinning Mill at Halle 14 in Leipzig is the first comprehensive exhibition in Germany of British artist Monica Ross (1950-2013) who worked with video, drawing, installation, text and performance. Ross first came to prominence as a feminist artist and organiser and was co-responsible for collective initiatives such as the seminal women\’s postal art event (Feministo: Representations of the Artist as Housewife, 1977). The exhibition takes its title from her 1985 piece recalling vanished industrial work in an abandoned spinning mill, paying tribute to the seldom-noticed role of female workers.
Jennifer Binnie curated by Jane England
November 2022
Jennifer Binnie: From the Forest is the first exhibition of Jennifer Binnie\’s own work in her new space, a listed former Turkish Baths in Hastings. It is curated by England & Co director, Jane England, who combines recent paintings with works from her studio archive, and who writes: \”These paintings are embedded in nature and emerge from Binnie\’s deep sense of connection to the natural world and her intense awareness of its fragility. She says that she feels \’at one with the forest\’ responsive to the trees, the animals, the spirits she senses there. Her paintings, drawn from nature and as as varied as a Grimms\’ fairytale or pagan mythology, emanate from her ritualistic belief in birth and rebirth.\”
1A Wellington Square, Hastings, East Sussex. By appointment.
Harald Smykla wins the Brewers Towner Prize
24 October 2022
Harald Smykla has won the 2022 Brewers Towner International Prize for his series of works Iconoclash Press Flowers and Ovid Press Rewilding.
The biennial exhibition and prize at the Tower Eastbourne has been curated by the gallery\’s Exhibitions & Offsite Curator, Noelle Collins. She says Smykla\’s \”convincing and direct work appeals to us all, and is highly accessible whilst remaining complex. The London-based, German artist makes images which ‘rewild’ press images, providing respite from the \’bad news’ in the form of colour and texture … Harald’s work in particular was appropriate to our [exhibition] theme of Sanctury.”
The exhibition at the Towner Eastbourne continues until 22 January 2023.
Christine Khondji in British Museum exhibition
17 October 2022 – 17 September 2023
Christine Khondjie\’s artist book, The poet’s coat (after Hafez), is included in the exhibition Artists making books: Poetry to politics at the British Museum (Room 43a).
Exhibition curator Dr Venetia Porter writes: \”Literature is a powerful theme in the display, from the tales of The Arabian Nights … to the writings of Amélie Nothomb … and the Persian lyric poetry of Hafez (1315–90), as evoked by Christine Khondjie. It was through Hafez that Khonjie learnt Persian, while living in London, and she often recites his poetry to herself.\” Read more >
Watch Anne Bean interviewed for \’Elles x Paris Photo\’ on YouTube
June 2022
England & Co is pleased to announce that Elles x Paris Photo has released an interview with Anne Bean on YouTube.
Elles x Paris Photo is a programmme initiated by the French Ministry of Culture, in partnership with Paris Photo and with the support of Women in Motion, a Kering programmee to highlight the place of women in the arts and culture.
Paule Vézelay at Tate Liverpool
Until 4 September 2022
Paule Vézelay’s plaster sculpture from 1935, Garden (Object in Three Dimensions) has been installed at Tate Liverpool in the exhibition Radical Landscapes, which runs until 4 September.
Anne Bean on Mattflix
20 May – 17 June 2022
The second instalment in Anne Bean’s Chana Dubinski quartet, Chana and Gioia, is available to view on Mattsflix. This film by Anne Bean and Gioia Meller Marcovicz was commissioned by Matt’s Gallery for MattFlix with support from Art Fund and Arts Council England. It explores Anne (Chana) and Gioia\’s friendship and collaboration, including the telling of their shared family histories of the Holocaust.