NEWS
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.
Paule Vézelay among ‘Radical Women’ at Pallant House
Until 23 February 2020
England & Co have loaned several works by Paule Vézelay (1892-1984) to the exhibition Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and her Contemporaries at Pallant House Gallery of British women artists of the early 20th century, centred around the pioneering work of Jessica Dismorr (1885–1939). Artists included in the exhibition are Dismorr’s fellow Rhythmists, Anne Estelle Rice and Ethel Wright; Helen Saunders, the only other female founding signatory of the Vorticists; Paule Vézelay, who showed with Dismorr with the London Group, and Sophie Fedorovitch and Winifred Nicholson who exhibited at the Seven and Five Society in the 1920s.
A Year in Art: 1973 at Tate Modern
Until 18 October 2020
Cecilia Vicuña‘s Violeta Parra and her Diary of Objects – both acquired from England & Co’s 2013 exhibition of her work – are now on view in A Year in Art: 1973. This display at Tate Modern, London, explores how art was used as a form of protest in response to the 1973 coup d’etat in Chile. The display features materials relating to Artists for Democracy, works by Conrad Atkinson, Francisco Copello, John Dugger, Nicolás Franco, Alfredo Jaar, Lynn MacRitchie and Lotty Rosenfeld, plus a section of arpilleras, textiles made by unknown artists depicting life in Chile.
Pushing Paper at the British Museum
Until 12 Jan 2020
Three significant works on paper acquired from England & Co in recent years for the collection of the British Museum are featured in the exhibition Pushing Paper: Liliane Lijn’s futuristic collage, Hanging/Floating Gardens of Rock City i (1970); Grayson Perry’s early mixed media work on paper, Untitled (c1984); and Stuart Brisley’s Dirty Protest, Armagh (1993), all join works by well-known and emerging artists in a selection chosen from more than 1,500 contemporary works in the Museum’s collection.
This British Museum display and touring exhibition explores how artists have used drawing to examine themes including identity, place and memory, pushing the boundaries of the medium. The museum says that “Pushing Paper marks an important moment for the museum and its contemporary collections.” The exhibition, supported by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation, will tour to four UK venues: the Oriental Museum in Durham, the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea and the Cooper Gallery in Barnsley.
Pushing Paper: contemporary drawing from 1970 to now, Department of Prints and Drawings Room 90, the British Museum (catalogue).
Satomi Matoba: Travelling Nomansland
12-15 December 2019
Satomi Matoba is a founder and core member of INTERCHANGE, an experimental collaboration of visual media art and improvisational contemporary music initiated in 2007. Her map animation, Travelling Nomansland, is featured in INTERCHANGE: Camera Obscura 13 (Hiroshima City Higashikumin Bunka Centre, Hiroshima, Japan). In the exhibition’s ‘audio and visual playroom’, Matoba’s mapping projection is accompanied by dancers invited to make a live performance in which dance, music and moving images interact with each other using cutting-edge technology.
Eduardo Kac at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
November 2019
Several works by Eduardo Kac are featured in New York’s newly renovated Museum of Modern Art‘s display of its permanent collection, including Reabracadabra (1985) and works from the Porn Art Movement (1980–82).
Reabracadabra is one of four animated digital poems that Kac created specifically for the Minitel network, the 1980s precursor of the internet. Also on display at MoMA are items from the Porn Art Movement (Movimento de Arte Pornô), which was created by Kac and collaborators in the early 1980s to contest the conservatism of Brazil’s military dictatorship through interventions, poetry, performances and publications, often with a liberating sense of humour. The display of items from the permanent collection includes Kac’s artist’s book Escracho (1983).
Paule Vézelay in Saint-Etienne
30 November 2019 – 30 October 2020
The foundations of the exceptional collection of modern art at the MAMC+ (Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole) were laid after the Second World War by Maurice Allemand (1906-1979), director of the Musée d’Art et d’Industrie from 1947 to 1966, at that time the only museum in Saint-Étienne.
This art collection is now part of the MAMC+, created in 1987. Maurice Allemand surrounded himself with some of the greatest artists, gallery owners and collectors of his era, and their donations, together with his purchases, transformed the museum’s collection, making it a pioneer among French regional modern art museums. Paule Vézelay is represented in the museum’s collection and in this exhibition – Maurice Allemand, or How Modern Art came to Saint-Etienne 1947-1966 – by two works donated to the collection by Susi Magnelli, the widow of artist Alberto Magnelli who knew Vézelay in Paris in the 1930s.
Vale, Klaus Friedeberger (1922–2019)
October 2019
Klaus Friedeberger arrived in Britain in 1939 as a refugee from Berlin. He was soon sent as an internee aboard the Dunera to Australia, where he spent his formative years as an artist before returning to Europe, where he lived and worked in London for the rest of his life. His first one-man exhibition was at Annely Juda’s Hamilton Galleries in 1963. A solo exhibition at England & Co in 2007 focused primarily on his early works in Australia and London and led to acquisitions of several works by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
Monica Ross at Austrian Cultural Forum, London
10 October 2019 – 31 January 2020
Monica Ross is represented in Nothing Less! at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, an exhibition that questions what constitutes women’s rights today and celebrates feminist legacies.
Cut and Paste – collage in Edinburgh
Until 27 October 2019
Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage is a comprehensive and fascinating exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exploring its history and many practitioners. England & Co has loaned seven works by Gwyther Irwin, Rolf Brandt, James Cant, Jiří Kolář, Michael Druks, JDH Catleugh, and an anonymous pre-modernist work. The exhibition is accompanied by an excellent catalogue by the curator of the exhibition, Patrick Elliott, with additional essays by Freya Gowrley and Yuval Etgar.