IS THERE SUCH A THING AS BRITISH ART?

Louisa Buck, Hew Locke and Barry Reigate in conversation
7.30pm, 29 November 2010
Tickets: £10 / £6 students - Book now

With the opening of Newspeak: British Art Now at the Saatchi Gallery, and the British Art Show 7 at Nottingham Contemporary, the question of British Art is once again in the spotlight. Both exhibitions include a host of radically divergent artists connected by 'Britishness'. Does this tag reveal anything more than shared geography?

Artists Hew Locke and Barry Reigate, and journalist Louisa Buck, discuss the problematic concept of British Art as a coherent context for artistic production. Is there a particular British sensibility, style or technique discernable in contemporary art produced in the UK today? Or, have we reached a point at which the idea of a national artistic identity has broken down leaving a multiplicity of artistic forms and languages?

Speakers:

Louisa Buck is a writer and broadcaster on contemporary art. She is a columnist for The Art Newspaper and a regular reviewer on BBC radio and TV. Her books include Moving Targets 2: A User's Guide to British Art Now (2007), Market Matters: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Art Market (2009) and Owning Art: The Contemporary Art Collector's Handbook (2006, with Judith Greer). Buck was a judge for the Turner Prize in 2005.

Hew Locke lives and works in London. Locke moved from Edinburgh to Guyana where he spent his formative years. Back in the UK he completed an MA in sculpture at the Royal College. Locke has exhibited extensively around the UK, including Tate Britain, The V&A Museum, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Rivington Place, The Bluecoat Gallery and The British Museum. In the US he has shown at The Luckman Gallery LA, The New York Museum of Art and Design, Atlanta Contemporary Arts and at The Brooklyn Museum. Locke has recently been shortlisted for the 4th Plinth Commission, and will be exhibiting as part of the Folkestone Triennial in 2011. He is represented by Hales Gallery in London.

Barry Reigate lives and works in London. He completed an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University and has since gone on to exhibit internationally. His work has been included in major national shows such as Rude Britannia: British Comic Art at Tate Britain and Newspeak: British Art Now at the Saatchi Gallery, and in exhibitions at Trolley Gallery, Baibakov Art Projects, Moscow, Chapman Fine Arts, The Agency Gallery and Stephen Friedman Gallery. He is represented by Paradise Row Gallery in London.

© Jenny Saville
Reproduction drawing I (after the Leonardo cartoon), 2009-2010
Pencil on paper
89 1/8 x 69 1/2 inches (226.3 x 176.5 cm)

April 15 - May 15, 2010
17-19 Davies Street London W1K 3DE
www.gagosian.com


Opening reception for the artist: Thursday, April 15th, from 6 to 8 pm

Bodies fascinate me. I find having the framework of a body essential. Having flesh as a central subject, I can channel a lot of ideas.
--Jenny Saville

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present three recent works on paper by Jenny Saville.

Known for her outsized oil paintings of traumatic female bodies, this is Saville's first exhibition devoted exclusively to drawing. In these large and detailed studies, she articulates specific aspects of her subject, giving powerful graphic life to the anatomical details and expressive movements that animate and underpin her visceral paintings.

Saville has chosen subjects -- including herself -- whose bodies she believes to represent the contemporary era. Rather than working from live studio models, she slowly renders form tangible in oil paint. Bodily orifices fascinate her, as is evident in her depictions of bulging and twisting bodies, imbued with the qualities of mortified flesh. She strives to make visible in viscous passages of paint the precarious states of the human body.

Each of the three drawings in this exhibition portrays the intimate relationship between mother and child, directly inspired by Renaissance nativity portraits, in particular Leonardo da Vinci's cartoon The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and John the Baptist (National Gallery, London) an atypical scene in which the Virgin contends with a lively Christ-child. The life-size portraits that she entitles "reproduction" -- a pun that conjoins the act of artistic emulation with the feat of motherhood -- renders the two figures in symbiotic flux. In Reproduction Drawing I and III (after the Leonardo cartoon) multiple impressions of mother and child, drawn, erased and superimposed, record the mother's patient efforts to hold the wriggling infant. Their relationship is expressed as a dynamic tangle of superimposed limbs and frenetic postures rather than a static composition of iconographic order. In Reproduction Drawing II (after the Leonardo cartoon), the mother grips the ankle of the baby who, from the ghostly lines of previous action recorded on the paper, has come to rest atop her heavily pregnant belly. And, as if in a reversal of the adult-child relationship, she appears absorbed in the process while he looks beyond her, fixing the viewer with his gaze.

Jenny Saville was born in Cambridge, England in 1970. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work has been included in exhibitions worldwide including "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection", Royal Academy of Arts, London (1997, traveled to Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York 1998-99); "The Nude In 20th Century Art", Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2002, traveled to Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen in 2003); "Painting", Museo Correr, 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003); and "Paint Made Flesh", Frist Center for the Arts, Nashville (2009, traveled to the Philips Collections, Washington D.C. and Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY in 2010). In 2005, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome.

Saville lives and works in Oxford, UK.

First major survey in the UK of the internationally acclaimed design maverick

18 February 2010 - 16 May 2010

Tickets: Standard £8 online / £10 full price
Concs £7 online / £8 full price
Members £6 online / £7 full price

Time: Open daily 11am-8pm (except Tue & Wed until 6pm)
Open late every Thu until 10pm
subject to availability

Barbican Art Gallery stages the first major survey in the UK of the internationally acclaimed, London-based design maverick Ron Arad.

Ron Arad: Restless explores three decades of Arad’s designs from his early post-punk approach of assembling products from readymade parts to his exclusive and highly polished sculptural furnishings. Featuring a dramatic exhibition design by Ron Arad Associates using the latest LED display technology, Ron Arad: Restless also includes architectural designs and immediately recognisable mass produced pieces. Highlighting the significance of experimentation, process and materials in Arad’s work, the exhibition offers a timely insight into the development of objects from initial idea and fabrication to finished design.

Events programme - Inspired by Ron Arad’s infectious curiosity and boundless sense of freedom, Barbican Art Gallery will be celebrating his work with a host of talks, workshops and lively, late-night gallery activities. More info coming soon.

Online exclusives coming soon... - Coming soon is a dedicated exhibition microsite for you to immerse yourself in the work and world of Ron Arad. You'll be able to visit for updates, videos, blogs and much, much more.

www.barbican.org.uk

MICHAEL RAKOWITZ , 22 January – 3 May 2010

Michael Rakowitz works as a cultural archaeologist, uncovering an unexpected network of connections between historical fact and fantasy. The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one's own traces links between western science fiction and military-industrial activities in Iraq during and after Saddam Hussein's regime.

Through a series of interwoven narratives this project addresses, among other things, the Iraqi leader's fascination with the iconography of Jules Verne's novels and the Star Wars films, and the World Wrestling Federation's unique take on Gulf War politics.

The project centres on the Swords of Qādisiyyah monument in central Baghdad. This triumphal arch, otherwise known as the Hands of Victory, was inaugurated on 8 August 1989. The invitation card for the opening ceremony featured the heroic proclamation, "The worst condition is for a person to pass under a sword that is not his own or to be forced down a road that is not willed by him." Rakowitz explores the multiple references and resonances of the Victory Arch, from the history of its design to its use as a backdrop for military posturing.

In this and other aspects of the project the artist explores how powerful contemporary mythologies derived from popular culture have informed the collective unconscious. Fictional characters from Darth Vader to Sgt. Slaughter coexist with historical figures in Rakowitz's symbolic universe, in which warrior fantasies transcend the alleged divide between east and west.

Michael Rakowitz talks about recent projects including The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one's own in his Artist's Talk on Friday 22 January.

Michael Rakowitz was born in Great Neck, New York, in 1973. He lives and works in Chicago.

The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one's own is curated by Ann Coxon and Rachel Taylor.

The Level 2 Gallery is conceived and led by Tate Modern's Assistant Curators, in dialogue with Mark Godfrey, Curator.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/michaelrakowitz/default.shtm