An exhibition of the artist's largest, most complex, multi-viewpoint lithographs which he made at the studios of master printer Ken Tyler.
An exhibition of the artist's largest, most complex, multi-viewpoint lithographs which he made at the studios of master printer Ken Tyler.
Including lithographs and etching by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
"Like haiku poems, Vicken Parsons' small paintings articulate form, image and atmosphere to generate a profound visual and psychic impact. They are at once painterly, sculptural and architectonic." Iwona Blazwick, 2005*
In early 2012 the Alan Cristea Gallery will present the first solo show in London for over twelve years of the British born artist, Vicken Parsons. The show will consist of around twenty new works and will be accompanied by a fully illustratecd catalogue with introduction by leading psychoanalyst and writer Darian Leader. To pre-order a copy of the catalogue please contact us.
Parsons makes small, intimate paintings of landscape and architectural spaces which move from figuration to abstraction with quiet ease. Made with thin layers of oil paint on thick plywood panel, the works have a three-dimensional, object-like quality. Often grey or monochrome, the paintings are sometimes hit with a flash of colour, of cornflower blue, bright white or electric yellow which almost seems to fluoresce. At times, however, they simply retreat into deep, dark corners.
‘In their jewel-like scale, their tentative yet dynamic surface and their Vermeer-like suggestion of darkness and light, Vicken Parsons' paintings hover between a palpable sense of the here and now, and a fantastical and poetic evocation of the life of the mind.'*
The movement between the real and the imagined, the concrete and the abstract makes you want to stand in front of a Parsons painting and linger. You may leave with more questions than answers (where am I? Is that a horizon? If I turn that corner can I escape?), but you will, without a doubt, want to return.
This London show follows solo exhibitions at the Galerie Christine Koenig, Vienna (2008 and 2005), the New Art Centre, Salisbury (2006) and Tate St Ives (2002), with group exhibitions including shows at Southampton City Art Gallery (2010), the Art Depot, London (2010), Tate Modern (2004), Art Futures, (2007), Kunsthalle Mannheim (2004-5) and the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2004). Born in 1957, Parsons studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and lives and works in London.
*From exhibition catalogue, Vicken Parsons Your Light, at the Galerie Christine Koenig, Vienna, 2005
To view available works, please click here.
Including work by Christiane Baumgartner, Sean Scully and Sol le Witt.
Alan Cristea Gallery will present a major new construction together with a site-specific series of drawings as well as a retrospective exhibition of Mimmo Paladino's prints and multiples. Born in Paduli, in the Benevento region, in 1948, Paladino lives and works in Italy where he has studios in Rome, Paduli and Puglia. The exhibition at 31 Cork Street will focus on a large-scale mixed-media installation as well as a new body of watercolours and works on paper backed onto canvas specifically conceived by Paladino for the space. Simultaneously, in the gallery at 34 Cork Street, a retrospective exhibition will be staged of the editions published by Alan Cristea Gallery over the past seven years, including a series of recent mosaic multiples. These two exhibitions will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an introductory essay by Dr. Jill Lloyd. To pre-order a copy of the catalogue, please contact us.
For three months, from April 2011, Paladino dominated Milan's cultural agenda. A jet fighter adorned by the artist landed in the octagon of the galleria Vittorio Emanuelle. His films were shown in Milanese theatres, his literary sources discussed in a festival of art and literature. His salt mountain strewn with horses, which he first installed 20 years ago, was resurrected in the Piazetta Reale adjacent to the Duomo. His gigantic Helmet sculpture looked out from the Castello Sofrzesco. His bronze Scudi (shields) stood guard in the courtyard of the Palazzo Reale protecting the entrance to a vast retrospective exhibition of his work in the palace itself; the show was curated by Flavio Arensi and the catalogue texts written by Arthur C. Danto and Germano Celant who charted the artist's career from the first mention of the Transavantguardia and established the artist's perennial significance in an era dominated by a Postmodernist aesthetic.
The focal point of the exhibitions at the Alan Cristea Gallery will be a large construction featuring 89 pencil drawings on wooden blocks surrounding a framed mixed-media work on paper. Also to be exhibited are 32 new unique works alongside 23 prints and multiples. Paladino's compendium of motifs - flora, fauna, and domestic objects together with his signature depiction of a vulnerable human face will fill the works whatever the medium. These motifs speak of the unchanging nature of human values and emotions and of the continuum of the past into the present.
Paladino's first solo exhibition was held at the Studio Oggetto, Caserta in 1969. In 1980 he participated in the Aperto '80 at the Venice Biennial along with Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Nicola De Maria (leaders of the Transavantgarde movment). A major retrospective of his work was held in Munich at the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in 1985. Other major solo exhibitions include Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Forte Belvedere, Florence in 1993, Scuderie di Palazzo Reale, Piazza del Plebiscito and Villa Pignatelli, Naples 1995-6, South London Gallery 1999, Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy 2002-03 and the Estorick Collection, London in 2004. Paladino's work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Tate Collection, London the Kunstmuseum, Basel, the Nationalgalerie, Berlin and the Australian National Gallery, Canberra. His interest in the relationship between visual art and sound led him to collaborate with musician Brian Eno, firstly on an installation for the Roundhouse, London in 1999 and again on a site-specific work for the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome in 2008.
The Alan Cristea Gallery is the exclusive distributor of Mimmo Paladino's editions worldwide.
To view available works, please click here.
Alan Cristea Gallery will present a major new construction together with a site-specific series of drawings as well as a retrospective exhibition of Mimmo Paladino's prints and multiples. Born in Paduli, in the Benevento region, in 1948, Paladino lives and works in Italy where he has studios in Rome, Paduli and Puglia. The exhibition at 31 Cork Street will focus on a large-scale mixed-media installation as well as a new body of watercolours and works on paper backed onto canvas specifically conceived by Paladino for the space. Simultaneously, in the gallery at 34 Cork Street, a retrospective exhibition will be staged of the editions published by Alan Cristea Gallery over the past seven years, including a series of recent mosaic multiples. These two exhibitions will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an introductory essay by Dr. Jill Lloyd. To pre-order a copy of the catalogue, please contact us.
For three months, from April 2011, Paladino dominated Milan's cultural agenda. A jet fighter adorned by the artist landed in the octagon of the galleria Vittorio Emanuelle. His films were shown in Milanese theatres, his literary sources discussed in a festival of art and literature. His salt mountain strewn with horses, which he first installed 20 years ago, was resurrected in the Piazetta Reale adjacent to the Duomo. His gigantic Helmet sculpture looked out from the Castello Sofrzesco. His bronze Scudi (shields) stood guard in the courtyard of the Palazzo Reale protecting the entrance to a vast retrospective exhibition of his work in the palace itself; the show was curated by Flavio Arensi and the catalogue texts written by Arthur C. Danto and Germano Celant who charted the artist's career from the first mention of the Transavantguardia and established the artist's perennial significance in an era dominated by a Postmodernist aesthetic.
The focal point of the exhibitions at the Alan Cristea Gallery will be a large construction featuring 89 pencil drawings on wooden blocks surrounding a framed mixed-media work on paper. Also to be exhibited are 32 new unique works alongside 23 prints and multiples. Paladino's compendium of motifs - flora, fauna, and domestic objects together with his signature depiction of a vulnerable human face will fill the works whatever the medium. These motifs speak of the unchanging nature of human values and emotions and of the continuum of the past into the present.
Paladino's first solo exhibition was held at the Studio Oggetto, Caserta in 1969. In 1980 he participated in the Aperto '80 at the Venice Biennial along with Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Nicola De Maria (leaders of the Transavantgarde movment). A major retrospective of his work was held in Munich at the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in 1985. Other major solo exhibitions include Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Forte Belvedere, Florence in 1993, Scuderie di Palazzo Reale, Piazza del Plebiscito and Villa Pignatelli, Naples 1995-6, South London Gallery 1999, Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy 2002-03 and the Estorick Collection, London in 2004. Paladino's work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Tate Collection, London the Kunstmuseum, Basel, the Nationalgalerie, Berlin and the Australian National Gallery, Canberra. His interest in the relationship between visual art and sound led him to collaborate with musician Brian Eno, firstly on an installation for the Roundhouse, London in 1999 and again on a site-specific work for the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome in 2008.
The Alan Cristea Gallery is the exclusive distributor of Mimmo Paladino's editions worldwide.
To view available works, please click here.
Including recent work by Dexter Dalwood, Ian Davenport and Richard Woods.
The first London exhibition for American artist and Vienna resident will feature recent paintings based on her research into Dorothea Lange's photographs of the Great Depression. For more information, please contact us.
In celebration of the artist's 80th birthday, the exhibition will take place in both of our galleries and to feature a new body of hand-painted etchings.
For more information, please contact us.
In celebration of the artist's 80th birthday, the exhibition will take place in both of our galleries and to feature a new body of hand-painted etchings.
For more information, please contact us.
Featuring prints and source material.
Including works by Anni Albers, Jean Dubuffet and Jacques Villon
Focusing on the work of our Royal Academician artists including Gillian Ayres, Michael Craig-Martin, Allen Jones, Ian McKeever, Lisa Milroy, Mimmo Paladino and Joe Tilson
Focusing on the work of our Royal Academician artists including Gillian Ayres, Michael Craig-Martin, Allen Jones, Ian McKeever, Lisa Milroy, Mimmo Paladino and Joe Tilson
New ceramic pieces by the acclaimed potter across both of our gallery spaces including an enormous new piece consisting of 1,000 pots.
For more information, please contact us.
New ceramic pieces by the acclaimed potter across both of our gallery spaces including an enormous new piece consisting of 1,000 pots.
For more information, please contact us.
New paintings and works on paper
An exhibition to coincide with the publication of a two volume catalogue, one volume of which will document all of the prints we have ever published by Ayres whilst the other will focus on recent paintings.
For more information, please contact us.
New paintings and works on paper
An exhibition to coincide with the publication of a two volume catalogue, one volume of which will document all of the prints we have ever published by Ayres whilst the other will focus on recent paintings.
For more information, please contact us.
Highlights from our 2011 publishing programme and new works.
Although best known for his monumental steel sculptures, Richard Serra is also a prolific and innovative printmaker. Ballast I follows the Arc of the Curve series made in California. The process of this series, ultimately realised as etchings, utilised numerous techniques in their development. The images were developed from Serra's initial drawings into screenprints. The next step was the need to create an organic, overall texture for the surface. This texture was created by applying lithographic rubbing ink onto a sheet of frosted Mylar that had been taped to an exterior stucco wall of the printing studio. The screenprints and texture sheet were photo-transferred to the copper etching plate, which was then placed into a custom-made acid tank, where they remained for several days before being ready to print.
My Marilyn is based on photographs of Marilyn Monroe that Richard Hamilton saw in an article in Town magazine in November 1962, not long after her death in August of that year. The colours that Hamilton chose for this series were evocative of the colour spectrum of cosmetics and beauty products and, coincidentally, are suggestive of the palette de Kooning used in his Women pictures in the 1950s. By choosing the title My Marilyn Hamilton was referring to the abundance of images of Monroe.
The ultimate source for Richard Hamilton's I'm dreaming of a White Christmas was a colour negative frame cut from the scene in the film White Christmas, showing Bing Crosby walking through a hotel lobby. Beginning in 1967 Richard Hamilton explored the theme in two earlier prints and a painting, all of which mimicked the colour reversal of the original. Shortly after making the print, Hamilton wrote that it was 'a return of the subject to positive. When the major piece of the group (a large painting) was completed I had it photographed and from that large sized transparency a colour negative was made with some difficulty. The painting itself is in negative colour so a negative of the painting becomes positive. This positive/negative has been printed, by collotype, to the same size as the silkscreen print of the subject with many silkscreen workings on top in simulation of graphic manipulation.'
Mimmo Paladino's compendium of motifs - flora, fauna, and domestic objects together with his signature depiction of a vulnerable human face will fill his works regardless of the medium. These motifs speak of the unchanging nature of human values and emotions and of the continuum of the past into the present.
Jim Dine's first representations of the Venus de Milo include a group of sculptures made in 1982-3, for which he took plaster casts that he had bought in art supply stores as a starting point for his reinvention of this icon of feminine beauty. He began by cutting off her head as a way of rendering her his own, making her the female equivalent to the male robe motif he has been using as a subject for nearly 20 years. While still immediately recognisable from her stance and proportions, by this violent and elemental act she was transformed from a specific if imaginary female to a sign for all womanhood. By 1985 he had made 23 prints on the subject, compelling evidence of the immediate hold it exercised on his imagination.
Botanical forms can be found in Jim Dine's work as early as 1960, when he collaged photographic illustrations from seed packets with lithographs, but it was only when he began drawing from life in the mid-1970s that he also began to draw flowers and plants.
Gordon Cheung's Still Life with Tulips on Orange re-interprets the canons of 17th Century European still life painting, which emerged in parallel with the rise of capitalism. The tulip is a recurring motif of the golden age of Dutch Vanitas. It also refers to an early example of a speculative bubble, when in 1636 - 1637 in the Netherlands, the frantic demand for tulip bulbs boosted prices to extremely high levels before suddenly collapsing.
Safety Last is the first set of etchings ever produced by Catherine Yass and is the result of her third collaboration with the gallery. This group of eight prints takes as its starting point stills from Safety Last!, the iconic 1923 silent comedy directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and starring Harold Lloyd at the apex of his career. The film culminates with the hero, hanging from a giant clock at the top of a skyscraper, pulling the clock hands downwards and forcibly reversing time. With Safety Last, Yass pursues her experimentation with methods of processing film, considering how time and damage affect the cellulose negative. In making the prints, she scratched the surface of the film itself, a way of working which recalls the etching of a plate and highlights parallels between lens-based media (such as photography or film-making) and etching, as forms of image-making.
Craig-Martin's drawings eschew the archetypal perception of the ‘spontaneous study', hand-drawn with graphite or inked by hand. His are complete and entirely resolved, often existing in large groups, created for their own sake and not necessarily in anticipation of a tangible object. Some are vehicles for the outpouring of ideas and others are proposals for works never or yet to be made. As with his treatment of everyday objects, these drawings are meticulously distilled and deceptively complex. The drawings are made using a crepe tape which was invented in the 1960s for drawing electronic circuitry and which allows for both straight and curved lines. The tape makes a line like a pen, but it's material. For Craig-Martin, drawing using this tape seemed to be a way of making drawings in a particularly sculptural way, where the drawing is physical, not just a mark or stain, but a hard material, so that the drawing itself becomes a construction.
Picasso had made surprisingly few lithographs before 1945, some twenty-five to thirty, the last of which was printed in 1930. This fifteen year interval was brought to an end by Picasso's introduction to the printer, Fernand Mourlot, after the Second World War, and the meeting led to the artist's most prolific period of activity in the medium. The most concentrated burst of activity comes in the following year when, for months on end, he devoted his attention entirely to his muse, Françoise Gilot. The prop that he chose to use was a Polish coat, whose voluminous sleeves serve to swell the physique of his mistress as she commands our attention with a direct stare at both artist and viewer.
From a series of eight portraits published earlier this year, Maria 2 and Ika 1 take 18th Century portraiture as their reference point. Having recently incorporated ever more detail into his portraits, with this series Opie investigates eliminating much of the information whilst keeping the overall format of the classical portrait. The costumes and props and poses are elaborate enough to allow the face itself, usually thought to be the focus of a portrait, to remain blank.
Le Matador demonstrates Miró's innovative attitude towards printmaking, with his use of what was then a new material, carborundum. Carborundum is the common household name for silicon carbide. Traditionally used by printers to grind down lithographic stones, it can also be used as part of the creative printmaking process. By grinding the carborundum into a course or a fine powder and mixing with a PVA glue, the artist can create a malleable paste which can be literally painted onto a printing plate (usually perspex rather than metal). This then dries into a hard, relief surface which can be inked in multiple colours, the carborundum, being granular, absorbs dense quantities of ink. When dampened paper is place on top of the worked plate and both are put through an etching press, the ink is transferred and the relief areas emboss the paper surface. The resulting printed areas are heavily textured and retain the painterly nature of the original application.
Printmaking came in sporadic bursts through Matisse's career, at different times in his life he became completely absorbed by one method or another. His first involvement with lithography came in 1914 and by 1930 he was fully committed to the medium. Jeune Fille assise au Bouquet de Fleurs introduces more elaboration and detail than in many of his prints made around this time, yet the decorative aspects of the composition have been achieved with an economical deftness of touch.
Marie Harnett makes series of highly detailed, minuscule drawings, derived from film stills, which capture fleeting moments of drama, suspense or beauty. Having experimented with making her own films at art school, she began drawing from selected stills. Her process requires her to watch film trailers online without sound or colour, frame by frame, until she sees something that inspires her. She rarely watches the film in its entirety, and doesn't follow the plot, preferring instead to reinvent her own story for the characters she draws.
Highlights from our 2011 publishing programme and new works.
Gillian Ayres was the first great English female abstract artist, and is widely acknowledged as one of Britain's foremost painters. Mirabell and Tivoli are from a new series of woodcuts, Ayres' first foray into this medium. They will form part of her solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper to be held in both of our galleries in October 2012. Also in 2012 a major exhibition of her prints and works on paper will begin at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath in February and will then tour to the Turnpike Gallery in Wigan, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter and the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro.
Prismatic Diptych Analogue is a unique colour variation of Prismatic Diptych, Ian Davenport's largest and most complex print to date. It was produced using a pair of two metre by one metre copper plates earlier this year at Thumbprint Editions in Camberwell. Each etching from his Colorplan Series is an orchestration of 27 different combinations of fluid lines of colour which pool to form puddles at the bottom of the compositions and is printed onto a delicate layer of coloured Chinese paper. To make these works, Davenport first makes a painted study the same size as the intended print in schematically contrasting colours. The study is photographed and the image split into three components, each containing every third dripped line. These components are then transferred to photosensitive copper plates to be bitten in acid and then steel-faced. For printing, each line is individually hand-inked and then each plate is printed in order to build the image part by part.
Lisa Ruyter is an American artist who lives and works in Vienna. Since 1996 her paintings have been based on individual photographs which are edited, refined and transcribed onto canvas. The Alan Cristea Gallery first invited the artist to London two years ago to create the series of woodcuts called The Women and for our second collaboration she returned to make this much larger woodcut on Japanese paper of Where the Sidewalk Ends.
Woodblock Inlays are the outcome of the first collaboration between Richard Woods and Alan Cristea Gallery. They relates to the ‘Offcut Inlays', a previous body of paintings on MDF, which were informed by Woods' Pop take on marquetry. The dynamic composition of the woodcuts is reminiscent of Suprematist aesthetics and the strength and severe geometry of their line recalls the abstraction of High Modernism, whilst maintaining a post-Pop wit. Woodblock Inlays are a step further in Richard Wood's ongoing exploration of the relationship between the functional and the ornamental.
In 1984-5 Lichtenstein produced a series of Landscape paintings, the imagery of which was composed of a combination of ‘cartoon' and ‘real' brushstrokes. In 1985 he explored the theme in a series of seven prints. Some of the images refer to masterpieces by other artists, while others are invented. Lichtenstein produced both the lithographic and the screenprinted brushstrokes by first painting the stroke on vellum and then transferring them to photosensitive screens or plates, in this way retaining all the fluidity of the original stroke. The softness of these strokes is balanced by the hard-edged woodcut ones.
This autumn the Alan Cristea gallery will present a major new body of etchings by British artist Ian Davenport in an exhibition entitled Prismatic, open to the public from 8 October until 12 November 2011. Ian Davenport was born in Kent in 1966. He is one of the now fabled generation of Young British Artists who participated in the seminal 1988 exhibition Freeze, in 1991 he was shortlisteded for the Turner Prize and in 1999 was a prize winner in the John Moores Exhibition. His work was part of the 2003 Tate Triennale and is held in numerous public collections including the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Dallas Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, London, Weltkunst Collection, Zurich and Southampton City Art Gallery.
Davenport is celebrated for his exploration into the nature of materials and colour and this exhibition, presents 14 new works each displaying subtle three-dimensional effects and fizzing with iridescent, jewel-like colours.
"It is always so exciting to be the catalyst between an artist and the production of an outstanding body of work, and particularly to collaborate with an artist who is as innovative and technically accomplished as Ian Davenport," says Alan Cristea.
Prismatic Diptych, 2011 is the largest and most complex work in the exhibition and was produced using a pair of two metre by one metre copper plates, the largest that can be accommodated on the printing press. One of the biggest etchings ever made, it is a tour-de-force of printmaking. The Colorplan Series, 2011 is a set of four smaller colour etchings, each an orchestration of 27 different combinations of fluid lines of colour which pool to form puddles at the bottom of the compositions and each printed onto a delicate layer of coloured chinese paper. Experimentation and improvisation is a vital part of the creative process for Davenport and the final part of the exhibition consists of a group of unique monoprint etchings - each one a further and more daring exploration of colour and line.
To view available works, click here.
Josef Albers, a founding member of the Bauhaus, was one of the most innovative printmakers of the twentieth century, making use of numerous print media, including etching, engraving, woodcut, lithography and screenprinting. He is perhaps best remembered for his Homage to the Square images, the square proving to be the ideal vehicle for his explorations into the interaction of colour.
Anni Albers is one of the best known textile artists of the 20th Century. In 1922 she attended the Bauhaus where she studied weaving, the only option open to women at that time, and where she later met and married Josef Albers. After the Bauhaus's closure in 1933, they moved to America where she taught at the Black Mountain College until 1949. From 1963 she added printmaking to her primary practice as a textile designer and continued to make prints in many different media for the rest of her life.
Christiane Baumgartner is best known for monumental woodcuts based on her own films and video stills, often dealing with themes of war, speed and industry. By making woodcuts of video stills, Baumgartner combines the most recent and one of the oldest means of producing an image.
Michael Craig-Martin's drawings eschew the archetypal perception of the ‘spontaneous study', hand-drawn with graphite or inked by hand. His are complete and entirely resolved, often existing in large groups, created for their own sake and not necessarily in anticipation of a tangible object. Some are vehicles for the outpouring of ideas and others are proposals for works never or yet to be made. As with his treatment of everyday objects, these drawings are meticulously distilled and deceptively complex.
Edmund de Waal is one of the world's leading ceramic artists. His work has recently been on display at Tate Britain and at the Victoria & Albert Museum where his commission Signs and Wonders has been launched as part of the new Ceramic Galleries. De Waal's work is held in over 30 public collections worldwide including the British Council, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Western Australia and the World Ceramic Exposition Museum, Korea. In October 2012, we will be holding our second solo exhibition of De Waal's work.
In 1985 Hodgkin won the Turner Prize and represented Britain in the Venice Biennale. His work has been the subject of numerous major retrospectives most notably at the Metropolitan Museum, New York in 1995 and more recently, in 2006, at Tate Britain, London, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. His paintings and prints are held by most major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the British Museum, London, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk.
Ellsworth Kelly was one of the major exponents of post-painterly abstraction in the 1960s, and is known for his influence on Hard-Edge, Colour Field and Minimalist painting. Kelly has been a prolific printmaker since the 1960s, and this practice has given him scope for an autonomous activity in which his explorations into composition and surface texture have fed back into his constructions.
Red, Blue, Black and Dark Purple embody the two overriding features of Kelly's abstract prints; the declaration of a precise, simplified form and immaculately flat colour. The images derive their strength and visual presence from a seamless unity of colour and form.
Since the 1960s Robert Mangold has developed an artistic vocabulary derived from the idea of geometry and asymmetry in shape and form. Mangold's use of subtle colour and curvilinear abstract forms are associated with Minimalism but also recall other sources from Ancient Greek pottery to Renaissance frescoes.
Vicken Parsons makes small, intimate paintings of landscapes and architectural spaces which move from figuration to abstraction with quiet ease. Made with thin layers of oil paint on thick plywood panels, the works have a three-dimensional, object-like quality. Often grey or monochrome, the paintings are sometimes hit with a flash of colour, of cornflower blue, bright white or electric yellow, which almost seems to fluoresce. At times, however, they simply retreat into deep, dark corners.
Bridget Riley's work is celebrated for its distinctive, optically vibrant nature which actively engages the viewer's sensations and perceptions, producing visual experiences that are complex and challenging, subtle and arresting.
Riley began printmaking in the early 1960s, finding the technique of screenprinting perfectly suited to her needs. Monochrome and optically challenging, Untitled (La Lune en Rodage - Carlo Belloli) is characteristic of her earliest screenprints.
Although best known for his monumental steel sculptures, Richard Serra is also a prolific and innovative printmaker.
Sol LeWitt was pivotal in the creation of the new radical aesthetic of the 1960s and rejected the Abstract Expressionist movement current in New York at that time.
The Alan Cristea Gallery will stage an exhibition of new works, Gordon Cheung: The Light that Burns Twice as Bright, from 14 September to 5 October 2011.
Cheung's multi-media artistic vision is fuelled by an anxious reflection on the current state of affairs in capitalist societies. He invokes prophetic visions of the impending end of our civilization: epic, sublime but terrifying revelations of post-apocalyptic landscapes, set against the backdrop of stock listings collage. He cross-references the cultural, mythological, political, religious and artistic to capture the ‘desert of the real': a hyper-real cyberscape of toxic undertones and noxious glows, complete with rampaging fauna, paranoiac hallucinations of collapsing architecture and techno-psychedelic biblical apparitions. His oeuvre can be placed within the long tradition of imagining the end of the world, displaying kinship with the Romantic landscapes of John Martin and Caspar David Friedrich.
Cheung begins a painting by laying out a background of collaged sheets from the Financial Times. Over this base, he juxtaposes layers of digital printing, ink, oil and acrylic paint. His imagery is lifted from the internet; current affairs, in particular news items surrounding the credit crisis, the ‘war on terror' and environmental disasters provide much of the raw material for his work. Although the small print of stock market listings is at times barely visible, covered as it is by the heavy impasto that characterises recent paintings, the market is omnipresent in the work. But the notion of ‘financial capitalism" does not interest Cheung as much as that of "virtual capitalism", of speculative financial transactions disconnected from the sphere of material production and physical reality. The fantasy of undoing and exposing the spectacle is also a recurring theme in Philip K. Dick's literature. His novel ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?' was adapted for the cinema in 1982 by Ridley Scott in the sci-fi cult movie Blade Runner, a major source of inspiration for Cheung in the making of ‘The Light that Burns Twice as Bright'.
The focal point of the exhibition are four large paintings completed in 2011, measuring 150 x 200 cm, including Still Life, Black Sun, The Highway and Trembling Sunrise, shown alongside a series of smaller paintings, including still lives, which stem from the larger works.
"The Disasters of Terror is a series of small pyrographic laser etchings and Light them all up is based on a still from wikileaks 'collateral murder', the 'crazy horse' apache helicopter that killed a group of innocents including two Reuters journalists," says Cheung. "It is the moment in between life and death where the image of destruction is created by the act of destruction" .
Gordon Cheung is of Hong Kong origin, born in London 1975 where he lives and works. He graduated from the Royal College of Art, 2001.
Cheung exhibits internationally, including The British Art Show 6 and The John Moores Painting 24. He was commissioned for a Laing Art Solo Award in July 2007. In 2010 Cheung staged his first US solo museum exhibition at the Arizona State University Art Museum and also had solo shows last year at ROOM Gallery, London, and at the Other Gallery, Shanghai, with an exhibition entitled The Sleeper Awakes, also touring in Beijing and Wenzhou in 2011. His works are in international collections including the Hirshhorn Museum, Whitworth Museum, ASU Art Museum, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Hiscox Collection, Progressive Arts Collection, UBS Collection and the Gottesman Collection.
A number of works by Cheung are currently showing alongside those of John Martin (1789-1854) at the Museums Sheffield: Millennium Gallery, until 20 September (after which the John Martin show will transfer directly to Tate Britain, from 21 September until 15 January 2012).
To view available works, click here.
Prints, paintings and works on paper from established international artists as well as emerging young talent. Featured artists include Gillian Ayres, Patrick Caulfield, Dexter Dalwood, Marie Harnett, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Allen Jones, Idris Khan, Lisa Milroy, Julian Opie, Boo Ritson, Lisa Ruyter, Joe Tilson and Richard Woods.
Alan Cristea Gallery will stage a major retrospective of Julian Opie's editions from 9 June to 9 July to coincide with the publication of an editions Catalogue Raisonné.
Julian Opie's highly distinctive depictions of the modern world are created in an extraordinary variety of media; this exhibition will present the most innovative and exciting editions that Opie has produced, and chart the development of his work from the early very reductive landscapes and portraits, to silhouettes, animations, lenticulars and LED animations. The 300 page Catalogue Raisonné, with an introduction by Jonathan Watkins, director of the IKON gallery, Birmingham, will provide authoritative documentation of every edition he has produced to date.
Opie has always strived to break down what he believes to be the illogical barriers set up between painting and design, and sculpture and objects - his printmaking and production of editions play a central role in this philosophy. Drawing from influences as diverse as billboard signs, 18th Century portraiture, Tintin comics, graveyards and Japanese woodblock prints, Opie 'paints' using a vast array of media and technologies. His works have been realised in silkscreen, vinyl, LCD, LED, lenticular and flocking, and he continues to push the boundaries of ‘traditional' artistic practice.
Born in London in 1958, Julian Opie studied at Goldsmith's College of Art from 1979 to 1982 and is one of the UK's best known contemporary artists, exhibiting widely both nationally and internationally. His editions can be found in many public collections worldwide including The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The British Museum, The Tate Gallery, London and MoMA, New York.
Alan Cristea Gallery is the worldwide exclusive publisher of all of Julian Opie's limited edition prints and animations.
To view available works, click here.
To order a copy of the catalogue raisonné, click here.
To view Julian Opie's online shop, click here.
Alan Cristea Gallery will stage a major retrospective of Julian Opie's editions from 9 June to 9 July to coincide with the publication of an editions Catalogue Raisonné.
Julian Opie's highly distinctive depictions of the modern world are created in an extraordinary variety of media; this exhibition will present the most innovative and exciting editions that Opie has produced, and chart the development of his work from the early very reductive landscapes and portraits, to silhouettes, animations, lenticulars and LED animations. The 300 page Catalogue Raisonné, with an introduction by Jonathan Watkins, director of the IKON gallery, Birmingham, will provide authoritative documentation of every edition he has produced to date.
Opie has always strived to break down what he believes to be the illogical barriers set up between painting and design, and sculpture and objects - his printmaking and production of editions play a central role in this philosophy. Drawing from influences as diverse as billboard signs, 18th Century portraiture, Tintin comics, graveyards and Japanese woodblock prints, Opie 'paints' using a vast array of media and technologies. His works have been realised in silkscreen, vinyl, LCD, LED, lenticular and flocking, and he continues to push the boundaries of ‘traditional' artistic practice.
Born in London in 1958, Julian Opie studied at Goldsmith's College of Art from 1979 to 1982 and is one of the UK's best known contemporary artists, exhibiting widely both nationally and internationally. His editions can be found in many public collections worldwide including The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The British Museum, The Tate Gallery, London and MoMA, New York.
Alan Cristea Gallery is the worldwide exclusive publisher of all of Julian Opie's limited edition prints and animations.
To view available works, click here.
To order a copy of the catalogue raisonné, click here.
To view Julian Opie's online shop, click here.
Group exhibition of contemporary prints bringing together works by Patrick Caulfield, Jim Dine, Langlands & Bell, Sean Scully, Mimmo Paladino, Catherine Yass and others.
Alan Cristea Gallery will present the first ever exhibition of drawings by the conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin from 5 May until 4 June 2011. To be staged in the year that Craig-Martin celebrates his 70th birthday, the show spans four decades of his career; none of the 60 unique drawings, including studies for major works and commissions, have ever been seen in the public domain and this exhibition represents the first time that this aspect of his work has been brought together and documented. All the works are hand-drawn, with the majority pre-dating his use of the computer - but will also include wall drawings which he will prepare in situ in the Alan Cristea Gallery ahead of the opening of the show, using his traditional technique of black masking tape.
This exhibition tracks the development of his signature artistic ‘vocabulary' of everyday ordinary objects including globes, sandals, pianos, tables, chairs and books, and gives new insight into his innovative and radical artistic practice, from early works made of tape on drafting film, to those produced at the dawn of the digital age, which challenged and changed the concept of drawing as we know it.
Many of the drawings to be shown are studies for realised works and commissions, including what is probably Craig-Martin's most famous work - An Oak Tree (1973), consisting of an ordinary glass of water on an equally plain shelf, with a text that asserts the superiority of the artist's intention over the object itself; now in the Tate Collection, this work is recognized as a defining moment in the development of conceptual art. Also included is Study for a neon drawing of an endlessly opening book for Margate, 1974, for his first public commission, an outdoor neon sculpture for Margate Library; the work, called Turning Pages, was commissioned by Kent County Council and the Arts Council; it made in 1975 but was allowed to decay beyond repair. In 2010, the work was remade by the artist for the 2011 opening of the new Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate, to be formally opened on the 16 April.
Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941 and educated in the United States, where he studied at Yale University. He returned to Europe in the mid-1960s and was a key figure in the first generation of British conceptual artists. His role as a tutor at Goldsmith's College from 1974-1988 and 1994-2000, where he had a significant influence on two generations of young British artists, is widely acknowledged. Craig-Martin has had retrospectives at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1989) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2006), and major solo exhibitions at National Art Centre, Tokyo (2007), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2006), and at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994). In 2006 he was appointed a Royal Academician. His work is in numerous museum collections including the Tate Gallery, London, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and MoMA, New York to name just a few.
Alan Cristea Gallery is the sole worldwide representative for Michael Craig-Martin's limited edition prints and animations.
To view available works, click here.
In March 2011 the Alan Cristea Gallery is holding the first solo exhibition of work by emerging artist Marie Harnett. Harnett makes series of highly detailed, minuscule drawings, derived from film stills, which capture fleeting moments of drama, suspense or beauty.
Harnett was initially inspired by comic books and film negatives, as well as being drawn to the Chapman brothers' reworked Goya etchings, which she says ‘reminded her of a film strip'. Having experimented with making her own films at art school, she began drawing from selected stills. Her previous work as a film extra drew her to period dramas and particular kinds of stage sets and costumes. Over the past four years since graduating, she has refined her technique and has now made sixteen series of drawings.
Her process requires her to watch film trailers online without sound or colour, frame by frame, until she sees something that inspires her. She rarely watches the film in its entirety, and doesn't follow the plot, preferring instead to reinvent her own story for the characters she draws. Nevertheless her highly skilled draughtsmanship means that her audience often recognises a familiar Hollywood face: she has, in the past, drawn lifelike portraits of Penelope Cruz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tilda Swinton, Adrian Brody and Audrey Tautou amongst many others. For this reason she has also completed a number of successful private portrait commissions.
Harnett has been working solidly towards this exhibition for nearly two years and has accumulated over 80 drawings for the show, which will date from 2007 to 2010. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition which includes an interview with the artist.
Marie Harnett is a recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art. She was selected to exhibit at Brave Art in 2006, the Contemporary Art Society's ARTfutures at Bloomberg Space in 2007 and The Threadneedle Prize in 2008 and 2009. She was included in the Alan Cristea Gallery's Young Contemporaries exhibition in 2009.
To see available works, please click here
Alan Cristea Gallery presents an exhibition of rare portrait lithographs by Pablo Picasso, from 24 March until 21 April 2011. Lithography, a method for printing using a stone or metal plate, was a medium which fascinated Picasso; this exhibition charts the decade from 1945 which saw his most prolific period of activity in the medium through a tightly edited group of just 16 works representing some of the best and rarest examples. The majority of these works, many depicting his mistresses, were only produced as copies of successive stages of a stone or plate and as such never intended for public display and distribution; consequently these artists proofs are highly sought after by collectors around the world.
During the 20th century, a group of celebrated artists including Chagall, Matisse, Miro and Picasso rediscovered the largely unexplored art form of lithography, thanks to the Mourlot Studios, a Parisian print-shop founded in 1852 by the Mourlot Family, which was transformed when the founder's grandson, Fernand, invited a number of leading artists of the day to explore the complexities of fine art printing. During the war Picasso had been starved of the associations so necessary to him with fellow artists, poets and craftsmen and one can speculate that the opportunity of renewing a daily relationship with a master printer was of great personal and professional appeal to him.
Picasso made numerous single images during these years but, in most cases, he would develop and transform a theme through many stages of a stone or plate. This exhibition focuses on his lithographic portraits of women, including his muses Francoise Gilot and Marie-Thérèse Walter, in which this transformative process is particularly prevalent. The exhibition consists of both "reserved" proofs (showing successive stages of prints which Picasso preserved as a record) and several final, editioned signed and numbered prints.
Highlights include Femme Assise et Dormeuse, dating from 1947, one of his earliest examples of lithography from the larger zinc plates, in which his abstracted, neo-classical female figures (seen frequently in earlier paintings, drawings or prints of women on a beach) fill the sheet - completely, in a tender and tranquil scene of repose. Several trial stages of Femme Assise et Dormeuse, as well as a final image, a literal combination of the two proceeding ones will be shown. There are a number of proofs featuring Francoise Gilot; Femme au Fauteuil No.1 (2nd State), 1948, a lithograph with scrapings of glass paper and needle, crayon and ink, is one of six proofs reserved for the artist and printer. Femme au Fauteuil No. 1 (9th State), produced some 15 days later than the 2nd state on 28 December 1948, is printed in black and blue-grey on Arches wove paper, and is one of six proofs, printed in different colours, reserved for the artist and printer. The exhibition will also include unique proofs; Femme au corsage à Fleurs, 1958, is a 3rd and final state unique proof on grey wove paper.
For more information, please contact us.
German artist Christiane Baumgartner combines the centuries-old technique of woodcut with the contemporary technology of video to reflect on subjects we often take for granted. She asks us to take a moment to stop and pause in a world of ever-increasing speed by making images of simple everyday views such as a ploughed field in snow, a wood from a moving car, a journey through a city at night or a reflection in water. She offers a poetic, objective view of war through her woodcuts of aircraft both moving and still, of explosions in the sky and floodlights trailing an unseen target.
This will be Christiane Baumgartner's second solo exhibition at the Alan Cristea Gallery. Spanning both our galleries, this is the largest commercial exhibition she has ever had anywhere and is certainly the most comprehensive show of her work to have taken place in London. It will include a new monumental print, Luftbild (Triptychon), which will cover an entire wall at 34 Cork Street, as well as her signature woodcut from 2002, Transall, copies of which can be found in the collections of the Albertina, Vienna, the Museum der bildende Künste Leipzig, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Zabludowicz Collection, London.
We will also be exhibiting for the first time in London the major diptych entitled Ladywood, which was originally commissioned by the New Art Gallery, Walsall and Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, through Art Fund International. Manhattan Transfer, another new woodcut which took the artist over a year to complete, will also get its first viewing in London, after being exhibited in Leipzig and New York in 2010. The works in the exhibition date from 2002 - 2011 and will range in size from 40cm to 4 metres in length.
Christiane Baumgartner was born in and is based in Leipzig, Germany. She has work in over 50 public collections worldwide including MOMA New York, LACMA, Los Angeles, the British Museum, London and Kunsthaus Zurich. Last year she took part in exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, the Cabinet d'arts graphiques, Geneva and Philagraphika, the inaugural quadrennial exhibition of international contemporary art in Philadelphia.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Following her show in London, Baumgartner will then be opening another solo exhibition at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf, Switzerland, in March 2011.
For available works by Christiane Baumgartner, click here.
German artist Christiane Baumgartner combines the centuries-old technique of woodcut with the contemporary technology of video to reflect on subjects we often take for granted. She asks us to take a moment to stop and pause in a world of ever-increasing speed by making images of simple everyday views such as a ploughed field in snow, a wood from a moving car, a journey through a city at night or a reflection in water. She offers a poetic, objective view of war through her woodcuts of aircraft both moving and still, of explosions in the sky and floodlights trailing an unseen target.
This will be Christiane Baumgartner's second solo exhibition at the Alan Cristea Gallery. Spanning both our galleries, this is the largest commercial exhibition she has ever had anywhere and is certainly the most comprehensive show of her work to have taken place in London. It will include a new monumental print, Luftbild (Triptychon), which will cover an entire wall at 34 Cork Street, as well as her signature woodcut from 2002, Transall, copies of which can be found in the collections of the Albertina, Vienna, the Museum der bildende Künste Leipzig, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Zabludowicz Collection, London.
We will also be exhibiting for the first time in London the major diptych entitled Ladywood, which was originally commissioned by the New Art Gallery, Walsall and Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, through Art Fund International. Manhattan Transfer, another new woodcut which took the artist over a year to complete, will also get its first viewing in London, after being exhibited in Leipzig and New York in 2010. The works in the exhibition date from 2002 - 2011 and will range in size from 40cm to 4 metres in length.
Christiane Baumgartner was born in and is based in Leipzig, Germany. She has work in over 50 public collections worldwide including MOMA New York, LACMA, Los Angeles, the British Museum, London and Kunsthaus Zurich. Last year she took part in exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, the Cabinet d'arts graphiques, Geneva and Philagraphika, the inaugural quadrennial exhibition of international contemporary art in Philadelphia.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Following her show in London, Baumgartner will then be opening another solo exhibition at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf, Switzerland, in March 2011.
For available works by Christiane Baumgartner, click here.
Highlights from 2010
Highlights from 2010
Ben Johnson's first solo exhibition of paintings at the Alan Cristea Gallery opens in November. Johnson, who is best known for his highly detailed, panoramic cityscapes, has created a new series of paintings of half-real, half-imagined interiors.
Johnson's influences include the Bauhaus, Russian minimalism - Malevich in particular - and the writings of Kandinsky and Klee. He sees art as important to the spirit and the soul; as Kandinsky once said: ‘Painting is an art, and art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul...' Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1914.
Johnson believes that our surroundings and environment are of the utmost importance in society. He believes that the places we inhabit can ‘change the way we think' and that ‘we grow through our spaces'. With this in mind he creates paintings which are meditations; they draw in the viewer through the use of perspective and hold the gaze. They are constructed rooms, perfect examples of design, of form and structure. And yet they are always empty - it is the spectator who is invited to inhabit these spaces.
To coincide with his exhibition at the Alan Cristea Gallery, Johnson has an exhibition in Room 1 at the National Gallery, London, opening on 8 December. Here he will be completing a view of London as seen from the roof of the National Gallery, looking out across Trafalgar Square. This vista has much in common with Canaletto's Stonemason's Yard which will be exhibited at the same time. Johnson completed a similar cityscape of Liverpool in 2008 which attracted over 200,000 visitors. It is now in the collection of Liverpool Museums but is being lent to his exhibition at the National Gallery in December, along with a panorama of Zurich.
Johnson was born in 1946 in Llandudno, Wales and studied at the Royal College of Art in London. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States and his work is held in many public collections including the Tate, the V&A and the British Museum in London, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam and the Special Administrative Regional Government of Hong Kong. He lives and works in London.
To view available works by Ben Johnson, click here.
A selection of new and classic works by Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Georges Braque, Patrick Caulfield, Eduardo Chillida, Edmund de Waal, Jan Dibbets, Naum Gabo, Ben Johnson, Langlands & Bell, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Julian Opie, Pablo Picasso and Sean Scully.
In October Alan Cristea Gallery is pleased to present Eleven, a group exhibition bringing together works by Christiane Baumgartner, Gordon Cheung, Michael Craig-Martin, Edmund de Waal, Dexter Dalwood, Ian Davenport, Richard Hamilton, Lisa Milroy, Julian Opie, Lisa Ruyter and Paul Winstanley.
Each artist will take command of one of our gallery walls to present new or classic works. Highlights include new prints and collages by Turner Prize nominee Dexter Dalwood, new lenticular editions and unique work by Julian Opie and our first print project with Lisa Ruyter. Alongside these will be new paintings by Gordon Cheung and Lisa Milroy as well as ceramic installations by Edmund de Waal and classic prints by Richard Hamilton.
For more information, please contact us.
In October Alan Cristea Gallery is pleased to present Eleven, a group exhibition bringing together works by Christiane Baumgartner, Gordon Cheung, Michael Craig-Martin, Edmund de Waal, Dexter Dalwood, Ian Davenport, Richard Hamilton, Lisa Milroy, Julian Opie, Lisa Ruyter and Paul Winstanley.
Each artist will take command of one of our gallery walls to present new or classic works. Highlights include new prints and collages by Turner Prize nominee Dexter Dalwood, new lenticular editions and unique work by Julian Opie and our first print project with Lisa Ruyter. Alongside these will be new paintings by Gordon Cheung and Lisa Milroy as well as ceramic installations by Edmund de Waal and classic prints by Richard Hamilton.
For more information, please contact us.
British artist, Paul Winstanley, opens his first solo exhibition at the Alan Cristea Gallery in September 2010.
The exhibition will include new monoprints, watercolours, paintings and a series of etchings he published with the gallery in 2008. Following numerous exhibitions in Europe and the States, this will be the artist's first exhibition in London since 2003 and is the first time that he has held an exhibition of his works on paper.
The series of 8 etchings were made at 107 Workshop in Wiltshire and take as their subject one of Winstanley's most well-known motifs - the Veil. A net curtain hangs in front of a window and partially reveals a wooded landscape behind.
The centrepiece of the show will be a monumental series of 50 hand-painted etched monoprints made at Thumbprint Studio in London. In this series Winstanley took the idea of the landscape image and developed it, making four new plates in sugar-lift aquatint and hand painting each image in different colours. The group will be installed on one wall of the gallery, creating a multi-hued forested panorama.
The title of the exhibition is a conscious mis-quote of Neil Young's ‘Everybody knows this is nowhere'. There is a generic quality about Winstanley's images which allows them to be part of anyone's memory - part of anyone's past. They are nowhere and everywhere but, of course, they have to be based on real places. The landscapes are reconstructed from photographs he took while travelling in the north of Finland, whereas the interiors depict a room on an institutional campus in south London.
Winstanley is known for his detailed, realistic paintings of landscapes and interiors which acknowledge the centrality of the photographic image to contemporary life. At once methodical and melancholic, his works are generally rendered in a muted palette, reminiscent of a blurred snapshot. They begin life as a series of photographs which he then adapts and manipulates on his computer before painting them, in one layer, on canvas.
Winstanley was born in Manchester in 1954. He studied at Cardiff School of Art and the Slade in London. He has exhibited internationally; in 2008 he had a major retrospective in Auckland, New Zealand. His work is held in many public collections including the Tate, London; Fonds National d'art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris; the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin; and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles. He lives and works in London.
Featuring Lisa Milroy, Gillian Ayres, Joe Tilson, Catherine Yass, Paul Schütze, Julian Opie, Jim Dine, Edmund de Waal, Anni Albers, Patrick Caulfield, Howard Hodgkin, Josef Albers, Christiane Baumgartner and more.
From July to September both of our gallery spaces will be dedicated to showing works by some of our best loved artists, featuring paintings and editions by Gillian Ayres, Michael Craig-Martin, Dexter Dalwood, David Hockney, Lisa Milroy and Allen Jones amongst many others.
We will also be presenting brand new editions by Mimmo Paladino, Joe Tilson and Gordon Cheung as well as ceramic works by renowned potter Edmund de Waal. For the first time in the gallery, we will be showing our first project with Vienna based American artist Lisa Ruyter - a set of 6 woodcuts on Japanese paper featuring fashion models.
The exhibition coincides with special celebrations of Gillian Ayres' career at both the Royal Academy and the Tate Britain.
Please note that the gallery will be closed for our annual summer break 14th - 30th August inclusive.
From July to September both of our gallery spaces will be dedicated to showing works by some of our best loved artists, featuring paintings and editions by Gillian Ayres, Michael Craig-Martin, Dexter Dalwood, David Hockney, Lisa Milroy and Allen Jones amongst many others.
We will also be presenting brand new editions by Mimmo Paladino, Joe Tilson and Gordon Cheung as well as ceramic works by renowned potter Edmund de Waal. For the first time in the gallery, we will be showing our first project with Vienna based American artist Lisa Ruyter - a set of 6 woodcuts on Japanese paper featuring fashion models.
The exhibition coincides with special celebrations of Gillian Ayres' career at both the Royal Academy and the Tate Britain.
Please note that the gallery will be closed for our annual summer break 14th - 30th August inclusive.
"Hamilton has a surgical understanding of the zeitgeist, an umbilical connection to his times that allows him simultaneously to participate in them and step back from them, to evaluate them while he lives them. [He] was the first to understand the dynamics of the media. The first to understand the consumer revolution. The first to acknowledge the unstoppable power of the image.'
Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times, 7 March 2010
Richard Hamilton returns to his ‘scatalogical period' to curate Shit and Flowers, an exhibition of his own work from the 1970s at the Alan Cristea Gallery from 27 May.
The selected works in the exhibition will include paintings, drawings, collages, etchings, lithographs, collotypes, stage proofs and trial proofs loaned from the artist's own collection.
A set of vintage postcards depicting some locals squatting, with their trousers down, in the Pyrenees countryside was the starting point for Hamilton to create this extraordinary series.
He was further inspired by a then new advertising campaign for Andrex toilet tissue by J Walter Thompson. Reminiscent of paintings by Watteau or Boucher, they portrayed the new ‘shades' of paper in a lush rural setting with women in floating garments holding pieces of appropriately coloured fabric. The ‘Shit and Flowers' motif was born - a subject that Hamilton studied and revisited for much of the decade. In making the work, he intentionally and wholeheartedly immersed himself in a ‘world of schmaltz'.
Although Hamilton worked in the aesthetic tradition of great artists such as Cézanne and Picasso, he was continuously drawn to the contemporary world of advertising and design and to the Duchampian rejection of painting. In taking these images of flowers and landscapes from one world (which had, in turn, been borrowed from art history) and returning them to the world of fine art, he was making an ironic commentary on the co-existence, and in some senses interdependence, of these two worlds. Hamilton continues to wrestle with the language of painting, and all it stands for, to the present day.
"Hamilton has a surgical understanding of the zeitgeist, an umbilical connection to his times that allows him simultaneously to participate in them and step back from them, to evaluate them while he lives them. [He] was the first to understand the dynamics of the media. The first to understand the consumer revolution. The first to acknowledge the unstoppable power of the image.'
Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times, 7 March 2010
Richard Hamilton returns to his ‘scatalogical period' to curate Shit and Flowers, an exhibition of his own work from the 1970s at the Alan Cristea Gallery from 27 May.
The selected works in the exhibition will include paintings, drawings, collages, etchings, lithographs, collotypes, stage proofs and trial proofs loaned from the artist's own collection.
A set of vintage postcards depicting some locals squatting, with their trousers down, in the Pyrenees countryside was the starting point for Hamilton to create this extraordinary series.
He was further inspired by a then new advertising campaign for Andrex toilet tissue by J Walter Thompson. Reminiscent of paintings by Watteau or Boucher, they portrayed the new ‘shades' of paper in a lush rural setting with women in floating garments holding pieces of appropriately coloured fabric. The ‘Shit and Flowers' motif was born - a subject that Hamilton studied and revisited for much of the decade. In making the work, he intentionally and wholeheartedly immersed himself in a ‘world of schmaltz'.
Although Hamilton worked in the aesthetic tradition of great artists such as Cézanne and Picasso, he was continuously drawn to the contemporary world of advertising and design and to the Duchampian rejection of painting. In taking these images of flowers and landscapes from one world (which had, in turn, been borrowed from art history) and returning them to the world of fine art, he was making an ironic commentary on the co-existence, and in some senses interdependence, of these two worlds. Hamilton continues to wrestle with the language of painting, and all it stands for, to the present day.
"I always need to find some theme, some tangible subject matter besides the paint itself. Otherwise I would have been an abstract artist. I need that hook... Something to hang my landscape on" Jim Dine in Jim Dine: Five Themes, 1984
Such is Jim Dine's importance that his work has been celebrated in solo exhibitions from the Guggenheim to the Getty in his native America and in museums in major cities across the length and breadth of Europe over the past 55 years. As he nears his 75th birthday, the demand for his work from institutions and collectors grows ever greater and he still exerts enormous influence over contemporary art practice both here in the UK and abroad.
The "Heart", one of his most enduring vehicles for his explorations of line and colour and one of his most expressive motifs, will be the common denominator in some 40 recent works, made in his studios in New York and Gottingen, Germany, and on a recent journey to India, which we will exhibit in both of our Cork Street galleries in April and May.
Dine is the Renaissance man of contemporary art - originally performance artist, now at once poet, writer, photographer, sculptor, painter and printmaker.
Our exhibition will concentrate on a series of some twenty watercolours and a similar amount of limited edition prints which combine new and time-honoured technology - etching, screenprinting and digital printing.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated and documented catalogue. Please contact us for further details.
"I always need to find some theme, some tangible subject matter besides the paint itself. Otherwise I would have been an abstract artist. I need that hook... Something to hang my landscape on" Jim Dine in Jim Dine: Five Themes, 1984
Such is Jim Dine's importance that his work has been celebrated in solo exhibitions from the Guggenheim to the Getty in his native America and in museums in major cities across the length and breadth of Europe over the past 55 years. As he nears his 75th birthday, the demand for his work from institutions and collectors grows ever greater and he still exerts enormous influence over contemporary art practice both here in the UK and abroad.
The "Heart", one of his most enduring vehicles for his explorations of line and colour and one of his most expressive motifs, will be the common denominator in some 40 recent works, made in his studios in New York and Gottingen, Germany, and on a recent journey to India, which we will exhibit in both of our Cork Street galleries in April and May.
Dine is the Renaissance man of contemporary art - originally performance artist, now at once poet, writer, photographer, sculptor, painter and printmaker.
Our exhibition will concentrate on a series of some twenty watercolours and a similar amount of limited edition prints which combine new and time-honoured technology - etching, screenprinting and digital printing.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated and documented catalogue. Please contact us for further details.
The Alan Cristea Gallery will be presenting the first major retrospective of the prints of Bauhaus artist and designer Anni Albers from 18 March.
The exhibition will be the most comprehensive survey of her graphic work to date and will include nearly every print she has made, alongside studies, photographs and source material loaned from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The exhibition will be accompanied by the release of the catalogue raisonne of her prints - the first major monograph on this aspect of her work.
Albers primarily worked in textiles and, late in life, as a printmaker. At the Bauhaus, Albers experimented with new materials for weaving and executed richly coloured designs on paper for wall hangings and textiles in silk, cotton, and linen yarns in which the raw materials and components of structure became the source of beauty. Like Josef, she focused above all on her work-happy to pursue it whilst remaining detached from the trends and shifting fashions of the art world. In 1984, Albers wrote, "... to comprehend art is to confide in a constant."
Anni Albers (b.1899) attended the Bauhaus as a student in 1922 where she later met and married her tutor, Josef Albers. After its closure in 1933, they moved to Black Mountain College where she taught until 1949. Her groundbreaking exhibition of textiles at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1949 was the first of its kind and toured from 1951 until 1953, establishing Albers as the most famous weaver of the day. Aside from her work in textiles she was an accomplished printmaker and made first prints in 1963 at the Tamarind Institute. From this point most of her time was devoted to the practices of lithography and screenprinting. Her earliest prints clearly show the influence of the weavings, with the drawn line taking on a thread like quality, but as her graphic work progressed, she developed a more hard-edge geometric style often making use of layering, rotation and subtle combinations of techniques to create hypnotic and at times, optically challenging, works on paper.
‘De Waal's pots - and the way he groups the pots to display them - are unlike anything else I have seen. They are solid and at the same time vanishing and ghostly, Platonic ideas of the essence of forms and the essence of glazed porcelain.'
A.S. Byatt, Song of Porcelain, The Guardian, 10 October 2009
In March 2010 Alan Cristea Gallery opens its first exhibition of ceramic installations by Edmund de Waal. This will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with introduction by Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt.
From Zero takes as its starting point a line from Kasimir Malevich's manifesto The Non-Objective World: ''It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins". The works on display will consist of groups of porcelain pots which use wood, plaster, lead, charred oak, glass and steel to ‘frame' them. This includes a sequence of white boxes, some lead-lined, others plaster-lined, which contain groups of vessels in varying white and celadon glazes. De Waal will also be exhibiting his first vitrine piece, using glass and black steel to encase over 100 pots of different sizes. A red lacquer shelf of white pots will be installed high on a gallery wall; a shelving unit with doors will hide and reveal collections of vessels in 15 different white glazes.
De Waal is a potter of international reputation, whose work has most recently been on display at Tate Britain as part of Kettle's Yard's 50th Anniversary celebrations and at the V&A where his commission Signs and Wonders has just been launched as part of the new Ceramic Galleries. De Waal's work is held in over 30 public collections worldwide including the British Council; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Western Australia, Perth; the World Ceramic Exposition Museum, Ichon, Korea and the Museum für angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt.
As well as exhibiting at the Alan Cristea Gallery in 2010 (the artist's first commercial gallery show in London for more than eight years), de Waal's solo exhibition water-shed opens at Leamington Spa Museum in January and he is part of a group exhibition The Artists' House at the New Art Centre, Salisbury from February to May, alongside Richard Hamilton and Chien Wei Chang.
De Waal is also a writer, whose publications include Twentieth Century Ceramics (Thames & Hudson, 2003) and Bernard Leach (Tate Publishing, 1998). His forthcoming book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance is being published by Chatto and Windus in June 2010. Alan Cristea Gallery will hold a major print retrospective by Bauhaus artist Anni Albers to run concurrently with their de Waal exhibition.
Gillian Ayres RA OBE, one of Britain's most respected painters, will unveil new paintings in an exhibition that marks her 80th birthday at Alan Cristea Gallery from 3 February 2010.
Broadcaster Andrew Marr described Gillian Ayres as ‘probably the finest abstract painter alive in Britain'. He continued: ‘Ayres has always been obsessively concerned with painting - the unfolding of a self-contained logic, whirling chaos held just in check. In her acid/sweet collisions, the complexity and crampedness, and then the unscrambling, of the canvas, it's about energy, laid down in colour and transmitted in shockwaves to the viewer. ‘
Ayres is best known for her vibrant palette and the sheer physicality with which she applies paint to canvas. The works in this exhibition contain many familiar motifs but also represent a marked progression. Each work brims with her usual energy, however these new compositions are more distilled and exude the confidence of a painter at the height of her powers.
Ayres was initially influenced by American Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, but sees her work as part of a European tradition. Gillian Ayres said: 'Titian, Rubens and Matisse are the greatest painters, unashamedly, of sheer beauty but they also used the medium to the fullest in every sense before or since..'
Ayres studied at Camberwell School of Art and had her first solo exhibition at Gallery One in 1956. She held a number of teaching posts through the 1960s and 1970s including Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art until 1981. She was awarded an OBE in 1986, was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989 and in 1991 became a Royal Academician. Her work has been shown in major national and international spaces during the course of the last six decades including exhibitions at Tate Britain, The Royal Academy and Southampton City Art Gallery and is the subject of a major monograph by Mel Gooding. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with an introduction by writer Christina Patterson. To order a copy, please call +44 207 439 1866 or email info@alancristea.com
Gillian Ayres RA OBE, one of Britain's most respected painters, will unveil new paintings in an exhibition that marks her 80th birthday at Alan Cristea Gallery from 3 February 2010.
Broadcaster Andrew Marr described Gillian Ayres as ‘probably the finest abstract painter alive in Britain'. He continued: ‘Ayres has always been obsessively concerned with painting - the unfolding of a self-contained logic, whirling chaos held just in check. In her acid/sweet collisions, the complexity and crampedness, and then the unscrambling, of the canvas, it's about energy, laid down in colour and transmitted in shockwaves to the viewer. ‘
Ayres is best known for her vibrant palette and the sheer physicality with which she applies paint to canvas. The works in this exhibition contain many familiar motifs but also represent a marked progression. Each work brims with her usual energy, however these new compositions are more distilled and exude the confidence of a painter at the height of her powers.
Ayres was initially influenced by American Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, but sees her work as part of a European tradition. Gillian Ayres said: 'Titian, Rubens and Matisse are the greatest painters, unashamedly, of sheer beauty but they also used the medium to the fullest in every sense before or since..'
Ayres studied at Camberwell School of Art and had her first solo exhibition at Gallery One in 1956. She held a number of teaching posts through the 1960s and 1970s including Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art until 1981. She was awarded an OBE in 1986, was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989 and in 1991 became a Royal Academician. Her work has been shown in major national and international spaces during the course of the last six decades including exhibitions at Tate Britain, The Royal Academy and Southampton City Art Gallery and is the subject of a major monograph by Mel Gooding. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with an introduction by writer Christina Patterson. To order a copy, please call +44 207 439 1866 or email info@alancristea.com
Part 1: The Diner at Alan Cristea Gallery
Part 2: The Gas Station at Poppy Sebire
Scenes of small-town America come to life in Back-Roads Journeys, an exhibition of new work across two venues by British artist Boo Ritson at Alan Cristea Gallery and Poppy Sebire from 13 October.
Back-Roads Journeys begins in ‘The Diner', an installation at Alan Cristea Gallery, where visitors are introduced to the Diner Waitress, unhappy in her job, waiting on the Trucker's table; he's stopped by for a quick burger. Their portraits are set alongside still lifes of fast food, a new series of screenprints on plexiglass of classic American diner food and a triptych interior scene made familiar through American road movies.
The story moves to ‘The Gas Station' at Poppy Sebire's gallery where we see the Diner Waitress who, having quit her job for a new life in the South, is hitching a lift with her friend the Trucker. Here, the narrative evolves with the addition of new characters associated with life on an American highway.
Boo Ritson depicts characters and still lifes drawn from her own imagined narratives merged with borrowed Americana. For each piece she paints her subject in a thick emulsion and then has the scene photographed whilst the paint is still wet. The resulting image sits somewhere between painting, sculpture, performance and photography. Ritson has always located her work in an American cultural context and has been fascinated by the process and by history of painting. In these new works at Alan Cristea Gallery and Poppy Sebire, she introduces her first ‘unfinished' subjects, each one defined as much by what is absent as what the viewer sees.
Including Baumgartner, Davenport, Hamilton, Opie, Craig-Martin, Motherwell, Lichtenstein, Paladino, Nauman
Mixed exhibition of gallery artists including works by Jan Dibbets, Julian Opie, Christiane Baumgartner, Lisa Milroy, Catherine Yass and Gordon Cheung.
Since 2005 Lisa Milroy has focused on large-scale paintings that break away from painting as a window-on-the-world to painting as an all-encompassing experience. Alan Cristea Gallery is pleased to present "Life on the Line", the latest in Milroy's environmental explorations.
The visitor enters the gallery and sees a large painting of an armchair leaning against a wall. Across the gallery a group of banner-type paintings hangs from ropes along the ceiling, depicting clothes, landscapes and still lifes. As the visitor walks back and forth in front of this installation, the images shift kaleidoscopically, stirring up in the visitor's mind a sense of the self. The visitor turns back to inspect the armchair painting and the state of mind induced by the banners is eclipsed. Instead, the visitor becomes aware of stillness.
The Alan Cristea Gallery will be holding a retrospective exhibition of Patrick Caulfield's prints. Caulfield died in 2005 leaving an indelible contribution to British painting and printmaking.
Caulfield was a student at the Royal College of Art between 1960-63 alongside David Hockney and Allen Jones. However his subject matter drew more from the masters of modern art such as Braque and Gris than from the consumer culture that preoccupied his fellow students. The works in the exhibition have been selected to represent every aspect of his printmaking career and will date from his very first print, Ruins, made in 1964 right through to his final edition entitled Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Vues de Derrière.
Caulfield made Ruins as part of the ground-breaking ICA portfolio in which 24 artists worked with Chris Prater at Kelpra Studios. It was here at Kelpra that Caulfield was to make all of his prints up to 1987 and where he developed a style and approach to printmaking that dominated his graphic work thereafter. By distilling elements of still life into their simplest form, and by using pure line and colour, he created an immaculate and instantly recognisable pictorial style.
On the whole his prints are devoid of human content. Instead traces of life, such as a discarded napkin or an empty wine bottle, imply a presence and evoke mood and emotion. Caulfield's illustrations to Jules Laforgue's poems exemplify this approach to printmaking. The images, which appear deceptively simple, perfectly mirror the poet's text. In each case a haunting image captures Laforgue's ironic, and at times melancholy, insights into the poignant banality of everyday life. His work has had a profound influence on generations of artists, including many of today's leading painters.
The gallery has published the complete catalogue raisonné of his prints, illustrating and documenting every print he has ever made. This hardback book will be available during the exhibition.
The gallery at No. 31 Cork Street is showing a selection of Howard Hodgkin's large prints, including the Venice Series, and Into the Woods.
The Alan Cristea Gallery will be exhibiting two new monumental works by British artist Sir Howard Hodgkin. The pair, titled As Time Goes By, are without a doubt Hodgkin's most ambitious and complex works to date. Measuring over 20ft long each, these two new pictures are the largest works the artist has ever made and will be unveiled for the very first time at the opening of Alan Cristea Gallery exhibition.
Each piece consists of five panels worked on with a combination of aquatint, carborundum embossing and painting in acrylic. These are the largest works ever made, by any artist, using this technique.
Howard Hodgkin is one of the most important painters and printmakers working today. His works are held by almost every major international museum and he has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, most recently at the Tate Gallery, London in 2006. Alan Cristea has been the exclusive publisher of Hodgkin's prints since 1987 and in 2006 the Gallery collaborated with the Barbican to mount the first large-scale touring retrospective of the artist's work in this medium and which has since toured to galleries and museums across the UK.
Alan Cristea Gallery is holding a major exhibition of Joe Tilson's printed works. The exhibition will see Tilson's ground - breaking screenprints and collages from the sixties hang alongside his most recent etchings and aquatints, as well as unique works, revealing a continuum in the artists' preoccupations, inspirations, motifs and media that has spanned almost half a century of activity, between 1963 and 2009.
One of the founding figures of British Pop art in the early 1960's, Tilson was an enthusiastic proponent of the hedonism, optimism and political activism that were such striking characteristics of that decade. His work embraced advances in technology, reflected the ever-increasing power of mass media and exposed changing attitudes towards sexual liberation. In the 1970's he began to spend more and more time in Italy and the subject matter of his work radically changed to reflect this shift, with a new emphasis on the five elements and Greek and Roman mythology, and later, to reflect his passion for Venice and Cortona, where he now lives and works for part of the year.
A lifelong dedicated and subversive printmaker, his work is held in collections internationally including the Tate Gallery, London, MoMA, New York and the Stedelijk, Amsterdam. A Royal Academician, his artistic career was celebrated at the Royal Academy in a retrospective exhibition in 2002.
The exhibition coincides with the launch of TILSON - The Printed Works 1963 - 2009.
Compiled and written by Enzo di Martino, and published by Papiro Arte, Editalia and the Bugno Gallery, Venice, the book it is a celebration of the way in which Tilson's printmaking has infiltrated and informed every aspect of his creative output over the past 46 years.
A set of three limited edition prints have been made to accompany the book.
Including Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Jim Dine, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Allen Jones, Leon Kossoff, Roy Lichtenstein, Joe Tilson.
In March 2009, the Alan Cristea Gallery will present a major new body of etchings and monoprints by British artist Ian Davenport. The exhibition will include over 30 new works and will be his second solo show with the gallery.
The first part will consist of a series of 33 small etched monoprints, each made from the same copper plate, and each realised using different combinations of foreground and background colours. These will be hung all hung together as an installation. The exhibition will also include a new series of three Etched Line prints which will further explore the stylistic developments seen his most recent paintings, with the use of more fluid lines which pool to form puddles of colour at the bottom of the compositions. This will also be the first opportunity to see Davenport's largest and most ambitious edition to date - a multi-coloured line etching entitled Etched Lines: Bright White, which will be shown together with a number of unique versions of the same composition.
Ian Davenport graduated from Goldsmiths College of Art in 1988 and as one of the generation of Young British Artists, he participated in the 1988 exhibition Freeze, curated by Damien Hirst. In 1991 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize on the basis of his ability to demonstrate 'the expressive possibilities of abstract paintings'*, and since then has exhibited extensively across the world, and undertaken several large scale site-specific murals, including the 50m long mural under the bridge on Southwark Street.
This exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and also by a short film, the latest in a series of short films made by Alan Cristea Gallery.
At the beginning of 2009, Alan Cristea Gallery is bringing together a group of new works on paper by four artists, all under thirty, based in the UK, who use film and photography as inspiration and source material to produce elaborate works on paper in other media.
Although Kate Atkin took her MA in photography (2003-05) at the Royal College of Art, she actually makes large-scale, intricate pencil drawings which she thinks of as slow-paced ‘re-enactments' of what is shown in a photograph. Atkin also works in other media: her sculpture was recently selected by Richard Cork as part of the exhibition A Life of Their Own at Lismore Castle in 2008. She has work in the British Council Collection and UBS Art Collection amongst others.
Film inspires Marie Harnett's work. She makes series of highly detailed, minuscule drawings derived from film stills, which capture fleeting moments of drama, suspense or beauty. In 2007 Harnett was selected for the Contemporary Art Society's ARTfutures at Bloomberg Space and exhibited at The Aspect Prize at The Paisley Museum. She showed at Brave Art in 2006 and more recently was shortlisted for the Threadneedle Figurative Prize at the Mall Galleries. Harnett graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2006.
Nathalie Guinamard is ‘interested in using a medium associated with editing and erasing for creation.' Her complex collages are both playful and uncanny and have a dark, surreal quality. Guinamard was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and ARTfutures in 2007 and was included in the Red Mansion Art Prize exhibition in 2008, following a residency in China. She has a forthcoming installation at the Rivington Grill in Shoreditch. She graduated from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in 2007.
Eilidh Young makes works on wood and paper which reference technical drawing books and photographic images of architectural ruins from lost cities of the world. By taking elements of the structures and reconfiguring them through the act of drawing, she distorts the perspective and creates complex geometrical forms. In the exhibition, she is also exhibiting a series of photopolymer prints based on Fellini's 8 ½, the director's dense classic about the film-making process. Young graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2007 and was selected in the same year to exhibit at Brave Art in London. In 2008 she was included in the New Faces exhibition at the Leith Gallery in Edinburgh.
Gillian Ayres, Christiane Baumgartner, Gordon Cheung, Michael Craig-Martin, Ian Davenport, Jim Dine, Allen Jones, Idris Khan, Langlands & Bell, Lisa Milroy, Julian Opie, Mimmo Paladino, Cornelia Parker, Boo Ritson, Paul Schütze, Joe Tilson, Rachel Whiteread, Paul Winstanley.
From November until January both our galleries at nos. 31 and 34 Cork Street will be devoted to the presentation of works by artists whom we represent either for their entire output or exclusively for their print editions. The common feature is that all of this work has been made during the course of the past twelve months. The range of media employed is vast.
The new sculptures by Rachel Whiteread represent our first collaboration with the artist as do the woodcuts by Christiane Baumgartner, the lithographs by Idris Khan, the set of eight etchings by Paul Winstanley and the six digital prints by Cornelia Parker. The new large etching by Ian Davenport serves as a foretaste of his solo exhibition that we will hold in March/April 2009, as do the etchings by Joe Tilson whose exhibition we will stage in April/May. Unique works appear in the show in the form of watercolours by Allen Jones, gouaches by Ian McKeever, paintings by Lisa Milroy and Gordon Cheung and both acrylics on paper and oils on canvas by Gillian Ayres. As well as traditional media, new technologies are employed by Langlands & Bell in their neon editions, by Julian Opie in his lenticular acrylic and in his flocked works and by Michael Craig-Martin in his computer animations, the latest being his interpretation of Velasquez's Las Meninas.
This is Shahnoza in 3 Parts features linear images of the pole dancer in nine different poses, each divided into three framed panels. In all of the works, the line of the figure is made using a combination of silkscreen and flocking. This marriage of techniques gives a rich, black and velvety surface texture which contrasts with the pure white acrylic support panels. Flocking is the process of adhering fine textile fibres to a surface. Historically it is associated with wall coverings that became popular during the reign of Louis XIV of France and its use continues, in various forms, to the present day.
‘Christiane Baumgartner's art is slow art, like slow cooking. It takes time to produce and it demands to be savoured and in those characteristics it seems to protest at the speed of the world. She may be fascinated by speed and enjoy the sense of liberation that accompanies it but she recognises its potential for destruction. This ambivalence lies at the heart of her work.'
Jeremy Lewison, ‘At the Still Point of the Turning World'. The Prints of Christiane Baumgartner, 2007, published by Johan Deumens, Haarlem.
Christiane Baumgartner is best known for her monumental woodcuts based on her own films and video stills. She first came to public attention in the UK in EAST international in 2004 and a year later with a major solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (with accompanying 80-page, fully illustrated hardback catalogue). Her work is held in over 30 public collections around the world including the Albertina, Vienna; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
Baumgartner is particularly interested in the passage of time; much of her work takes the form of diptychs or series of images depicting the same scene, taken seconds apart. The sheer scale of these works and the fact that she prints them herself in her studio makes them some of the most exciting and ambitious prints being made today. This exhibition will include new and recent woodcuts on varying scales, many of which will be shown for the first time. Formation I & II shows two frames isolated from a video which depict Second World War planes (I) and their shadow cast on the ground (II). Treffer continues this theme of war and destruction with four images of explosions. Brandenburg is a smaller work made especially for the exhibition which shows one of the artist's classic images of a still from a journey on a motorway.
All these works demand viewing from a distance and yet the blurring of the horizontal lines seen close to is equally captivating. Baumgartner's work often documents time, distance and speed and yet the results are still and contemplative. It is the combination of the ancient art of woodcut with contemporary digital technology which makes her practice so innovative.
Christiane Baumgartner was born in Leipzig, Germany and studied there at the Hochschule fur Grafik und Buchkunst before completing her Masters in Printmaking at the Royal College Art in London in 1999. She now lives and works in Leipzig. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Museum für moderne Kunst, Goslar, the Kunstverein Ulm, Johan Deumens, Heemstede and the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig. Following her exhibition at Alan Cristea Gallery, she will be exhibiting in October at the Royal College in a group show curated by Christopher Orr and has her first solo show at SPACEX gallery, Exeter, in December.
Throughout his career, Craig-Martin has explored the aesthetic and linguistic character of everyday, designer and most recently iconic ‘art-historical' objects. In the new Alphabet prints, outlines of familiar objects from his recognisable vocabulary - an umbrella, a glove, a glass - are set against a background of vivid monochrome colour and overlaid with a single letter. In some cases there appears to be a link between the object and letter and in others the connection is more ambiguous.
For this exhibition, the artist also completed his first series of digital inkjet prints, Tokyo Sunsets, which again draws upon his vocabulary of generic and iconic objects, only this time set against a backdrop of vivid colours which graduate seamlessly from one print to the next.
Jeffrey Blondes, Catherine Yass, Julian Opie, Michael Craig-Martin, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Ron Haselden, Dan Flavin, Langlands & Bell
Soho's disused and derelict Marshall Street Baths, dinosaur skeletons in a deserted Oxford museum and illusionary glacial landscapes are among the images included in ‘Twilight Science', a photography exhibition by artist and musician, Paul Schütze (b.1958, Australia), at Alan Cristea Gallery from 14 May.
The exploration of specific locations and ambience through photography follows Schütze's parallel and interconnected work as a musician and sound artist for which he has made many site-specific sound pieces including those with the land artist, James Turrell.
The works in the exhibition are from McKeever's Assembly series, which is one in a group of four series that collectively form the body of work, Four Quartets. McKeever began Four Quartets in 2001 and took the title from TS Eliot's poem of the same name. There are no literal connections or direct references to the poem within the works but the poem resonates within the paintings.
London-based artist, Gordon Cheung takes inspiration from John Martin's famous 19th-century illustrations for Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost in an exhibition at Alan Cristea Gallery throughout February 2008.
This biblical story covers the fall of the rebel angels into Hell, the temptation of Adam and Eve and their subsequent expulsion from paradise. Cheung sees this story as having a metaphorical relevance to the way we have entered the 21st century. The series of 24 works in the exhibition depict imaginary worlds on the brink of devastation reminiscent of a sci-fi landscapes in spray paint, Chinese ink and Financial Times stock listings.
Jones is fascinated by performance and movement of the figure and aims to achieve an idealised beauty in his presentation of it. By setting his figures within the context of the stage he is able to distance them from everyday life allowing fantasy to become a believable reality.
The most comprehensive Ben Nicholson print exhibition ever held, with over 110 works. The majority of the works come from an important private collection which has been built up over many years and which is now being offered for sale exclusively through the gallery. The collection contains a number of extremely rare early hand-worked linocuts, drypoints of St Ives, annotated working proofs, trial proofs, hand-coloured etchings, as well as original printing plates and lino-blocks. Many of the works in the collection are unique.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated hard-bound catalogue which will contain a new essay by Jeremy Lewison, a former curator at the Tate Gallery and an acknowledged expert on the artist. His essay will re-examine in depth the way Nicholson conceived and printed the various series that make up his entire printed oeuvre. To date there has been no complete catalogue raisonné of Nicholson's prints and this new publication will contain more prints than any previous volume.
AN EXHIBITION TO CELEBRATE THE LAUNCH OF THE NEWLY EXPANDED AND REFURBISHED ALAN CRISTEA GALLERIES
GILLIAN AYRES - JOSEF ALBERS - ANNI ALBERS - PATRICK CAULFIELD - GORDON CHEUNG - MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN - DEXTER DALWOOD - IAN DAVENPORT - JAN DIBBETS - JIM DINE - HOWARD HODGKIN - NAUM GABO - RICHARD HAMILTON ALLEN JONES - LANGLANDS&BELL - IAN MCKEEVER - LISA MILROY - JULIAN OPIE MIMMO PALADINO - BOO RITSON - PAUL SCHÜTZE - JOE TILSON - CATHERINE YASS
Ayres is best known for her vibrant palette and the sheer physicality with which she applies paint to canvas. The works in this exhibition are classic examples and contain many familiar motifs but also represent a noticeable progression. Each work brims with her usual energy, however these new compositions are more distilled and exude the confidence of a painter at the height of her powers. The titles of these works - which include shipping forecast areas and sixties songs - are chosen by Ayres not as indicators or hints at content, but simply as words and phrases that please her.
‘Perspective Corrections' was the title of a groundbreaking body of work Dibbets began in 1969 in which he explored the illusory effects that could be created using a camera. He drew out trapezoid shapes on various backgrounds, from his studio wall to fields of grass, and then photographed them, each time angling the camera in such a way as to give the illusion that the mapped out shape was a square. The square, by virtue of not actually existing, appeared to hover uncomfortably in the pictorial space.
In this new body of work, Dibbets has re-visited this idea, this time adding into the compositions minimalist artworks from his own collection by his artist colleagues including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, Sol LeWitt and Robert Mangold
Within the past two years the leading American artist Jim Dine has been working on a major body of work based on Carlo Collodi's classic morality tale The Adventures of Pinocchio, which was first published in 1883. The Alan Cristea Gallery will be holding an exhibition of these new works which will consist of eight huge hand-painted lithographs and woodcuts, together with a portfolio of 41 prints.
Since the 1960s, Dine has used printmaking with unequalled inventiveness and skill. He finds that printmaking allows constant reinvention and numerous possible combinations of techniques and formats and is known for his obsessive re-interpretation of the same subject matter. These new prints exemplify his approach to the medium and the exhibition will be a celebration of Dine's enduring fascination with this particular subject. All the editions were made at the printing studio of Michael Woolworth in Paris and the exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated hard-back catalogue published by Steidl.
The Alan Cristea Gallery will be holding an exhibition of 21 of the most important lithographs by Henri Matisse. It will be a unique opportunity to see such a large group of rare prints in one exhibition. The lithographs date from 1913 to 1930 and all explore different aspects of the female form, developing the themes of the artist's paintings and sculpture - the nude, the odalisque and the dancer. None of the impressions on display will have been exhibited before.
Many of the works in the exhibition, for example Reclining Nude with Louis XIV Screen and Arabesque were included in the 2005 Royal Academy exhibition Matisse, His Art and His Textiles, which toured to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Indeed editions of many of the works in the exhibition are held in major public collections including MOMA, New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
