NEWS
Susan Hiller’s 1973 Street Ceremonies
RE/SISTERS Talks: Joyful Militancy and Protest
Frobisher Auditorium 1, Barbican, London EC2
26 October 2023, 5.30pm
To complement the Barbican Art Gallery’s current RE/SISTERS exhibition exploring the role of women in protesting ecological destruction, a public programme of RE/SISTERS Talks includes Joyful Militancy and Protest, an event bringing together artists, photographers and academics for an afternoon and evening of talks and presentations ‘digging into the past and present of creative feminist dissent’.
The co-operative women’s photography agency Format, founded 40 years ago, documented creative acts of civil disobedience at Greenham Common and core members Maggie Murray, Melanie Friend and Joanne O’Brien will discuss their practice with Dr Noni Stacey.
Gallerist and curator Jane England then explores the film, audio and photographic archive of Susan Hiller’s 1973 work Street Ceremonies, where Hiller and over 120 participants used mirrors reflecting sunlight to ‘draw’ a continuous circle across the urban landscape of West London. Her presentation will include screening the previously unseen film footage of the event.
The event will end with a discussion between artists and thinkers Poulomi Basu, Nina Wakeford, Anna Feigenbaum and the RE/SISTERS Curator, Alona Pardo. The exhibition continues until 14 January 2024.
‘Women’s Works’ private view + book launch
Thursday 19 October, 6–8pm
Women’s Works: Artists working in 1970s & ’80s London
England & Co’s Project Space at the Sotheran’s Building,
2a Sackville Street, Piccadilly, London W1S 3DP
England & Co are pleased to combine the private view of our forthcoming exhibition, Women’s Works: Artists working in the 1970s & ’80s London, with a London book launch for Dr Amy Tobin’s book, Women Artists Together: Art in the Age ot Women’s Liberation published by Yale University Press. Dr Tobin came to England & Co’s exhibition Cecilia Vicuña in 2013 – the artist’s first solo exhibition in London since 1974 – and the title page of Tobin’s new book features Vicuña’s painting Janis Jo.
Tobin’s book is a thought-provoking galvanized a generation of women artists. She looks at the work of UK and USA-based artists, and offers a fresh perspective on the history of the women’s art movement and how it was shaped by collaboration and togetherness, providing examples or inspirational feminist activism while retracing 1970s liberation politics. Tobin emphasizes how artworks emerged from, and contested, feminist paradigms and contexts, with class, gender, race, and sexuality as central concerns.
Women’s Works exhibition Press Release
England & Co at Frieze Masters 2023
11-15 October 2023
England & Co will present an exhibition of work by Paule Vézelay (1892–1934) at Frieze Masters 2023 in the Modern Women section of the fair.
Rolf Brandt represented in ‘Crossing Borders’
28 September – 1 October 2023
Artists who came to live and work in Britain from all over the world during the 20th century and who contributed significantly to British culture, are the subject of a wide-ranging exhibition, Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art, at British Art Fair 2023, Saatchi Gallery, London. Artworks from immigrants to the UK from India and Pakistan, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and America are included in an exhibition co-curated by Colin Gleadell and art historian and author Monica Bohm-Duchen, founding director of the Insiders/Outsiders project.
The gouache on paper work here was one of the works by Rolf Brandt loaned by the gallery for the occasion.
Vale, John Dugger 1948 – 2023
We are very sad to announce the death of the American artist John Dugger on 31 May in California.
John became part of avant-garde art circles soon after arriving in Europe in 1967. A multi-talented artist, he was an early exponent of Participatory Art and an inventive pioneer of political banner making – his iconic Chile Vencera Banner was first displayed in London’s Trafalgar Square in 1974.
John has exhibited with England & Co since 2007 and a monograph on his career and practice is in preparation. A memorial event will be held in London later in the summer.
- John Dugger’s obiturary in The Guardian.
‘L’Ensemble’ on loan to Néo-Romantics in Paris
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Until 18 June 2023
England & Co has loaned Sir Francis Rose‘s painting L’Ensemble (1938) to the exhibition Néo-Romantics at the Musée Marmottan, Paris.
Curator Patrick Mauriès presents more than a hundred works that highlight one of the first post-modern movements and one that heralded the return of the figure. “First gathered in Paris in the 1920s, those [artists] took part in the American, British and Italian artistic scenes, creating links between Picasso, surrealism, figurative artists from the 20th century and living arts for which they designed memorable shows.”
Sir Francis Rose’s cast of characters in the painting, from left: Madame Wellington Koo, Emmy Sommermann, Russell Hitchcock, Natalie Barney, Diana Varé, Serge Lifar, George Maratier, Francis Rose, Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchev, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Louis Bromfield, Tyrone Power, Virgil Thompson, Francis Picabia, Billy Mayor. The painting (oil on canvas, 79 x 138 ins) was exhibited in 1939 at Le Petit Palais Musée des Beaux Arts, Paris.
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, some four decades later, she rediscovered the tapes.
Listen to Lynn MacRitchie: Artists for Democracy.
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.