Cecilia Vicuña’s painting of Karl Marx in The Guggenheim
January 2018
Another significant museum acquisition of a painting by Cecilia Vicuña: her painting of Karl Marx from 1972 has been acquired from England & Co by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, with the help of the museum’s Latin American Circle.
This work is the first in Vicuña’s series of paintings from the early 1970s, Heroes of the Revolution, in which she depicted important political figures of international and Latin American socialism: Karl Marx, Lenin, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, and Violeta Parra.
Vicuña wrote in 1972: “In order to exalt Marx, I wanted to associate him with ideas that dogmaticians consider way removed from him, such as eroticism, poetics, blues, jazz and rock, female and homosexual liberation and that I consider intrinsic to the revolution.”
‘Faded Wallpaper’ by Tina Keane acquired by Tate
January 2018
Tina Keane‘s pioneering, poetic film Faded Wallpaper (1988) has been acquired from England & Co by Tate, and is currently on view at Tate St Ives in Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by her Writings.
Keane described this dream-like film as being “based loosely on the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Faded Wallpaper is concerned with visual perception, madness and the search for identity. A woman, isolated within a room, becomes obsessed with the wallpaper surrounding her, seeing within its faded patterns strange images – at times pleasurable and seductive, at times threatening and dangerous. As these images become more insistent she begins to strip the wallpaper away in an attempt either to banish the images or get to their source. Words and sounds run through her head as she peels away the layers, questioning her own self-image, her imagination and her sanity. No solutions are given, only more questions…”
The film was made over a period between 1986 to 1988, emerging from a series of performances with video. The film was an experimental work that led to Keane evolving and learning new technology: she said that she “invented the techniques to show the concept… the process of making the work was very important.”
Cecilia Vicuña’s painting of Violeta Parra acquired by Tate
December 2017
We are pleased to announce Tate’s acquisition from England & Co of Cecilia Vicuña’s 1973 painting of the Chilean folk singer, poet, artist and social activist, Violeta Parra.
Marion Adnams – photographs by Jane England
2 December 2017 – 4 March 2018
Two of gallery director Jane England’s photographic portraits of artist Marion Adnams (1898-1995) have been acquired by Derby Museum and Art Gallery. They were included in the recent exhibition Marion Adnams: A Singular Woman – an exhibition celebrating (until her work received recent attention) this almost forgotten artist. Adnams spent most of her life in Derby where she was born, working as an art teacher while she quietly developed a reputation as a painter of idiosyncratic, dream-like works inspired by Surrealism. She exhibited in London and regional art galleries from the late 1930s onwards, and examples of her work can be found in many UK public collections. England & Co first exhibited Adnam’s work in an exhibition in 1990 about the artists of her first London gallery: Jack Bilbo’s The Modern Art Gallery.
Paule Vézelay work acquired by Scottish Museum of Modern Art
November 2017
Paule Vézelay’s Composition from 1933, a large pastel on canvas the artist produced in Paris in 1933, has been acquired by the Scottish Museum of Modern Art, Edinburgh. The following year, Vézelay was invited to join the group Abstraction-Création and exhibited in several significant pioneering exhibitions of non-figurative art in France, Italy and Holland and this work demonstrates her move away from the Surrealist influence of her former partner, André Masson, towards pure non-objectivity.
Cecilia Vicuña in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985
Cecilia Vicuña is one of the featured artists in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 opening on Friday (15 September) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (until 31 December 2017). It then travels to the Brooklyn Museum, New York (13 April – 29 July 2018).
Benjamin Creme’s ‘Sybilline Figure’ in Scottish Modern Art exhibition
Until 10 June 2018
A major early work by Benjamin Creme, Sybilline Figure (1943), is on view in the exhibition A New Era: Scottish Modern Art 1900-1950 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. The exhibition reveals the remarkable yet relatively unknown response by Scottish artists to the development of modern art in the first half of the 20th Century.
Paule Vézelay: Spotlight at Tate Britain
April – November 2017
Paule Vézelay is the subject of a Spotlight room display at Tate Britain curated by Inga Fraser with works from Tate’s collection and from Tate Archive, together with loans of works from private collections facilitated by England & Co, who represent the Estate of the artist.
Cecilia Vicuña: Read Thread – The Story of the Red Thread for documenta 14
April 2017
Read Thread is published to coincide with Cecilia Vicuña’s installation in Athens for documenta 14, and tells the story of the sanguine thread in the artist’s work. From the 1970s to the present, Vicuña’s work has engaged with rituals involving red thread from Aboriginal Australia, South Africa, Paleolithic Europe, and pre-Columbian America. The Chilean artist’s performances, installations, paintings and drawings relate to the symbolic function of textile and language.
Read Thread documents Vicuña’s quipus – large-scale immersive installations of thread, wool and yarn that reference the pre-Columbian language of knotting, a type of weaving-as-writing. The book also includes poetic texts and narratives written by the artist especially for this project, as well as essays by documenta 14 curator Dieter Roelstraete and art historian José de Nordenflycht Concha.
Published by Sternberg Press, the book (148 pages) will be available, in English, in April 2017, at €22. ISBN 978-3-95679-322-6. Pre-order through the publisher’s website: sternberg-press.com
Cecilia Vicuña in documenta 14 – Athens and Kassel
April – July 2017
Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread) is a monumental installation of Cecilia Vicuña’s new work for documenta 14 at EMST (National Museum of Contemporary Art) in Athens. Her work, both a Quipu and paintings, also feature in documenta’s exhibitions in Kassel.