Author: Denys Andrianjafy

DOUBLE TAKE – The Art of Printmaking

Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm
16 January – 14 May 2012

FREE ADMISSION

Private View: Monday 23rd January 2012, 6 – 8pm. ALL WELCOME

The art of printmaking is being celebrated in a new exhibition opening next week at the University of Kent’s Studio 3 Gallery.

The University is collaborating with the Royal College of Art (RCA) to host Double Take – The Art of Printmaking, which will feature artists such as Tim Mara, Paula Rego, Chris Orr, Elisabeth Frink and Ana Maria Pacheco.

Running from 16 January to 14 May, the exhibition will also showcase the work of recent graduates of the RCA’s MA in Printmaking and feature a ‘vibrant and eclectic mix of styles and techniques’, according to Studio 3 Gallery curator Ben Thomas.

‘Some works on display will challenge assumptions about prints through their scale, use of materials or through technique. The subordinate status of the print to other art forms is contested, bringing printmaking into play with painting, photography and digital design and animation,’ he said.

‘Other works re-examine established techniques like etching, linocut and screen printing to explore their potential for future innovation.’

One of the artists exhibiting, Professor Jo Stockham, Head of Printmaking at the RCA, said: ‘This has been a fantastic opportunity to share our extensive archive of work produced in the department with informed and enthusiastic researchers and a new audience.

‘The range of work chosen demonstrates the way print circulates and creates dialogues through time which transcend specific mediums and attest to its continual reinvention and hybridity.’

Key works from the RCA’s printmaking archive have been selected for the exhibition by recent graduates as influences on their work. The majority of works exhibited will be from the last five years, but the earliest print dates back to the 1930s.

Artists exhibited are: Frances Bennett, David Borrington, Jessie Brennan, Tereza Buskova, Cordelia Cembrowicz, An Ghee Chan, Laura Clarke, Andrew Curtis, Elisabeth Frink, Joy Gerrard, Ioanna Gouma, Claas Gutsche, Oona Grimes, Beatrice Haines, Mark Hayward, Allen Jones, Serena Korda, Youn Jeong Lee, Claire Maunsell, Tim Mara, Sonsoles Marquez, Frederick Morris, , Fay Nicolson, David Orme, Chris Orr, Ana Maria Pacheco, Andrew Parker, Simon Patterson, Paula Rego, Giulia Resteghini, Dolores de Sade, Aithan Shapira, William Scott, Sarah Simmonds, Jo Stockham

Portraits and a Dream: Art & Language

Art & Language were formed in 1967/68 out of the collaboration of four artists: Mike Baldwin, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge and Harold Hurrell. The group’s name derived from their journal Art-Language, that existed ‘as a work in conversation’ from 1966 onwards. During the 1970s the name served as a common identity for various artists involved in a range of international collaborations, though from the late 1970s Art & Language have consisted of Mike Baldwin, Mel Ramsden and Charles Harrison, until the latter’s death in 2009. Widely considered to be one of the first, most influential and controversial conceptual art groups, Art & Language have exhibited globally, including at Documenta, the Lisson Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Tate Gallery, the Getty Museum and Barcelona have holdings of their work. They were nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986.

Art & Language’s work is characterized by a diverse array of activities and projects commonly characterized by the resistance to categorization and by an ‘openness of effect’ and meaning. Their oeuvre marks a historical turn toward a more theoretical, linguistic and critical intervention into the context of fine arts production. Much of their work provokes reflection on the institutional conditions of making and contemplating works of art and reflects critically on the history of modern art and contemporary practice, as well as the uses and functionality to which culture and cultural objects are put. A central concern of their oeuvre from the beginning, as the name Art & Language implies, is the exploration of the relationship between the linguistic and visual and the questions involved in the interrelation and understanding of the one in terms of the other.

The installation Portraits and a Dream involves a series of interrelated works, including written texts, poster-portraits pasted on the gallery walls and another set of the same printed writings cut up and fashioned into paper-chains. This is a demotic motif Art & Language have been using for the past couple of years, but one whose meanings are linked to the swirling linear forms of the paintings of Jackson Pollock, whose Portrait and a Dream (1953) is referenced in the work’s title. As Charles Harrison has commented, the apparently ‘perverse’ motif of the paper-chain represents a response to ‘the critical requirement that…whatever in practice is inflated – in scale, in genre, in professional ambition, in technical adventure – must at some point be brought low.’ The ‘decorative’ paper-chains of Art & Language simultaneously bring the work of art down to earth while re-configuring its form and meanings.

Portraits and a Dream was first exhibited at the Lisson gallery in 2010; the exhibition at Gallery 3 presents a new version of the work. A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by the curator Jon Kear and texts by Art & Language is available. Mike Baldwin and Mel Ramsden will also be doing a number of seminars in conjunction with the exhibition.

Jon Kear, Curator Portraits and a Dream

Portraits and a dream invitation

3 Oct to 16Dec
Mon-Fri 9am-5pm
Free, Disabled Access

Studio 3 Gallery
Jarman Building
School of Arts
Canterbury Campus
University of Kent

(tel: 01227 827228, web: www.kent.ac.uk/arts.hpa/exhibitions)

Shadows of the Wanderer at Studio 3 Gallery

Shadows of the Wanderer an exhibition by Ana Maria Pacheco will be displayed at the University of Kent from 17 Jan to 17 May 2011, Mon-Fri 9am-5pm.

The exhibition, which will take place in Studio 3 Gallery on the University’s Canterbury campus, is free and open to all. There is disabled access to the Gallery.

This work by Ana Maria Pacheco has been described by Galleries Magazine as ‘a major new sculptural work by perhaps the most powerful and original of significant artists practicing in this country’.

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Ana Maria Pacheco is a Brazilian artist who has lived and worked in Britain since 1973. She was Head of Fine Art at Norwich School of Art (1985-89) and Associate Artist at the National Gallery (1997-2000). She has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and her work is represented in major public collections (British Museum, British Council, Arts Council, Tate, V&A etc). Pacheco works across sculpture, painting and printmaking as a figurative artist.

Shadows of the Wanderer is a multi-piece figure sculpture in polychromed wood. In it a group of larger than life, darkly robed figures witness the struggle of a young man to carry an older man on his shoulders. The figures of the young man burdened by the old suggest a reference to the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid, where the hero Aeneas carries his lame father Anchises out of the burning city of Troy. As in previous works by Pacheco, for example The Longest Journey (1994), Shadows of the Wanderer initiates a journey into unknown territory; a journey that the beholder is invited to participate in.

Shadows of the Wanderer was created in 2008 and was previously exhibited at the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts in 2008, and at St John’s Waterloo in 2010. The exhibition at Studio 3 in Canterbury has been organised in association with Pratt Contemporary Art. A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Brendan Prendeville and Christopher Reid is available. The series of Dark Event prints (2007) by Pacheco will also be displayed alongside Shadows of the Wanderer.

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This exhibition has been organised in association with Pratt Contemporary Art.