NEWS
The Light of Day: Anne Bean/Alex Eisenberg
3 October 2021
LUX, Waterlow Park Centre, London
A special screening was held of The Light of Day, a unique collaborative film celebrating the life-long friendship of artists Anne Bean and Jeanette Iljon. Presented by LUX, the film is a \”series of tender exchanges between life long friends Jeanette Iljon and Anne Bean. Born eleven days apart to Jewish families in Zambia in 1950, they both went on to become artists in the UK. The Light of Day carefully recomposes Iljon’s experimental, feminist and social activist film works made in the 1970s/80s. It combines these with an almost lost interview, shot by Anne Bean in 2000 and new performance material that was made with Alex Eisenberg in 2019 following Iljon’s diagnosis with dementia.\”
Photographs of Eileen Agar by Jane England
Until 29 August 2021
Three photographs by gallery director Jane England are on display at the Whitechapel Gallery in a complementary section of Eileen Agar’s retrospective exhibition (alongside other photographers’ images and a film). The photographs were taken at Agar’s studio and home in West House, Melbury Road, Kensington, where she had lived since the late 1950s. The exhibition, Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy ends on 29 August 2021.
Anne Bean interview in The Guardian
18 August 2021
In this interview in The Guardian, Anne Bean has been revisiting her past: on 21 August, the pioneering performance artist is taking part in a 10-hour “durational live event” as part of PSX: A Decade of Performance Art in the UK. This required her to look back on five decades of practice – her past work, she says is “intimately linked” to her present – and takes place at The Ugly Duck event space in Bermondsey, not far from the Butler’s Wharf studio where Bean worked from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.
ZKM acquires \’Change Painting\’ by Roy Ascott
July 2021
The ZKM – the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe – has acquired Change Painting (Love Code), 1961, by Roy Ascott from England & Co. The work comprises five sliding painted glass panes in a wooden frame; in 2016 it was included in the exhibition Electronic Superhighway at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
The ZKN was founded in 1989 with the mission of continuing the classical arts into the digital age, which is why it is sometimes called the \’electronic or digital Bauhaus\’.
Vale Michael Horovitz OBE (1935-2021)
Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy
19 May – 29 August 2021
Whitechapel Gallery
England & Co were pleased to arrange the loan of Portrait of the Artist’s Mother – a major painting from the 1940s by Agar, which the gallery sold to a private collection some years ago – to the retrospective exhibition, Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
This is the largest exhibition ever of her work to date and traces Agar\’s “ground-breaking career from the 1920s to the 1990s. From early works influenced by her teachings at the Slade, through her experiments with Cubism and her inclusion in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, to her later compositions of lyrical abstraction, Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy features over 150 works… reveal[s] Agar as one of the most dynamic, bold and prolific artists of her generation, which included friends André Breton, Gertrude Hermes, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Paul Nash and Man Ray.”
Paule Vézelay and Louise Hopkins in Glasgow
10 June – 4 July 2021
England & Co were pleased to loan selected works by Paule Vézelay to 42 Carlton Place in Glasgow. The exhibition Paule Vézelay-Louise Hopkins: You can have curves and straight lines paired the work of the pioneering abstract artist of the 1930s and beyond with that of the contemporary artist Louise Hopkins.
Cecilia Vicuña quipu acquired by Tate
17 May 2021
England & Co is delighted to announce the acquisition by Tate of Cecilia Vicuña’s monumental work Quipu Womb (The story of the Red Thread, Athens), created for documenta 14 in Athens in 2017. Now installed at Tate Modern, the acquisition was generously supported by the Tate Americas Foundation, Latin American Acquisitions Committee.
Cecilia Vicuña (born 1948, Santiago, Chile) is a poet, artist and filmmaker who has moved between Chile and New York for over four decades. Her practice draws from ‘indigenous weaving practices, ritual, and environmental activism’. Vicuña’s quipus are installations she creates from strands of raw, dyed wool, referencing the ancient Inca and Andean communication system of knotted cords. Vicuña has described Quipu Womb as a ‘poem in space’.
Quipu Womb (The story of the Red Thread, Athens), documenta 14, Athens 2017. Photograph © Jane England, England & Co.
Paule Vézelay among the \’Fifty\’
9 April – 27 July 2021
England & Co were pleased to loan works by Paule Vézelay to the exhibition Fifty Works by Fifty British Women Artists 1900–1950, a diverse collection of fifty works by fifty British women artists, from portraits and self-portraits, landscapes and cityscapes to industrial scenes and images of war, curated by Sacha Llewellyn to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People’s Act. The exhibition is at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds.
Vale, John Furnival
(30 May 1933 – 31 May 2020)
We are sad to announce the death of John Furnival, on the day after his 87th birthday. John described himself as \”a drawer of landscapes, personages and wordscapes”, and his prints, drawings and publications connected his antecedents in the Dada and Surrealist movements to his associations in the early 1960s with the innovators of Concrete Poetry, the Beat poets, and the Fluxus and Mail Art movements. He taught for more than thirty years at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, and was an active participant in the Academy’s innovative era in the 1960s and \’70s when it was a creative hub for Concrete Poetry.