NEWS
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.
Mechanical Echoes: the Typewriter and Artistic Practice
Until 27 October 2019
Early visual poetry by Eduardo Kac is featured in Mechanical Echoes: The Typewriter and Artistic Practice at the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo, Brazil. Curated by Cristina Freire, the exhibition highlights the use of the typewriter by international artists from the 19th and 20th centuries and it includes five of Kac’s works on paper alongside his digital poem Letter (1996). Acquired by the museum in 2014, Letter presents a spiralling cone made of words, visually evoking the creation or destruction of a star. The component texts are composed as fragments of letters written to a single individual, while deliberately conflating the subject positions of grandmother, mother, and daughter, referencing moments of death and birth in the poet’s family.
Jack Bilbo in Brave New Visions at Sotheby’s
17 July – 9 August 2019
Jack Bilbo is represented – as both an artist and gallery director – in the exhibition Brave New Visions at Sotheby’s London that pays tribute to the émigré art dealers who transformed the London gallery scene after arriving in the UK. England & Co have loaned Bilbo’s Black Madonna and material about the gallery Bilbo opened during the war years in London.
Benjamin Creme and the Circle around Jankel Adler
Thursday 11 July, 6.30pm
Gallery director, Jane England, will be giving a talk on Thursday evening at the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London. Entitled Benjamin Creme and the Circle of Jankel Adler, it will focus on the work of Glasgow-born artist Benjamin Creme (1922-2016), one of the artists who gathered around the émigré Polish artist Jankel Adler (1895-1949) in Glasgow and London in the 1940s. Two works by Benjamin Creme are included in the museum’s current exhibition, Jankel Adler: A ‘degenerate’ artist in Britain 1940-1949.
Anne Bean in conversation on Resonance FM
7 July 2019
Listen to Anne Bean talking with Simon Tyszko on Resonance FM. The discussion was recorded as a “walking conversation” around her latest exhibition project, Anne Bean: How Things Used to Be Now, held by England & Co in the Southeran Building, London W1.
Vicuña exhibition at Witte de With
Until 24 November 2019
Cecilia Vicuña’s retrospective exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam brings together more than a hundred works by this poet, visual artist, and activist. Dawn Adès’ wonderful essay on Vicuña’s early paintings – first published by England & Co in the publication/catalogue for Cecilia Vicuña’s exhibition at England & Co in 2013 – has been re-published in the excellent publication accompanying the exhibiiton edited by the curator Miguel López.