John Dugger’s Mountain Banners at Telluride
25 – 28 May 2018
John Dugger returns for the second time as the featured artist at Telluride Mountain Film Festival in Colorado, this year celebrating its 40th anniversary. His solo exhibition includes 12 of his Mountain Banners, from the earliest to his most recent works.
Paule Vézelay at HKW Berlin
13 April – 9 July 2018
England & Co have loaned a painting by Paule Vézelay to Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 at HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) Berlin. This exhibition of artworks and archive documents demonstrate the role played by art and visual culture in grappling with the crises around 1930. This period, “c. 1930”, was a time of crisis in modernity and, for the artistic avant-gardes in Europe, the contemporary condition also became problematic. Taking its cue from texts by the extra-academic art historian Carl Einstein, this exhibition and conference thematises the upheavals, openings, and contradictions that became manifest in art and the humanities from the 1920s into the 1940s. “Neolithic Childhood” was a concept used by Carl Einstein to characterize his understanding of Hans Arp.
Poetry for Animals, Machines and Aliens: The Art of Eduardo Kac
Until 28 May 2018
This exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery presents a selection of Eduardo Kac’s works including holopoems, digital poems, and a space poem. One of the highlights of the exhibition is Lagoogleglyph III, a large-scale image inscribed on the ground in Finsbury Park, London. The image was specifically created and optimized for satellite photography, thus potentially visible to anyone on the planet via Google’s geographic search engine (Google Earth).
Cecilia Vicuña in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985
13 April – 22 July 2018
Works by Cecilia Vicuña are included in this touring exhibition which has just opened at at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at Brooklyn Museum, NY. Featuring more than 120 artists from 15 countries, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 focuses on their use of the female body for political and social critique and artistic expression.
Paule Vézelay in Surface Work
11 April – 16 June 2018
England & Co have loaned a 1938 painting by Paule Vézelay from a private collection to Surface Work at the Victoria Miro Gallery: an international, cross-generational exhibition of women artists who have shaped and transformed, and continue to influence and expand, the language of abstract painting. The exhibition is held across both of the Victoria Miro London galleries: the Vézelay work is at their Mayfair gallery.
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.