NEWS
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.
Woodwork: A Family Tree of Sculpture at Leeds Art Gallery
Until 25 April 2021
As part of Yorkshire Sculpture International, this sculpture display features eight works from the collection of Leeds Art Gallery exhibited together for the first time. Woodwork: A Family Tree of Sculpture ‘responds to Phyllida Barlow’s provocation that ‘sculpture is the most anthropological of the art forms’ by considering wood as the most anthropological of materials’. The display includes Stuart Brisley’s Untitled wall relief c1962-63 (seen on left of installation view), a work acquired from the England & Co exhibition: Stuart Brisley: Works 1958-2006. Brisley’s assemblage ‘is a pivotal early work marking the artist’s transition in the early 1960s from collage and relief into three-dimensional sculpture using found objects…’.
‘In Our Hands, Greenham’ by Tina Keane acquired by Tate
March 2020
Tate has acquired In Our Hands, Greenham 1982-4 by Tina Keane from the gallery. The 38-minute video ‘celebrates the women’s peace protest that began in 1981 outside RAF Greenham Common, in Berkshire, England …The goals of the women’s protest were the removal of the cruise missiles from Greenham Common and cessation of the use of nuclear weapons in general.’
Towner Art Gallery acquires ‘Neo Naturist’
3 February 2020
Towner Art Gallery in East Sussex has acquired an example of the iconic photograph by Wilma Johnson from the edition published by England & Co with the artist in 2007. It is a key image from the very beginning of this live art collective initiated in 1981 by Jennifer Binnie, Christine Binnie and Wilma Johnson.