NEWS
Paule Vezélay: ‘Parisian Abstracts’ in Hungary
Vale, John Aldus (1940-2022)
29 January 2022
England & Co are sad to announce the death last week of the artist John Aldus who exhibited with us in recent years. John, born in Geneva as Gérald Ducimetière, was a French/Swiss sculptor, painter, photographer and multimedia artist. He changed his name to John Aldus in the mid 1990s, and settled in London for the rest of his life.
Over the past six decades, he received many awards, had numerous international exhibitions and created installations for public spaces in Switzerland, Europe and the UK. He said that his main aim throughout his many-faceted practice was to be “engaged in examining the role of art and its mechanisms in contemporary society”.
For his permanent public art commission on London’s Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury, in 2006, Aldus worked closely with the nearby Foundling Museum. He created ‘Tokens’ inspired by the poignant objects left by mothers at the original Foundling Hospital. These were embedded into the fabric of Marchmont Street as a a trail of cast metal shapes, resonant objects for passersby to encounter, engage with and reflect on the past.
Anne Bean-Louisa Buck interview
7 January 2022
As part of the series 40 Years: 40 Artists, marking the 40th anniversary of a-n, The Artists Information Company’s newsletter, the distinguished British writer and broadcaster Louisa Buck interviews Anne Bean.
Anne Bean and The White Room
Sit-in #2: To Be Potential
Cooper Gallery
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee
3 December 2021 – 19 February 2022
Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University
5 March – 21 May 2022
This exhibition and event project navigates and extends experiments in art education and alternative educational initiatives from the early 20th century to the present.
One of several featured projects, ‘The White Room’ experiment, was instigated by artist and tutor Rita Donagh with a group of students at the Fine Art Department at Reading University in May 1970. At the centre of the experiment was a consideration of the figure of the life model, and a question of what could happen in a ‘life room’ at a time when art education was subject to radical changes.
The White Room/Drawing Life (1970), a series of collage works from ‘The White Room’ by Anne Bean, together with reconstructed elements and ephemera, is accompanied by a newly commissioned audio work The Ballad of the White Room by Anne Bean, Graham Challifour, Rita Donagh and Rod Melvin.
Anne Bean: Elles x Paris Photo
November 2021 and continuing online
Anne Bean has been selected for Elles x Paris Photo. For this edition in 2021, Nathalie Herschdorfer, an art historian and curator specialising in the history of photography, spotlighted a selection of works – both online and at Paris Photo itself – by women artists and the galleries that support them.
Elles x Paris Photo is a programme initiated in 2019 in partnership with the French Ministry of Culture and supported by Women In Motion, a Kering programme focused on women artists and their contribution to the history of photography.
Tina Keane: In Our Hands, Greenham
15 – 24 October 2021
Studio Voltaire, London
Tina Keane‘s In Our Hands, Greenham will be screened at Studio Voltaire as part of Conal McStravick’s project, Desperate Living: Queer Care Camp that aims by generating “collaborative outcomes and public events, the project will explore how past, present and future care can provide tools for our current social, political and ecological crises, and hopes.”
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’.