Bermondsey Project Space

Dawn Parsonage: The Boring Exhibition
2019-06-25 - 2019-07-06
Dawn Parsonage: The Boring Exhibition
26 June – 6 July 2019

A playful celebration of boredom through the eyes of artist and collector Dawn Parsonage.
Humorous and often beautiful, this collection of images explores boredom through found images and contemporary portraits. Boredom is a rare emotion to capture in a photograph and this is why Dawn has been drawn to collecting these images for over 20 years.
The exhibition is playful in itself. The images of bored people are displayed, as are boring photographs along with the opportunity for the viewers to take their own boring photograph. There is a playful nature to the fact they were taken in the first place. They show an intimacy between the sitter and the photographer.
Dawn enjoys the juxtaposition of the aesthetic of the snapshot, which is designed to be treasured and celebratory, containing something so contrary to that.
Her contemporary answer to these images is also presented as she looks at our relationship with boredom today, with the same playful themes.
Dawn Parsonage has been collecting photographs for over 20 years and has amassed over 10,000 images. She uses these images in her artistic practice, curating collections and presenting these images in a new light.
She works from her studio in London.

Supported by:

MASTER YOUR FLASH AND START GETTING PAID (WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK!)
2019-05-28 18:30 - 21:30 (Europe/London)
Master your flash and start getting paid
(without breaking the bank)

It goes without saying that knowing how to properly use on and off camera flashes enables you to work everywhere with confidence and increases the chances of you getting hired by a potential client. That being said many photographers find flashguns confusing due to their wide range of functions and settings as well as the vast choice and high cost of flash accessories available on the market. After completing this workshop, you will have a very good understanding of a variety of accessories, including shapers, modifiers, triggers and light-stands including some tips on how to save money on your equipment. In addition, not only will you be able to take full control of your flash but also achieve the results that will help you get paid for your next commission.
Requirements
It is not necessary to bring your own equipment to attend this workshop, however should you wish to get bespoke advice you will only need to carry a digital SLR Camera and a dedicated flash unit.
Topics covered
– Flash settings including zoom, TTL and manual
– Fill flash and flash exposure compensation
– How to balance ambient light with flash
– Bouncing flash off ceilings and walls
– Working with off camera flash
– Off camera flash lighting set ups for portraits and events
– How and when to use reflectors, diffusers and umbrellas
– Posing the model
– Flash modifiers
– Marketing and insider tips
– Who is this course for
This course is aimed at photographers wanting to push their creative image-making skills to the next level and get the most out of their flashguns in order to start their own business without breaking the bank.
About the workshop leader
Baldo Sciacca is a London based photographer, originally from Sicily with a degree in Photojournalism and Documentary photography from the London College of Communication. He has been exhibited worldwide and was shortlisted commended photographer for the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards. His work ranges from commercial assignments and time pressure portraits of personalities to more personal and thought-provoking projects during which he frequently uses speedlights.
www.baldosciacca.com
Please Note: This workshop is limited to small groups therefore booking in advance is strongly recommended.

BOOK YOUR PLACE AT:
https://www.fillerproduction.co.uk/workshops

British Painting II: A Summer Show By Independent Artists
2019-05-21 11:00 - 2019-06-15 18:00
British Painting II: A Summer Show By Independent Artists
21 May – 15 June 2019

Exhibiting Artists

Felicitas Aga, John Atkin, Philippa Beale, Day Bowman, Laurence Causse-Parsley, Mercedes Carbonell, Stella Carr, Francesca Cho, Mi-Young Choi, James Cockburn, Kate Cragg, Claudia De Grandi, Paul Finn, Andrew Flint-Shipman, Martin Galton, Carolyn Gowdy, Adam Gray, Elizabeth Hannaford, Connie Harrison, Frances Hatch, Adrian Hemming, Marguerite Horner, Gennadiy Ivanov, Michael Jarvis, Robyn Litchfield, Martin Harrison-Priestman, Alan Rankle, Robert Sample, Rob Reed, Pauline Smith, Charlotte Snook, Helen De Sybel, Richard Walker

Sabine
acrylic on canvas
FELICITAS AGA

Vanishing Point No. 2 2018/19
collage, oil, perspex, MDF on board
JOHN ATKIN

The Poplars Across the Road 2018
oil on canvas
PHILIPPA S BEALE

Study I Fortress 2019
oil, charcoal and conte on canvas
DAY BOWMAN

orders II 2019
mixed media on board
LAURENCE CAUSSE-PARSLEY/LAC

Juanito Asencio 2017
oil on linen
MERCEDES CARBONELL

I Will Hold You In The Heat 2018
oil on board
STELLA CARR

Twin but Twin V 2018-9
(from ash & wind) ash and mixed media
FRANCESCA CHO

Case for the Defense 2019
oil on linen
MI-YOUNG CHOI

Tartan Road, Argyll. Scotland 2019
oil on canvas
JAMES COCKBURN

Girl, 5 2018
gouache on canvas
KATE CRAGG

Waves & Horizons – Graphite 17 2019
oil and graphite on aluminium
CLAUDIA DE GRANDI

San Gimignano Autumn 2011
oil on linen
PAUL FINN

In honour of Ianna 2018
acrylic, liquid metal & whisky on linen
ANDREW FLINT SHIPMAN

Martin Sibley and the Austin 10 2019
oil pastel and house paint on paper
MARTIN GALTON

Unwrap Your Inner Magic 2018
oil and mixed media on canvas
CAROLYN GOWDY

Losing Faith 2018
oil on burlap
ADAM GRAY

Black Hole 2019
oil, grit on canvas
ELIZABETH HANNAFORD

Grid III 2018
oil paint and wax on canvas
CONNIE HARRISON

Perigree Supermoon Smudge 2018
gouache lay-by litter and earths on paper
FRANCES HATCH

Heliconia 2016
oil on canvas
ADRIAN HEMMING

Exit 2011
oil on linen
MARGUERITE HORNER

Egyptian Emotions II Division series 2018
oil on canvas
GENNADIY IVANOV

Albens 2018
mixed media
MICHAEL JARVIS

Lake Brunner 2017
oil and acrylic on canvas
ROBYN LITCHFIELD

Wall Scape 2018
poster monoprint, collage, pencil, acrylic on paper
CHRISTIANNA MARION MITCHELL

A Requiem for Industry 2019
oil on canvas
KATE MIECZKOWSKA

In the Cafe 2019
acrylic on canvas

WILLIAM OXER F.R.S.A.

Le Jokey 2019
oil on linen
M. HARRISON-PRIESTMAN

Untitled Painting XXII (Bodiam) 2017
oil on canvas
ALAN RANKLE

Avenue 2017
oil on canvas
ROB REED

Head Down Duvet 2018
oil on board
ROBERT SAMPLE

Blossom in Twilight in Brixton 2012
oil on canvas
PAULINE SMITH

Nude in the Studio with Dogman 2018
oil on board
CHARLOTTE SNOOK

Landscape Bucks 2018
mixed media
HELEN DE SYBEL

West End Boy 2019
acrylic and pencil on canvas
RICHARD WALKER

Rear View Mirror: Jack Milroy, Five Decades of work
2019-04-25 - 2019-05-12
Rear View Mirror: Jack Milroy, Five Decades of work
25 April – 12 May 2019

This is a celebratory exhibition to chart Jack Milroy’s artistic evolution from art school rebel of the late 1950s, to his heretical ‘evisceration’ of books and printed matter, which continues to this day. The recent works are consummate examples of his pioneering treatment of the printed page, revealing him to be a gentle and wry surrealist commentator. There is genuine astonishment at his virtuosic facility – but it is a skill that is simultaneously underpinned by a steady intellect and purpose.
Jackie Wullschlager, chief visual arts critic of the Financial Times, has commented on Milroy’s output in her round-up pieces for ‘Critic’s Choice’ observing that “Jack Milroy’s sculptural collages blend fairy tale and conceptual art, mediations on rhythms and shapes with references to Darwin”. She points out that sometimes his rearrangement of species, gravity, day and night – is fraught with twenty-first century tension about science and nature. This is clearly the case in the two metre tall Grey Skies, 2015, where the metallic greys of aeroplanes designed for war dominate the upper section, with bountiful cottage flowers clustered in colourful array beneath them, tended in the margins by pretty butterflies innocently echoing the perilous pattern of flight implied above.
Milroy’s titles alone tell you that he is a man of verbal as well as visual wit. There is often brevity and subversion: he uses his scalpel cut things up, but in doing so, he sets things free, revealing them, reordering them, liberating or juxtaposing them to convey his point of view. His overall interest lies in regeneration, and the paradox of creation through destruction. His work in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection is called ‘The Librarian’s Garden’,1999. It is a table top piece in which the prickly cacti emerge in three dimensional form from the book’s pages onto a rectangular surface – ‘a beautifully evocative piece which uses the book as both container and liberator’, the label explained.
Latterly, digital prints have emerged from the studio – one of them an arrangement of words from a lively collaboration with the author A S Byatt called Into the Dark Wood, 2002. And there are still actual books, hard covered and sculptural, with their contents popping out of their covers as in Francis Chichester, 1992, or in Surgery as a Pastime, 1997, where anatomical body parts tumble down from the book’s pages, suspended in streams of cut up medical text.
‘Ophelia’ 2015 belongs to Milroy’s ‘art about art’ output, like the earlier Garden of Earthly Delights series, inspired by Hieronymous Bosch or Le Rouge et le Noir, 2010 which is Milroy’s version of a Jackson Pollock. He takes liberties with his updated renderings, paying tribute to the original painted compositions, while using digital printing methods and exploiting the three dimensional possibilities of his paper or acetate film constructions, which he arranges in Perspex boxes with topical inclusions (spot the Tesco plastic bag floating in Ophelia’s watery world).
Milroy’s developments within different series over five decades consistently demonstrate the range and the calibre of his ideas alongside the constant testing, teasing, thoughtful approach to the codification of knowledge, the products, and the art of the times in which we live.
Cut Out, (Black Dog Publishing, 2016) is a fully illustrated monograph on Jack Milroy’s work, containing essays by Philip Hensher, A S Byatt, and Andrew Lambirth, with William Packer as the overall author and co-ordinator. It offers a most engaging lexicon of the artist’s work over a 50 year period. Copies are available from the gallery during the exhibition, and from Art First thereafter.
For further information and exhibition, biographical and collection history, please visit our website: www.artfirst.co.uk or contact us for the pricelist and out of hours visits :
Clare Cooper: clare@artfirst.co.uk
Benjamin Rhodes: Benjamin@artfirst.co.uk
Instagram: @artfirstlondon
Facebook: @artfirstlondon
Exhibition opening times are Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm Venue Tel: 0203 441 5152, email: abps@project-spacelondon

1/3 MeelPress
2019-04-02 - 2019-04-13
1/3 MeelPress

Portuguese Contemporary Artists
Curated by João Silvério

2nd – 13th April 2019

Bermondsey Project Space is delighted to announce its forthcoming exhibition, titled “1/3MeelPress”, curated by João Silvério. This is a non-profit showcase sponsored by Camões IP with the Embassy of Portugal in the United Kingdom and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
This exhibition celebrates the past five years of print work from MeelPress Studio by Portuguese contemporary artists. Its aim is to present their work in an international context, choosing the city of London as an acknowledgment of teaching and learning relationships established between Portuguese artists and British institutions.
“1/3 MeelPress” was projected by Hugo Amorim, Constança Arouca and Mara Alves, and will show artworks from the following artists: Alexandre Conefrey, Ana Jotta, Ana Yokoshi, Ana Pérez-Quiroga, André Romão, Ângela Ferreira, Belén Uriel, Constança Arouca, Edgar Pires, Elisa Pône, Francisco Tropa, Henrique Pavão, Hugo Amorim, Joana Villaverde, Julião Sarmento, João Louro, João Paulo Feliciano, João Queiroz, Luís Paulo Costa, Luísa Cunha, Miguel Palma, Paulo Brighenti, Ricardo Jacinto, Rui Calçada Bastos, Salomé Lamas, Susana Mendes Silva, Thierry Simões, Tomás Cunha Ferreira.

Miguel Palma
Untitled, 2016
Monoprint, Chine-collé, on 300g Somerset White paper Paper dim.: 76 x 56 cm
Unique proof

João Silvério exhibition’s Curator, comments:
The exhibition 1/3 MeelPress brings together a group of contemporary artists from different generations whose work was developed in collaboration with MeelPress print studio, founded in Lisbon in 2013 by the artist and printmaker Hugo Amorim.
The singularity of the exhibition project is anchored in the diversity of artistic projects which, emerging within a great historical tradition, reveals a strong experimental component present in the art works on show. This print studio has assumed a dual role in the context of Portuguese contemporary art, as both a space for production of printed work and an artist’s studio where they can create and develop new art work.

1/3 MeelPress is the collective expression represented by printmaking in contemporary art production.

About Meel Press Studio:
The MeelPress studio was founded in 2013 by the artist and printmaker Hugo Amorim with the primary purpose of creating a collaborative space for contemporary artists, in the production and diffusion of print editions, as well as other cultural agents, curators and gallerists.
Meel Press printed with the following artists for their solo shows: Alexandre Conefrey, Ana Jotta, Ana Pérez Piroga, Belén Uriel, Constança Arouca, Elisa Pône, Henrique Pavão, João Queiroz, Miguel Palma, Paulo Brighenti, Rui Calçada Bastos, Salomé Lamas, Thierry Simões, Tomás Cunha Ferreira.
Meel Press printed editions for the following group exhibitions: “Appleton Square 10 Anos” (10th anniversary book of prints), Appleton Square (2018) : Alexandre Conefrey, Ana Jotta, Ana Yokoshi, Ângela Ferreira, Belén Uriel, Edgar Pires, Francisco Tropa, Joana Villaverde, Julião Sarmento, João Louro, João Paulo Feliciano, Susana Mendes Silva; “BAT bon à tirer”, Appleton Square (2018): Alexandre Conefrey, Ana Jotta, Ana Yokoshi, Ana Pérez Piroga, André Romão, Ângela Ferreira, Belén Uriel, Constança Arouca, Edgar Pires, Elisa Pône, Henrique Pavão, Hugo Amorim, Joana Villaverde, Julião Sarmento, Luís Paulo Costa, Luísa Cunha, Miguel Palma, Paulo Brighenti, Ricardo Jacinto, Rui Calçada Bastos, Salomé Lamas, Susana Mendes Silva, Thierry
Simões; “Mercadoria Chinesa”, Galeria Cristina Guerra (2014): Ana Jotta, André Romão, Julião Sarmento, João Louro, João Paulo Feliciano, Luís Paulo Costa, Luísa Cunha, Ricardo Jacinto.
About the Curator João Silvério:
João Silvério (1962) is an Art Curator based in Lisbon. He works as a curator for the Art Collection of the Luso- American Development Foundation (www.flad.pt) and is the President of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) Portuguese section 2013-2015. In 2007 he created the independent project EMPTY CUBE (www.emptycube.org).
He holds a Master’s Degree in Curatorial Studies from the Fine Arts Faculty of Universidade de Lisboa and is currently preparing his PhD dissertation at the Arts College of Universidade de Coimbra.
He is the author of art books, writes regularly on art projects in catalogues, publications and websites including the www. emptycube.org
From the exhibitions curated by João Silvério we select: Imaginário da Paisagem – Colecção BESArt – Centro de Artes de Visuais, Coimbra, 2010; all to wall, Parte I Parte II, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, 2011, Lisbon; Dois Desenhos, Uma Escultura, de José Pedro Croft , Appleton Square, Lisbon, 2012; INDEX – Julião Sarmento, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas – Collection António Cachola; Co-Curator with Suzanne Cotter of the exhibition HABITAR(S) Group show with works form the collections of the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento and Fundação de Serralves – Biblioteca Municipal Almeida Garrett, Porto, 2013; Passagem de Nível, exhibiton of Rui Calçada Bastos, Invaliden1 Galerie, Berlin, 2014; Colecção de Arte Contemporânea Arquipélago, uma selecção, Arquipélago Centro de Artes Contemporâneas, Ribeira Grande, S. Miguel, Azores, 2015; shadow pieces on Body frames – Julião Sarmento, CAPC-Círculo Sereia, Bienal Ano Zero, Coimbra, Portugal(2015); As Good As it Gets- Julião Sarmento, Museum of Fine Arts / Kula Gallery/ Institut Hazu, Split and Museum of Contemprary Art Zabgreb, Croatia, 2016; Ponto de Partida, Coleção Figueiredo Ribeiro, Quartel – Galeria Municipal de Arte, Abrantes, 2016; Uma Colecção = Um Museu, 2007- 2017, António Cachola Collection 10 Years Exhibiton program, MACE, Elvas and Badajoz, Spain, 2017; EDP FOUNDATION’S NEW ARTISTS AWARD 2017, Lisbon.
In 2018 he has curated Mesa dos Sonhos: duas coleções de arte contemporânea – Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento e Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea Nadir Afonso, Chaves, Centro de Cultura Contemporânea de Castelo Branco – CCCB (2018); “O Estado das Coisas – Obras da Colecção da Fundação PLMJ”, Kunstraum Botschaft / Camões Berlin (2018). In 2019 he is curator and member of selection Jury of 2019 EDP FOUNDATION’S NEW ARTISTS AWARD.

About Hugo Amorim (Meel Press Founder):
Hugo Amorim (1975) is an artist printmaker and editor who was born in Lisbon where he lives and works. Between 2004 and 2007 he was the teacher and head technician for the Printing Studio at Ar.Co – Independent Art School, in Almada. In 2013, Hugo Amorim founded MeelPress Studio with the main purpose of creating a Print Studio to collaborate with artists and develop print editions.
Hugo Amorim studied at Ar.Co – Independent Art School, where he graduated from the Complete Painting Studies, in 2002,
the Advanced Course in Visual Arts, in 2004, the Cinema/ Moving Image Course, in 2005, and Sculpture Practice in 2006. He participated in the following group shows: Selected artists for the prize Amadeo Souza-Cardoso (2017), Amarante; Mostra15 (2015); “Sim Não”, with Francisco Tropa, included in the project: “O corpo como utensílio, o corpo como matéria”, Auditório da Fundação de Serralves (2006), Porto; “Ar.Co, Bazar”, Centro Cultural de Belém (2006), Lisbon; “Exposição de Finalistas e Bolseiros”, Ar.Co, Cordoaria Nacional (2005), Lisbon; “Exposição de Verão”/ Open Studio, Ar.Co (2004), Almada.
At MeelPress Studio he printed with the following artists for their solo and group shows: Alexandre Conefrey, Ana Jotta, Ana Yokoshi, Ana Pérez Piroga, André Romão, Ângela Ferreira, Belén Uriel, Constança Arouca, Edgar Pires, Elisa Pône, Henrique Pavão, Hugo Amorim, Joana Villaverde, João Louro, João Queiroz, João Paulo Feliciano, Julião Sarmento, Luís Paulo Costa, Luísa Cunha, Miguel Palma, Paulo Brighenti, Ricardo Jacinto, Rui Calçada Bastos, Salomé Lamas, Susana Mendes Silva, Thierry Simões, Tomás Cunha Ferreira.
He printed editions for the following group exhibitions: “Appleton Square 10 Anos” (Livro), Appleton Square (2018); “BAT bon à tirer”, Appleton Square (2018); “Mercadoria Chinesa”, Galeria Cristina Guerra (2014)
About Constança Arouca (“1/3 Meel Press” Project Manager – Portugal):
Constança Arouca (Lisbon, 1976) is an artist and researcher based in Lisbon. She has developed her work in the fields of drawing, printmaking and moving image.
She graduated from the Advanced Course of Visual Arts, in 2004, and Individual Project at Ar.Co, Lisbon, in 2005. In 2006, she participated in Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Visual Arts Course. In 2009 and 2011 she was an artist in residence at Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier. In 2016 she graduated from Nova University’s Master Program of Anthropology-Visual Cultures.
Her solo shows include: “Uma escada é um bom tema para uma pintura?” O Armário, Lisbon, 2019; “Meia Cana Chanfrada”, FRESS Museu de Artes Decorativas, Lisbon, 2018; “Pick a Prime”, Galeria Diferença, Lisbon, 2017; BÁ Studio, Lisbon, 2012; Módulo, Centro Difusor de Arte, Lisbon, 2006; Módulo, Centro Difusor de Arte, Porto, 2006. From her group shows we select: Orto di Incendio, Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, Rome, 2019; “BAT bon à tirer”, Appleton Square, Lisbon, 2018; Her research work in printmaking includes: The Case Study of Iohannes Moll’s Copper Plate, conference: “Stones, Blocks and Plates: Matrices/ Printing Surfaces in Research and Collections”, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2017; Neptuno e Coronis, Vieira Lusitano, 1724 – co- presentation with Dra Alexandra Markl, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, 2017; Lisboa Prática (e materialidade) Desenho Indireto: conference: “Ways of doing, Ways of being: artistic practices in and with anthropology”, Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Lisbon, 2017.
In 2018 she was an artist in residence at the Decorative Arts Museum’s Chiseling workshop. In 2019 travelled to Vietnam with a scholarship from the Orient Foundation, where she has been researching on Vietnamese printmaking and folk painting since 2017.

About Mara Alves (“1/3 Meel Press Project Manager – London):

Lisbon-born Artist, Contemporary Art Curator and Advisor with a Degree in Fine Arts and Curatorial Studies. Mara was accepted to an MA in Art Business programme at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, with impressive merit, in 2019. Over eight years in Managerial roles in the Arts Industry.
Between 2010 and 2015 Mara developed and led educational and cultural programmes for students and the general public at a studio and gallery that she founded in Lisbon. In 2015 and before moving to London, Mara founded PortugArt, a project that globally promotes Portuguese culture. Between 2015 and 2016 Mara has developed a drawing programme for one year for the Independent Art School in London, to improve the student’s capacities of representation and concentration.
For three years she was Chief Curator and Manager with start-up gallery D Contemporary in Mayfair, dealing with emergent
and mid-career artists. In 2018 Mara was a Guest Curator and Advisor for Caspia Contemporary Gallery, and a Guest Speaker at various events including COBA (Contemporary Balkan Art) and the International Art Congress, Brazil. Also, Mara conducted and organised a series of art salon evenings during Frieze week.
Currently, Mara was appointed as Head Of Projects and Senior Curator with The Dragon Gallery focusing on highly contemporary work from emerging and mid-career artists, and she is also independently managing and mentoring individual artist’s careers. Mara has enrolled as a cultural facilitator and project manager in London with MEELPress to bring a group of Portuguese contemporary artists to Bermondsey Project Space in April 2019, and will be presenting and curating a solo exhibition with Caracas-born analogue photographer Alexandro Pelaez.
About Bermondsey Project Space:
A cutting edge, creative platform to encourage personal development through visual art and support the fusion of art, photography and culture. A not-for-profit space supporting community initiatives in the heart of London, the Bermondsey Project Space comprises three galleries, three floors, three thousand square feet of exhibition space and offices located in one of the most vibrant arts areas of London, in the shadow of the Shard and minutes from White Cube, and close to Borough Market and Tate Modern.
The BPS has created high profile exhibitions with some of the UK’s leading photographers and partnered with internationally renowned agencies – like Magnum Pictures and Camera Press – to showcase the best in British photography. In 2018, the gallery’s efforts to encourage interaction and participation within the area’s many diverse interests were generously recognised by Southwark Council who shortlisted the BPS for two awards, alongside finalists of the calibre of the Old Vic and Brunel Museum.
The Bermondsey Project Space has become a popular destination for art collectors, residents and visitors to London from the UK and beyond. The area has become a beacon for art thanks to nearby White Cube gallery and Tate Modern.
All press enquiries should be sent to e-mail: maracralves@gmail.com tel.: +44 (0) 74 2508 9060
All general enquiries should be sent to e-mail: hmc.amorim@gmail.com tel.: +351 919600410 www.meelpress.com
Sponsored by:
Camões IP with the Embassy of Portugal in the United Kingdom and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

Ana Jotta
then, I saw, 2017
Drypoint on 300g Somerset Soft-white paper Paper dim.: 45 x 35 cm
Unique proof

Belén Uriel
Untitled, 2018
Monotype on 300g Somerset Soft-white paper Paper dim.: 38 x 27,8 cm
Unique proof

Rui Calçada Bastos
Landscape for the Vanished II, 2018
Photogravure on 300g Somerset Soft-white paper Paper dim.: 28 x 43 cm
Image dim.: 28 x 43 cm
Ed. 3 + 1 AP + 1 HC

João Paulo Feliciano
Untitled, 2017
Photo etching, “a la poupée” printing with the artist blood on 300g Somerset Soft-white paper
Paper dim.: 45 x 35 cm
Image dim.: 11,6 x 13,9 cm
Ed: 10 + 3 AP

Julião Sarmento
Ouro, 2017
Hard ground, soft ground, on 300g Somerset Soft-white paper Paper dim.: 20 x 25,5 cm
Ed: 10 + 3 AP

SUMMER SALON 01 BRITISH PAINTING : DISPOSITION
2019-03-18 - 2019-03-31
SUMMER SALON 01 British Painting
DISPOSITION
Curated by Marguerite Horner
Exhibiting Artists: John Atkin, Franki Austin, Day Bowman, Luke Caulfield, Claudia De Grandi, Alex Hanna, Kaori Homma, Ben Johnson, Graham Martin, Sneh Mehta, Kate Mieczkowska, Alan Rankle, Rob Reed, Katherine Russell, Sarah Shaw, Andrew Stahl, Judith Tucker.
MARCH 18 – 31

Disposition is defined as an arrangement of things in relation to each other. While the relationship between artists, their practices and the perception of audience are not always empirically definable, this exhibition attempts to bring together a group of artists whose common link is that, they are all contemporary practitioner living and working here and now, and endeavouring to put the ether into material form, each in their unique and individual way, their consciousness manifest through material process to be experienced by the ‘other’- the viewer who brings their own associations.
Merleau-Ponty states: ‘precisely because Painting does not ‘copy’ things, and because it does not offer things to thought as does science but presents them immediately and bodily, in their depth and movement, that painting gives a true sense of the world and what it means to see it’.

John Atkin deploys a clear physicality to the artworks through the use of collage alongside materials such as Perspex. The use of digital media together with traditional methods of practice has permitted an experimental approach to the application of colour and form used in preparatory drawing and prints.

Franki Austin‘s work revolves around Dartington Hall in Devon and on the international community of artists who were living and working at Dartington in 1930s. This research led the artist to value the relationships and interactions between artist, community and place.

Day Bowman is a painter whose work lies on the axis of figuration and abstraction. In her current body of work she confronts and questions our notion of the coast and the seaside and asks ‘is it now more border than holiday destination?’

Luke Caulfield’s work is founded on instable, shifting, temporal elements and perceptual uncertainty. The work seems to toy with the idea that he may not be making a work of art himself but instead making a “documentation” of other works of art.

From 2017 onwards Claudia De Grandi has been concentrating on large scale paintings based on her studies and observations of the sea, from the shores of East Sussex and Northern California.

Alex Hanna‘s work is based around arrangements of objects, materials and surfaces. Much of his work has been about the painting as both an illusory device and simultaneously an object.

Kaori Homma uses Invisible ink made with lemon juice to render images, altering the delicate balance of paper. For the artist, the resulting image contains a level of fragility and notion of death within it by nature.

Ben Johnson He is best known for his paintings based on architectural spaces (some almost forensically accurate, others heavily manipulated) and his large-scale, intricately detailed cityscape.

Graham Martin is interested in the ideas which shaped the original social and architectural concepts of development, the dystopian themes associated with it today and the inevitable entropy to which it has succumbed.

Sneh Metha current series ‘Psychological Portraits’ is an exploration of the intangible in the human condition through ‘moods’, ‘emotions’, ‘relationships’ and ‘states of being’.

Kate Mieczkowska is a British born artist inspired by history, politics and the world around her. Her work often explores identity in terms of nationality and gender.

Alan Rankle is an artist and curator whose work explores historical, social and environmental issues informed by his interest in the evolution of landscape art.

Rob Reed practice re-evaluates the everyday scenery and the discovery of its symbolic qualities which can present an environment for solitary contemplation for audiences.

Katherine Russell tries to dissimulate a fraction of the mass of imagery that we encounter on a daily basis. Her work looks at how we as individuals, inevitably engage with these images on a personal, subjective and an emotional level.

Andrew Stahl ‘s process is based around his personal experience. Andrew Stahl has exhibited frequently in London and the UK and widely internationally across Europe, Asia and America. He is a recipient of many awards Scholarships and residencies.

Sarah Shaw’s process revolves around the building up and stripping down of imagery, exploring different painterly languages then reducing down to the lowest denominator.

Judith Tucker‘s work explores the meeting of social history, personal memory and geography; it investigates their relationship through drawing, painting and writing.

MARGUERITE HORNER Time Keeps Slipping
Solo Show
MARCH 18 – 31
Our minds slip in and out of linear time, bringing memories, thoughts and beliefs that exist outside of linear time into the present as we recall.
This body of work originates from the recalled reality of my personal experience which acts as a metaphor for my internal world with which I explore notions of transience, intimacy, loss and hope.
‘For the only equivalent of the Universe within is the Universe without’.
Jung

Yana Rits: Body Talks
2019-03-12 - 2019-03-16
BODY TALKS
YANA RITS
MARCH 12 – MARCH 16

‘We, as humans, carry within ourselves all angels of heaven alongside every demon of hell blending one with the other, a cocktail complementary to circumstances and personal tastes. This impermanence is as infinite as it is beautiful. The human personality is rich and iridescent like an artfully cut diamond, and it is the diversity of these innumerable facets that I try to reflect in my works’. Yana Rits

Born and raised in St. Petersburg, London based artist Yana Rits’ photography and cinematography combines the sublime moral character and rich cultural heritage of these beautiful cities. In her photographic practice, the artist uses her own body to study not only concepts of time, form, and space but also the whole gamut of human existence – from cultural aspects such as religion, gender and racial privilege to more primal ones like sexuality and age.
The beauty, harmony and fragility of the human body, male or female, are the focus of the artist’s work and they represent an incomparable tool for the embodiment of philosophical themes. The use of a single model in various hypostases united in a single-frame allows the artist to achieve the effect of presence in several spatial planes simultaneously, thus transferring the idea of unity in a single moment in time. The technique of black and white allows the artist to create a language of metaphors and abstractions – the image thus becomes a means to establish a conversation between the viewer and the artist’s inner universe.

The exhibition will be held in conjunction with SMart Network, the arts-based registered charity which helps homeless and socially marginalised individuals to regain a sense of purpose using creative expression. Some of the proceeds of the exhibition sales will be generously donated by Rits as a way to raise valuable funds to promote existing art projects and to inspire the creation of new ones.
Being an artist myself, I find it crucial to utilise art in supporting others, who’s life circumstances do not allow them to express themselves or even fulfil their basic human needs of food and shelter. I would be very proud to help SMart in their work of raising funds and awareness of the issues of homeless people. I find it very important that art can play an active role and serve the most vulnerable people, help rediscover themselves, find new meaning in their life and get back on their feet again.I find it very important that art can play an active role and serve the most vulnerable people, help rediscover themselves, find new meaning in their life and get back on their feet again.
– Yana Rits (March 02, 2019)

Mark Baldwin: Embodied Knowledge
2019-01-29 - 2019-03-09
Embodied Knowledge
MARK BALDWIN
JANUARY 29 – MARCH 9

Nicola Clayton FRS
Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)

Embodied knowledge captures those thought processes that emerge when the brain and the rest of the body come together in a meeting of minds: the cerebral mind’s metacognitive eye coupled with the corporal intuitive wordless thoughts. The brain is not a vat of knowledge that works in isolation, depending on a mutually beneficial relationship with the body. They interact with the world and are shaped by the environment they inhabit because all thoughts move, whether they are wordless images or they are pictures and sounds that are accompanied by words. The environment affects the way in which these thoughts move, influenced by the substrate, the morphology, the atmosphere, the ambience…

Thoughts shimmer and change through space and time, depending on our emotional well being and our current perspective, capturing fleeting moments in the active process of memory and mental time travel~ travelling backwards and forwards in the mind’s eye to reflect upon the past, inventing new futures and creating new ways of thinking. Sometimes these strategies are deliberate and mindful, where the brain has conscious access to the thoughts we create; but sometimes these thoughts arise de novo as a result of unexpected triggers which may be manifest as insight and intuition, created through improbable connections and surprising parallels, and sometimes the body knows these things long before the mind is afforded conscious access to them.
The body remembers as well as the brain and therefore it is interesting to contrast those two types of memory. Psychologists differentiate between procedural memory (body memory/corporal thoughts), and declarative memory (mental memory/cerebral thoughts). With procedural memory, the body acquires the knowledge of what to do and how, but there doesn’t have to be conscious access to the process through which the information was acquired. By contrast, declarative memory depends on conscious access, when the mind is well aware of what it knows and remembers. Mental time travel is an especially important process because it allows us to constantly reconfigure our memories and thoughts, supporting our need to contextualize the present and make it our own, because it is controlled and constrained by who we are – past, present and future – and in turn it creates our identity, our sense of self and a sense of self-involvement. As the famous American psychologist William James remarked “For a memory to become my memory, to own it, requires more than the mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past.”
A powerful way of experiencing these features of memory is through movement, and especially through contemporary dance and other forms of conceptual art. This ‘mental time travel’ feature of memory makes it great for creativity, allowing us to think outside the box, engage in divergent thought and explore new ideas. However, there is a downside to this process. Our memories are not accurate repositories of what really happened.
There is another feature of memory that is all about movement, namely suppleness. We use the past to create the future, and when we recall the past it is the suppleness of our imagination that allows us to create and recreate those memories. This is a powerful creative tool, particularly when the physical suppleness of a dancer meets the cognitive suppleness of the mind. It is this physical and cognitive suppleness that allows the dancer to engage with the choreographer (the person who invents the dance) in a deep sense.
So memory is not static, nor is it just focused on the past. It is forward-looking not backward, and it is flexible not fixed, which is precisely what allows it to be supple. These ideas are the very things that are expressed in Mark Baldwin’s masterful art. All of the images move in the mind of the viewer because even static images can capture movement, and they can tell a story, reminiscent of the paintings of lions and horses in the caves of Chauvet and Lascaux created by our early ancestors to capture the vitality of the living form. Mental time travel is an essential feature of the human mind, one that may have originated before our ability to read and write.
Mark’s art is all about ideas and why and how they move. His creative process reveals the complexities of how to use a transferable skill across domains~ the conceptual visual artist, the choreographer, the Renaissance man inspired by science and the arts: they are both the same and different.

Movement in Mind
Mark Baldwin and Nicky Clayton have been collaborating for the past ten years, exploring the exciting commonalities between science and art, about ideas expressed through the medium of movement. For Mark it’s about the dancer and the choreographer; for Nicky it’s about the crow and the scientist fascinated by their manners and movements. There are in fact many parallels in the practice of an artist and a scientist: they use different tools and methods of inquiry, but many of the questions remain the same. How can we represent complex abstract ideas through the medium of movement without the need for words to represent and explain these things? What might mental time travel be like in the absence of words, and what kinds of evidence might we look for in such an endeavour?
What happens when our worlds meet and we create something new together? Typically for us these are ideas that have inspired seven new choreographic works including “Comedy of Change” to celebrate Darwin’s bicentennial and the 150th anniversary of “On the Origin of Species” or “Seven for a secret never to be told” with its emphasis on the importance of play for cognitive development in young children and other animals, notably crows or “The Creation”, which was inspired by the origins of life in the universe. These ideas of our mutual ways of working are expressed pictorially in this series of watercolours painted by Mark, ideas that evolved mutually from Mark and Nicky’s discussions, questions that grew and emerged organically through a decade of exploring and playing with ideas together.
Movement in Mind investigates the creative process through a series of open-ended questions, in the hope of inspiring new questions and new ways of thinking and working.

WORKSHOPS & EVENTS

MARK BALDWIN – ARTIST WORKSHOP
Saturday 02/02/2019, 12pm
The artist process with Mark Baldwin
A rare pair of workshops led by Mark Baldwin OBE, on the process of embodied knowledge, crossing between art and dance.
Learn how to use your own embodied knowledge to create art and dance. Following his debut solo exhibition Mark presents a practical workshop of the ideas behind his work, looking at inspiration, process and performance.
Ever wondered what knowledge is in your body?
Recommend for people interested in visual arts and/or dance. Loose clothing required. Drawing materials provided.

MEMORY – INTERACTIVE TALK
Wednesday 06/02/2019, 6pm
The Dancer Remembers with Prof. Nicky Clayton FRS
Part-talk, part-workshop Professor Nicky Clayton FRS and Clive Wilkins MMC combine both Tango and science to help us understand how memory works and what is its purpose. The presentation will consist of both observation and participation to demonstrate these ideas.
How do you access memory? Where are your memories? Could you say that remembering the past is a form of time travel? When we think of the future, does this engage the same process? The same parts of the brain?

MEMORY – WORKSHOP
Saturday 09/02/2019, 12pm
Who am I? with Carolyn Bolton
Professional dance artist Carolyn Bolton leads two separate movement based workshops, focusing on internalising physical memories and accessing them. Through the sessions you will seek to access your ancestral, future, past, embodied knowledge and find an enriching experience.
Workshop 1 – will guide you through a series of improvised sequences that open up our creative memory, whilst opening up your archived knowledge to lead you in the future.
Workshop 2 – will lead you through a series of task-based work, which culminates in a mini-art performance in the gallery based on memory.
Could you say that remembering the past is a form of time travel?
The workshops are aimed at anyone with dance experience who wants to investigate their own embodied knowledge to generate and explore movement.
Participation in both workshops is highly advised.
Loose clothing required.

PLAY – PANEL DISCUSSION
Wednesday 13/02/2019, 6pm
The Playground discusses

The success of the playground as a place of collaboration and sharing of ideas between artists of different disciplines motivates this panel.
The Playground is normally hosted at Rambert’s building on Southbank. This panel will give a unique insight into the inner workings of the artist’s mind.
Finding out how process can be integral to finding common ground. Questioning how to work with difference and overcoming and embracing challenges.

PLAY – WORKSHOP
Saturday 16/02/2019, 12pm
The Playground deeper with Vanessa Kang
The Playground is a place of collaboration and sharing of ideas between artists of different disciplines. This workshop extends upon those ideals. Normally hosted at Rambert’s building on Southbank, this workshop will give a different context to learn about collaboration.
Facilitator Vanessa Kang will lead through a series of exercises, games and scenarios to enable tools for collaboration. Placing emphasis on dealing with difference and maintaining a sense of identity whilst working with others.
Play can create a joyful body so for any starting point, what better place to be.
Play is essential to children’s development but also to non-verbal forms of process. Whilst as adults we can be discouraged against our ‘childlike’ selves, this embodiment of potential is an exciting one.
Observers welcome.

GENDER – PANEL DISCUSSION
Wednesday 20/02/2019, 6pm
Do I feel my Gender? Young artists talk about today’s challenges in a gendered world. Young artists talk about today’s challenges in a gendered world.
As alternative and parallel thinking of gender are becoming more prominent, artists discuss what it means today. How does this relate to their practice and what does it mean for audiences. The work of Mark Baldwin OBE travels through various non-binary/gender specific identities, prompting the topic of Gender.
A panel of dance and visual artists will discuss what does gender mean to them in their embodied forms. Thought-provoking discussion, including a Q&A.
What is gender, a construct or instincts? Do we feel our gender? Is it internal or what we show?

GENDER – WORKSHOP
Saturday 23/02/3019, 12pm
Gendered bodies with Stephen Quildan
What is gender, a construct or instincts? Do we feel our gender? Is it internal or what we show?
Practical movement based workshop looking at the performing of gender, based on observation, imitation and embodiment. Starting with projections of gender as a social construct, Choreographer Stephen Quildan leads a series of two workshops on what it means to perform Gender. By recognising what is our own and what we have learnt he hopes to uncover more of our true selves.
This workshop is appropriate for all levels of movement. Loose clothing recommended.

COMPOSITION – PANEL DISCUSSION
Wednesday 27/02/2019, 6pm
A score of movement, Composers discuss
A panel of musical composers will spin through their practices and philosophies of composition and reveal their crafting of time and sound. Using the themes of the exhibition ‘Embodied Knowledge’ the talk will create discourse on what it means to compose music for the moving body.
How do you capture movement, in a painting, score or picture?

COMPOSITION – WORKSHOP
Saturday 02/03/2019, 12pm
Image Making with Jack Thomson
Jack Thomson will be leading two fascinating workshops investigating the relationship between dance and the camera, revealing his artistic practice and processes along the way.
Workshop 1 – role of the photographer with the subject/dancer.
Workshop 2 – role of the dancer/subject and how these roles work together to create composition.
“Combining my interests inside and outside the dance studio, has developed my personal, multidisciplinary interests and work. Most of the work I make is largely about the relationship between the moving body and the camera and the context in which these two come together.”
– Jack Thomson
Participation in both workshops is highly advised.
Bring your own cameras and loose clothing recommended.

CULTURE – ARTIST TALK
Wednesday 06/03/2019, 6pm
In conversation with Mark Baldwin and friends. Mark Baldwin OBE discusses with other artists what does embodied knowledge means to them. Does your personal culture become art?
Exploring the culture-makers responses to the world around them and discussing what they feel. Highlighting quirkiness and being silly, amongst the deeply skilful and serious aspects of an artist.

CULTURE – WORKSHOP
Saturday 09/03/2019, 12pm
‘Borderless?’ with Mark Baldwin
Mark Baldwin OBE, artist of ‘Embodied Knowledge’ leads this rare practical movement workshop. Co-creation and embodied knowledge have led him to make new work with artists of specific cultural backgrounds, such as African Zulu, New Zealand Maori and worked in dance ecologies in Japan, Colombia, Turkey and Europe.
In the workshop Mark will open up collaboration, improvisation and endless invention for artists to learn to further develop their own territory and voice.
“I start most of my work by listening and moving to music, I can also read music so if I have written score I will learn to follow it as I hear and see it on the page. I also make paintings. It’s in these actions that I begin to make sense of what I might be trying to say, essentially I am looking for “something” by playing with ideas in time and space. I find music opens up my brain to all kinds pictorial thoughts, atmospheres, manners, attitudes, memories and feelings both from my body and my mind. I tend to listen to several different pieces of music usually along a chosen theme or musical direction e.g. choral works, new music, string sounds lately Japanese or Polynesian drumming. I am trying to go beyond the ideas and move towards another place where my Embodied Knowledge is informing me of a key direction.”
No previous dance experience necessary.
Loose clothing recommended.

Workshop days consist of two sessions 12pm-1pm & 2pm-3pm.
That workshops are £10 or £15 for two workshops on the same day. £6 concessions.
All other events are £7/£5 concessions
Concessions are, over 60 , under 18, Student, Equity/BECTU.

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About Mark Baldwin
Mark Baldwin is a choreographer and a dancer, therefore these images came into the world via a particular stance, dance. For this exhibition, his first, grids are his preferred method of transport. The paintings in his grids stand-alone but make a whole new picture when stacked next to each other. They, represent his choreographic notes, the squiggles on the back of an envelope writ large which carry information about timing, shift, sound, shapes, mood, character and plot.

The paintings inhabit the universe of memory; “Mental Time Travel” and the “imagination system” allowing him to make a dance in time and space that is flat but constantly shifting up, down, back, forth, inside, outside, left, right, high and low etc. We all have embodied knowledge which some might argue sits on the surface of who we are, where we came from, and who we hope to become.

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Mel Ramos
2019-01-09 - 2019-01-24
MEL RAMOS (1935 – 2018)
PAINTINGS, SCULPTURES & EDITIONS
9 – 24 January 2019

Gitanes, 2012, Polychrome resin, 85 x 48 x 70 cm, 33 ½ x 19 x 27 ½ in

Mel Ramos, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol exhibited together in a seminal show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1963. It was the era of Playboy (then a publishing phenomenon) and of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ analysis of advertising manipulation. Ramos’ ironic commentaries on the use of sex to sell any commodity (and the Californian obsession with the body beautiful) reflected other American artists’ – like Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann and Wayne Thiebaud – reaction to the soft power of popular culture and the mass media. Pop Art rapidly became an influential movement that still resonates today, and Ramos is regarded as a key participant in its evolution.

Initially the Feminist movement of the 1970s, and now current social issues concerned with misogyny and the #MeToo movement, have redefined Ramos’ work as controversial. Even his depictions of famous comic book characters have come under negative scrutiny, when re-viewed through the lens of contemporary sensibilities. Nevertheless, his confrontational use of the female nude, configured with branded products, to generate an ‘instant recognition’ factor, has paved the way for the uninhibited, sexualised subject matter common in 21st century Post-Pop art.

The art of Mel Ramos is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art in New York; and a major exhibition was held at the Albertina in Vienna in 2011. His first solo show in the UK is at the Bermondsey Project Space in 2019.

Ramos was art professor at California State University, East Bay (1966 -97), and emeritus professor (1998-2018).

Galerie Ernst Hilger : From the Heart of Europe
2018-12-07 - 2018-12-22
Andreas Leikauf, Expect nothing, 2015, Acrylic on canvas, 140 x 100 cm/ 55 x 39 1/3 in
Galerie Ernst Hilger
From the Heart of Europe
7 – 22 December 2018

Private View: 12th December, 6 – 9pm

Artists: Daniele Buetti, Maria Bussmann, Gunter Damisch, Oliver Dorfer, Joannis Avramidis, Alfred Hrdlicka, Paulina Korobkiewicz, Andreas Leikauf, Oswald Oberhuber, Hans Staudacher and Miha Strukelj.

Cultural exchange with Vienna-based Galerie Ernst Hilger focuses on the dialogue between Painting, Photography Drawing and Sculpture. The exhibition is comprised of works in various mediums by ten international artists.

Daniele Buetti is one of the principle artists concerned with consumerism and informed society. His installations, videos, light boxes, sculptures, drawings, and performances reflect, comment on, and underline our present times in physically powerful, atmospheric images.

The drawings of the artist Maria Bussmann, who lives in Vienna and New York City, are often based on philosophical writings. In generously conceived series, the artist implements chains of graphical associations, which she understands not so much as illustrations, but rather as open commentaries on philosophical thinking in general.

Gunter Damisch is an influential proponent of the Neue Wilde style is one of Austria’s most significant contemporary artists. His art features strong colouring and is highly abstract, with sweeping brushstrokes and a furious and intense painting style on the mainly large-format works.

A picture says more than a thousand words. In the case of Oliver Dorfer’s work, this saying is more than appropriate. Dorfer’s pictures should speak for themselves – by means of their own picture language, a syntax established out of signs from the world of films, comics, graphic designs and other pop culture influences that serve as the raw material for his work.

Joannis Avramidisʼ work always circled round the human figure. In his search for a compression of the figurative form, simultaneously with abstraction of the form, Avramidis always oriented himself in the Greek archaic and classical sculpture.

Alfred Hrdlicka was an important Austrian sculptor, draughtsman, painter, and writer. He is considered a political artist, many of his works being memorials warning against war and fascism.

Paulina Korobkiewicz is a Polish visual artist, photographer and self-publisher. Her practice explores how the political transition influenced contemporary landscape in Poland and neighbouring post-communist states. Her photographs draw inspiration from sculpture and architecture, and translate to a graphic conceptual style.

Best described as “reflexive art gone rock and roll,” Andreas Leikauf’s masterful style and imagery incites multi-dimensional reverberations, as he likes to amp up his scenes to a dark and fervent crescendo.

Oswald Oberhuber is an Austrian painter, sculptor and illustrator whose works cover a broad artistic spectrum: pieces using or built from plastic, paintings, collages, assemblies and sculptures.

Hans Staudacher is a multiple award-winning, Austrian painter whose work is attributed to the genres of Tachism and Action Painting. He is the founder of Art Informel in Austria.

Slovenian artist Miha Strukelj is drawn to the ambiguous nature and the confines of space (both in a compositional and geographical sense). He focuses on urban landscapes and through his paintings and drawings he creates a new sense of place, combining real and fictitious elements or abstracting real topologies.

Christina Reihill: Glad I Did It
2018-11-14 - 2018-12-01
Glad I Did It
Christina Reihill
14 November – 1 December

Night club manageress Ruth Ellis (1926 – 1955) poses for one Captain Ritchie, 1954. The setting is probably the flat above her club on the Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, London. In 1955, Ellis was convicted of the murder of her lover, David Blakely, and hanged at Holloway Prison, becoming the last woman to receive the death penalty in Britain. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

This November, installation artist Christina Reihill will recreate the prison cell of Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be executed by the state, after she shot her abusive lover, 25-year-old racing driver David Blakely in 1955. Glad I Did It will be an artist’s interpretation of Ruth Ellis’ cell, imagined moments after her hanging, informed by a close reading of the psychiatric notes, prison files and diaries. A video piece on the lower level of the gallery will feature an exclusive interview with the artist presented by Madeleine Keane, Literary Editor of the Irish Sunday Independent.

Ruth Ellis’ execution on 13th July 1955 was a turning point in the death penalty debate in the UK. Ellis unapologetically declared her intent was to kill her lover, who she shot five times at point-blank range. In court she infamously stated:

“It’s very obvious that when I shot David Blakely I intended to kill him”

Many sympathised with the abuse she suffered at the hands of Blakely, who famously caused her to miscarry following an alcohol-fuelled row about another woman.

Glad I Did It asks visitors to step into Ellis’ mind at this crucial moment in history and to consider how easily they could have been in her shoes. The installation examines the thwarted desires and impulsive behaviours that led to Ellis’ execution, and explores how we all can be victims to our own addictions.

Recalling the darkness of her own addiction to drugs and alcohol, artist Christina Reihill prompts visitors to questions how ambition, desire, loss and grief impacts our lives and asks the question ‘how dissimilar are we all from Ruth Ellis really?’
The prison files illustrate Ellis’ relationships with her family, psychiatrist, lawyer and even the prison warden, and reveal the woman behind the media speculation, who has been on trial by the British public ever since.

Ellis famously declared her reason for wanting to die: “I want to join him” she repeated despite efforts that could have saved her from the hangman’s noose. If she had presented herself as a victim this could have spared her execution. But she didn’t. The artist believes Ellis wanted to die and appreciated her time in jail.

In her prison cell, Ellis, a Jewish nightclub hostess dismissed as a “tart”, could, for the first time in her life, experience the respect and dignity she needed. Here she was addressed as “Mrs. Ellis” and listened to, and the relationship plagued by violence and alcoholism that her lover had tried to hide, was front page news.

The artist Christina Reihill claims that in all that has been written, staged, documented and filmed, Glad I Did It reveals facts about Ruth Ellis, never identified before.

About the trial of Ruth Ellis
Ellis, a 29- year old Jewish girl from North Wales was working as a nightclub hostess in Knightsbridge when she met wealthy racing car driver David Blakely. Their affair was passionate but violent, marked by alcoholism, abortions and infidelity. On Easter Sunday at 9pm, April 10th 1955, Ellis shot Blakely five times at close range, outside the Magdala Tavern in Hampstead and put the gun to her head for the last bullet, which failed to discharge. She was hanged for his murder three months later. “It’s obvious I intended to kill him” she famously declared in court. Her trial was highly publicised and caused widespread controversy, as details of the violence she endured throughout her life emerged. Following pressure from the British media including the Evening Standard and the Daily Mirror, the case against the death penalty was strengthened, and in 1965 it was abolished in Great Britain.

About Christina Reihill

Born and educated in Dublin, Christina studied psychology at Harvard, and later went on to read multi-media and communications at the London Institute, before starting a 12-year career in journalism working for Vogue, The Evening Standard, Irish Times and Sunday Independent.
In the early 90’s she returned to Ireland for drug and alcohol treatment at The Rutland Centre. For the next decade she trained and practiced as apsychotherapist. During this time she wrote her debut book SoulBurgers, and later created a performance based on the book, and has since produced a number of award-winning installations. In 2012 she won the Allianz Tile Style Artist of the Year Award. Christina created an Urban Art work in 2016, called WallWalks and last year staged Wit’s End, a major installation at Smock Alley Theatre on Dorothy Parker’s last days before her death, opened by Patrick Murphy, Director of the Royal Hibernian Academy.

Nick Malone: The Disappearance of Makepeace - A Tale of Two Lives
2018-11-06 - 2018-11-10
The Disappearance of Makepeace
A Tale of Two Lives
NICK MALONE
6-10 November 2018

The exhibition follows on from an earlier solo at BPS, which acted as a springboard in developing this particular way of working. It interacts with the text of a graphic novel concerning the mysterious disappearance of its eponymous hero James Makepeace that sets the exhibition within a wider context of narrative, adventure and dream. The exhibition will combine installation, images, animation, and soundscape to enable words and images to interact and operate together in new ways.

A catalogue is available with an essay by Sacha Craddock

Accompanying podcasts will be available from www.nickmalone.com

Podcasts of the novel that underpins the exhibition are available at: http://nickmalone.libsyn.com

Drawn to London
2018-10-16 - 2018-11-03
Drawn to London
Within the shadow of the Tower

16 October – 3 November
Curated by: Philippa Beale

Artists: Alexandra Blum, Philippa Beale, John Blandy, Stella Carr, Paul Cosquieri, Paul Finn, Sue Hackney, Susannah Hubert, Martin Harrison-Priestman, Maryellen Lamb, Mark Long, Natasha Lien, Fiona McIntyre, Seema Manchanda, Emma Perring, Pat Phippard PRofit, Karen Summers, Jacqueline Wedlake-Hatton, Marion Wilcocks, Alice White, Les Williams, Sandra Wroe

“Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
Samuel Johnson, ‘The Life of Samuel Johnson Vol 3’, James Boswell, 1851

The exhibition brings together a variety of artists who have responded to the life and history of London. They follow in a tradition that reaches back to Hogarth’s etchings of Gin Lane and Monet’s impressionist visions of the Thames to Rachel Whiteread’s ghostly House in east London and Gilbert and George’s lurid evocations of Brick Lane. London has long been a conspicuously successful multi-cultural metropolis where people from different cultures have combined to create a dynamic and positive place to live, work and create art.
The show will reflect and celebrate this energy, but will also probe the implications of the city cutting itself off from the wider world in the aftermath of Brexit.
The exhibition will include members from The Society of Graphic Fine Art, The Lloyds Art Group, Gibraltar Fine Arts Society and invited artists whose work reflects different aspects of life in London.
The exhibition includes around 80 or more works of art including paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, film, sound and installation. The themes found in the works range from the women held as prisoners in Bermondsey Abbey to the minutiae of flora and fauna found within the cracks of the city itself. While some artists have collaborated with communities in London, celebrating the practice of drawing; others have engaged with the buildings and building sites, aiming to capture the essence of the city. The iconic Trafalgar Square will be newly observed, while the quotidian more mundane moments that make up parts of the everyday lives of Londoners will be under close scrutiny.
There is guaranteed something of interest for everybody in this new exhibition and works will be for sale.

Alexandra Blum

Paul Finn

Les Williams

Natasha Lien

Emma Perring

Pat Phippard

Alice White

Philippa Beale

Sandra Wroe

Jaqueline Wedlake Hatton

Seema Manchanda

Paul Cosquieri

Susannah Hubert

Philippa Beale

Maryellen Lamb

Karen Summers

Fiona McIntyre

The Discontents
2018-10-02 - 2018-10-13
The Discontents
Matthew Collings, Tommaso Corvi-Mora, Zavier Ellis, Matthew Higgs, Max Presneill
2 – 13 October
Private View Tuesday 2nd October 6 – 9 pm

The Discontents brings together five artworld protagonists who are recognised for their work in the industry including art criticism, journalism, running galleries and museums, educating and curating. Whilst establishing themselves in their respective capacities Matthew Collings, Tommaso Corvi-Mora, Zavier Ellis, Matthew Higgs and Max Presneill have refused to navigate a singular path through the artworld and have been insistent on maintaining a rigorous studio practice, developing successful careers as artists.

Including painting, collage, objects and ceramics, the exhibition will be diverse despite formal and thematic correlations emerging. Matthew Collings presents impasto oil paintings where abstraction vies with figuration. They are narrative paintings that are deeply personal, referencing events and relationships from his early to current life. Tommaso Corvi-Mora’s ceramics reflect his interest in the history and tradition of British Studio Pottery. Investigating the relationship between art object and functionality, there are also political undertones including deliberations on overpopulation and compulsive consumption. Zavier Ellis will present a monumental 2×3 metre painting. Continuing his exploration into the historical, from where he draws an internal, symbolic logic, this recent series is inspired by research into revolutionary flags and events, and specifically in this case the French Revolution. Matthew Higgs will exhibit archetypal work that draws directly on the history of the readymade. Continuously scouring book stores and markets to add to his collection, Higgs appropriates elements of found books and re-contextualises them. Engaging with notions of authorship, originality, typography and linguistics his work is resonant and nuanced. Max Presneill’s large abstract paintings represent a labyrinthine, simultaneous enquiry into presence and mortality; masculine codes and gender; networks of understanding and cognitive associations; and sub-cultural references. They explicitly engage with the history of mark making, and by combining abstraction with collage elements Presneill seeks to undermine the hierarchy of visual signs and materials.

Together then, the artists in this exhibition engage with historicity; the personal political; the act of making; abstract versus figurative; found objects and materials; narrative; the disparate; and the interconnectedness of things.

Matthew Collings (Born 1955; BA (Hons) Fine Art, Byam Shaw Art School, 1974-78; MA Fine Art, Goldsmiths, 1990-1992) has been one of the most relevant art writers since the 1980’s. Initially editing Artscribe Magazine, Collings then worked for the BBC as an art critic, writing and presenting programmes on art. Eventually he began authoring and presenting multi-part TV series, initially for Channel 4 and then the BBC. One of these, This Is Modern Art, received many awards including a Bafta. Collings has also written books on art, including the seminal “Blimey!”, which was described by Artforum as “the most popular contemporary art book ever.”

During his career as an artist, Collings has always made his own work, whilst working in collaboration with Emma Biggs as Biggs & Collings since the 1990’s. During the ‘90s his paintings were in a number of group exhibitions including Candyman II, and Something’s Wrong, curated by Matthew Arnatt and Peter Lewis, and Bob & Roberta Smith, respectively. He also featured in Instructions, 1992 at Gio’ Marconi, Milan, curated by Liam Gillick, and created an artist’s book for Matthew Higgs Imprint 93 series in 1993, which was later exhibited in Life/Live, 1996, curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Laurence Bossé at Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, and Century City, 2001, curated by Ywona Blazwick at Tate Modern.

Tommaso Corvi-Mora (Born 1969) has been running contemporary art galleries in London since 1995. His first gallery was Robert Prime, which he ran with Gregorio Magnani until the end of 1999. The gallery represented, among others, Kai Althoff, Angela Bulloch, General Idea, Isa Genzken, Liam Gillick and Lothar Hempel. In 2000 he set up Corvi-Mora and the gallery has been in Kennington, South London since 2004. The gallery’s roster includes Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Roger Hiorns, Imran Qureshi and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye among many others.

Corvi-Mora started attending ceramics evening classes at Morley College in 2009 and since 2012 has been exhibiting his work regularly in galleries, both in the UK and abroad. In 2013 he started integrating his passion for ceramics within the gallery’s programme and over the years has held solo exhibitions of new work by Adam Buick, Simon Carroll, Julian Stair and Sophie Wiltshire and has exhibited works by Colin Pearson, Janet Leach, James & Tilla Waters, Walter Keeler and many other studio potters. One of his main concerns has been that of showing contemporary art and ceramics together, creating unexpected formal and conceptual links between disparate works.

Zavier Ellis (Born 1973; BA (Hons) History of Modern Art, Manchester University, 1993-1996; MA Fine Art, City & Guilds of London Art School, 2003-2005) is the Founder and Director of CHARLIE SMITH LONDON, a contemporary art gallery established in 2009 in Shoreditch that specialises in showing and representing emerging to mid-career artists with a curatorial perspective. He was co-founder and co-curator of the annual museum scale show THE FUTURE CAN WAIT (2007-2017), which between 2011 and 2014 was organised in partnership with Channel 4 & Saatchi’s New Sensations. THE FUTURE CAN WAIT was the largest independent exhibition of its kind globally. Ellis also curates an annual exhibition called Young Gods, which is his personal selection of London graduates and postgraduates. He has curated exhibitions internationally including in Berlin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Klaipėda, London, Los Angeles, Naples and Rome; and continues to place work in notable collections globally. Recognised as an adroit talent spotter, Ellis has identified and exhibited a number of important young artists directly from art college who have gone on to considerable success with galleries, museums and collectors.

As an artist Ellis has exhibited at Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Saatchi Gallery, London; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre, Klaipėda; Royal West Academy, Bristol; Dean Clough, Halifax; Paul Stolper, London; Galerie Heike Strelow, Frankfurt; Raid Projects, Los Angeles; and ENIA Gallery, Pireas. His work is featured in prominent private collections including the seminal Sammlung Annette und Peter Nobel, Zurich.
In 2014 Ellis published the iArtBook 100 London Artists with renowned art critic and historian Edward Lucie-Smith.

Matthew Higgs (Born 1964; BA (Hons) Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic, 1984-1987) is a prolific artist, curator, writer and publisher. In 1993, he founded his own press, Imprint 93, publishing a series of artist’s editions and multiples including Billy Childish, Martin Creed, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Peyton, Peter Doig and Jeremy Deller. Continuously promoting contemporary art that was an alternative to the YBA phenomenon, Higgs curated the renowned touring exhibition British Art Show 5 as well as Protest and Survive at Whitechapel Art Gallery, both in 2000. In 2001 he was appointed as a curator at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of Arts and Crafts. In 2006 Higgs was one of the Turner Prize judges and in 2007 he selected EASTinternational with Marc Camille Chaimowicz. He is currently director of White Columns in New York.

Since the 1990’s, Higgs has had numerous solo exhibitions including London, Los Angeles, New York and Vancouver, and participated in group exhibitions globally including The Whitney Museum of American Art, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, South London Art Gallery, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Andrea Rosen Gallery, Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, Cubitt Gallery, Frith Street Gallery, City Racing, Paul Stolper and Anton Kern Gallery. His work is featured in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art and Tate.

Max Presneill (MFA, California State University, 2001) is Director and Head Curator of the Torrance Art Museum, California, with particular curatorial interests in artist-led projects, emerging art, new models for curatorial methodologies and an international scope for partnerships, exchanges and building artistic communities. He is also Founder of Durden and Ray (2009 – current), an artists collaborative group and gallery in Los Angeles, as well as Founder and Curatorial Director of ARTRA Curatorial, an independent, voluntary, curatorial projects management team which organizes international exhibition exchanges. Previously, Presneill was the Founder and Director of the alternative space, Raid Projects, an influential gallery which had an international Artist-In-Residency program (1998-2008).

Presneill’s own work has been exhibited globally including Amsterdam, Berlin, Guangzhou, Istanbul, London, New York, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo and Vienna. Solo exhibitions include TW Fine Art (Brisbane), Garboushian Gallery (Beverly Hills), New Bedford Art Museum (New Bedford), Freight & Volume (New York City), Nicodim Gallery (Los Angeles), and group exhibitions include Museum Villa Seiz (Germany), Lancaster Museum of Art & History, the Yokohama Triennial and 13th Istanbul Biennial. His work has also been shown at art fairs including The Armory Show (New York), The Stray Show (Chicago), The Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Hong Kong Art Fair, the Los Angeles Art Show, Supermarket Art Fair (Stockholm) and Miami Projects.

Maryam Eisler: Adventures & Obsession
2018-09-18 - 2018-09-29
Adventure & Obsession
Maryam Eisler
18 – 30 SEPTEMBER
Private View Thursday 20th September 6 – 9 pm

Photographer Maryam Eisler presents images from two series #She and Havana: Beauty and Dereliction over the two floors of the gallery.

Gallery 1 – Ground Floor
#She
[row]
[/row]Across cultures, the Sublime Feminine or in the context of this exhibition SHE, has been associated with a spiritual force best ennobled through creative expression — beautiful, soulful, sensual and intellectual; a force which at its crux carries the greatest mystery of all, that of human creation. From a personal perspective, the Sublime Feminine has fascinated Eisler, who has sought out this interest photographically in different places and environmental spaces, a personal journey of sorts during which she has tried to trace and visually revitalize this energy, embodied in the female form, as set against the grandeur of nature.

For her first public series back in 2015, Eisler followed in the footsteps of the great painter Georgia O’Keeffe, experiencing first-hand a small part of her journey among the truly grand barren landscapes of New Mexico. The experience, haunting and vital, set against unimaginably sharp blue skies and rock-strewn valleys in shades of rust made her whisper O’Keeffe’s own words to the wind: “Such a beautiful untouched lonely feeling place, such a new part of what I call the Faraway.” Lost in time, trying to tie purpose to creative endeavor, she began a visual dialectic with the sources of her budding inspiration, whilst grasping to understand the outlines of her own poetic adventure.
Thus was born the search for Eve, Mother Earth’s first muse. “I saw her standing atop rocky inclines, as sensual and powerful as the monumental nature surrounding her.” In 2016, Eisler happened upon the Carrières de Lumières (Quarries of Light), an ‘Underworld’ of sorts, tucked away in the heart of Provence — a place imbued with texture and light, a perfect setting to seek out mythic antecedents, such as the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, a tale re-visited by Jean Cocteau, in that same mythic location, fifty or so years before. It is here that Eisler decided to marry reality to myth, photographically exploring universal themes common to all cultures alike: love and lust, passion, temptation and unconquered passions.
In 2017, the yellow brick road led her to the Catskills, a place of some mystery, beautiful and vibrant, alive with its own spiritual and folkloric rhythm, hewn out of the land. It is in these surroundings that Eisler was transported by childhood memories and magical fairytales of enchanted water sirens and forest nymphs, all mesmerizing creatures, reunited in an unlikely and imaginary melting pot. It is fair to say that Eisler’s oeuvre has been driven by fantasy and it is in such settings of immeasurable natural grandeur as in New Mexico, Provence and the Catskills, that universal dreams have turned into reality.

Gallery 2 – First Floor
Havana: Beauty and Dereliction
[row] [/row]
It is sometimes impossible to distinguish between beauty and dereliction when it comes to history, art and architecture.
In Havana, this distinction becomes even more blurred. The former Spanish colonial capital city is a UNESCO world heritage site. Preserved in time, pickled since the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Nevertheless, beauty there is aplenty, as I found on my first visit in May 2017.
It was as if I’d entered a time-warp. The city’s faded facades form some of the most wonderful Spanish colonial style architecture I’ve come across in Latin America. Photogenic people, the Cubans; they have an air of freedom born of necessity. Life’s hard, very hard. So, make the best of it! Seems to be their philosophy.
In photography, this translates into whatever you want to make out of it. Showing the face of bankrupt ideologies, the crumbling socialist visage of resistance. And the eternal spirit of goodwill that comes from shared hardships and kind fellowship amongst humans.
Defiance was the word that struck me early on in my hunt for scenes to shoot. Scenarios to craft, fashioned out of the very little that existed. I could portray an elderly grand dame, say; Mrs Alonso whose salons in her grand mansion were the talk of town in their heyday. Now, an old pensioner barely receiving $10 a month, she is reduced to living in a house with crumbling ceilings, amongst some colourful mementoes imprinted in her memory, a vintage Silvertone record player, and the odd ornaments that time’s ravages have left behind. Her class shows through, despite the not-so gentile poverty and through her choice of the French language to communicate with me. I could perhaps conjure Marcel Proust? But also a bit of magic surrealism: Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabelle Allende?

Can decay become diversity, I wonder? Asking the walls to reveal their secrets. If only they could talk. Can I wind the clock backwards and try to imagine the airs and graces of ladies who lunched in the extravagance of what used to be one of Latin America’s richest, and most splendid of cities.Havana was a jewel, and it needed my photographer’s diamond polished lens. Dust off the façade and add a dash of colourful pizzaz. A piece of furniture here. A cracked vase displayed over there. The dress the lady wore on her birthday sixty years ago. Let the old contrast with even older relics gathering dust, whether humans or objects. Havana is a city of pathos more than modern contradictions. The irony is that the city transforms decrepitude, turning it into something inviting. For the visitor, that is. We’re blessed in our daily lives in European plenitude. Let the unfeeling camera spare a thought for lost graces that are still carried through the airs of haunted corridors of the city where two million souls reside.
This city that has become an open-air museum filled with nostalgia. For revolutionaries, there’s Che and Fidel, their faces plastering every prominent public space. Demi-gods who have visited ruin on this rich land. Yet love and adorations still follow in their tracks, their words gospel to hungry ears.
And there’s creativity. Pockets of talent bubbling to the surface where it can, seeking fresh, unpolluted political airs. Let’s hope the bubbles don’t pop in the continuing climate of political decay. And there’s music, everywhere you turn a corner. Radio, guitar, drums, anything that conjures a bit of mood change. Salsa, Mambo, Rumba … but also ballet. Yes, ballet. And very good they are, these kids who cannot afford ballet shoes and yet practice on the streets and the quiet of tucked away spaces in La Habana Vieja.
The city’s contradictions extend into the minds of its people. The younger generation dream of Miami and New York, whilst the old cling on to the faded revolutionary rhetoric of the past. Like older generations everywhere, change is feared.
If you want drama and music, dance and the poetry of motion with young beautiful people walking as if in a ballad of the fifties, go for a walk on the Malecon in the evenings. Watch imaginary Al Capones and Che Guevaras ride past in a 1955 Plymouth Belvedere. A massive Cohiba showing what history can magic-up in the itinerant photographer’s mind!

About Maryam Eisler
Maryam Eisler has shown her work at Photo London, Unseen Amsterdam, the Dallas Art Fair and at Harper’s Books in East Hampton. Eisler’s work is held by the Davis Museum, Wellesley College.
Eisler is a board member of the Columbia University Global Centers and is also a member of the Tate International Council and co-chairs Tate’s MENAAC acquisitions committee. As a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, she sits on the advisory board of Photo London and is a nominator for the Prix Pictet photography prize.
She is a contributing editor to LUX magazine, a Condé Nast publication, and has contributed both photographically and editorially to Harpers Bazaar Art, Vanity Fair ‘on Art’ UK as well as Vogue Arabia. Eisler is represented by Tristan Hoare in London and Harper’s Books in New York.
She has had executive editorial roles on several publications including Sanctuary: Britain’s Artists and their Studios; Art Studio America: Contemporary Artist Spaces and London Burning: Portraits from a Creative City. Her 2017 book Voices: East London (for which she supplied both text and photographs) was co-published by Thames and Hudson and TransGlobe Publishing.

Philip Volkers: Dust to Dawn - A Photographic Adventure at Burning Man
2018-09-11 - 2018-09-15
Dust to Dawn
A photographic Adventure at Burning Man
Philip Volkers
11 – 15 September 2018
Renegade photographer Philip Volkers’ book “Dust to Dawn” which is to be published by Kehrer Verlag, at the end of August, documents his visual adventures at Nevada’s notorious Burning Man Festival over a 10-year period. Every year 75,000 people descend on an alkaline lake bed in Nevada for The Burning Man Festival, a highly influential festival and heaven for enquiring minds. Few people are fortunate enough to experience a decade of Burning Man, one of the most extraordinary human gatherings in the world, but as official photographer, Philip Volkers has captured the many raw and spiritual moments from the festival over the past ten years. The culminated works from his unique vantage point have led to the creation of a new art book ‘Dust to Dawn’ published by Kehrer Verlag and an exhibition of large-scale works to be held at the Bermondsey Project Space before touring to the Lucy Bell Gallery in St Leonards-on-Sea. Volkers’ passion is the documentation of spiritual, hedonistic gatherings, and exploring the meaning behind them.

“I have always had a fascination with human gatherings and what first attracted me to Burning Man was that it is one of the only places on Earth that transgresses commodification; a place where people from across the globe are stripped of social crutches such as mobile phones and gather to push themselves to the limits of survival and expression. Burning Man is a completely unique opportunity to see amazing art combined with cutting edge technology. Dust to Dawn celebrates iconic Burning Man artists and designers such as Alex Wreckage and his ‘Lost Tea Party’ and Marco Cochrane. Having been part of Burning man for 10 years, I have seen it evolve into the global phenomenon that it is today but at its core the fundamentals of what Burning Man stands for remain the same, and ‘Dust to Dawn’ and the exhibition is my way of celebrating Burning Man and revealing a little of the magic that lies under its surface.”

The book “Dust to Dawn”, fully sanctioned by Burning Man, and exhibition showcases Philip Volkers’ work as a photographer, an anthropological enthusiast and documenter of a festival that continues to captivate the world.
An exhibition timed to coincide with the launch of the Publication of Philip Volkers book “Dust to Dawn” published by Kehrer Verlag.

Debbie Castro -- I - CUT
2018-09-11 - 2018-09-15
I-CUT
Debbie Castro
11 – 15 September
Private View Thursday 13th September 6 – 9 pm

I have an overwhelming need to document key changes and turning points in my life and to capture those moments and memories in image, thus when my husband and I were planning pregnancy I needed a specific document of my body before all the changes that were about to happen to it – my way to be in control and to consciously choose change, readying myself to move from the now that I recognise to whatever is next. My husband took the polaroid. I hated it, I hated myself in it, right then I hated him a bit for not knowing what I needed, for not taking the moment seriously.I picked up the scissors and I cut, I cut out all the bits that annoyed me and I was cutting his lack of care and my frustration and fear of the unknown. I put the pieces in a blue plastic sandwich back and zipped it shut forever only to re-find them later and really love them and the disjointedness of the image they created.

Stem from an image of the photographer and her emotional reaction to it, the body of work I-CUT is about turning the subject and photographer relationship on its head in producing a piece, a representation that cannot and will not exist without the photographer but the final image and its meaning are out of her control.
It is a collaboration as the person portrayed self-directs their pose and then edits their own image – cutting the polaroid, but it is also a performance that produces a unique object as Castro is always there documenting their reaction, but there is only one single unreproducible polaroid taken.

Claudia De Grandi: Waves and Horizons
2018-09-04 - 2018-09-08
Waves and Horizons
Claudia de Grandi
4 – 8 SEPTEMBER
Curated by Alan Rankle
Private View Wednesday 5th September 6 – 9 pm

Claudia De Grandi brings an impressive suite of new works to Bermondsey Project Space – a venue recognized for exhibitions of challenging cutting-edge contemporary art.
As the first artist to be invited to present works on all three floors of the gallery, De Grandi’s installation Waves & Horizons comprises Paintings, Photographs, Prints and Videos.
There is a tangible and literal depth of feeling in Claudia De Grandi’s recent works. These new paintings from the two series Waves and Horizons are based on her observations and photographs of the Pacific Ocean and closer to home the steel grey waters of the English Channel near to her Hastings studio.
They make sublime and alluringly poetic images, referencing as they do the seascapes of Turner and Whistler while at the same time expanding and revisiting the historical Modernist genre of Colour Field Abstraction. The paintings in the series work equally well as contemporary depictions of light and movement within water, yet are also pervasively drawing the viewer into the abstract.
In a noticeably filmic way, some of the paintings evoke the darkly threatening waters of a psychological thriller, you can sense a disturbing, metronomic soundtrack hinting at deep waters and danger below the shimmering surface.
These themes actively precipitate De Grandi’s vision for the entire evolving work as a total immersive installation of painting and music which will be presented next year at Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan.
This upcoming exhibition, curated by Alan Rankle, is her debut solo showing in London and gives an intimate insight into the development of her project.

A Brazilian born artist who lives and works in East Sussex, De Grandi makes her art with well defined and far-reaching objectives:

When I am painting the action of creating connects me to a greater moment of happening – it is the What and the only thing happening at that moment
Reality is a mystery. When trying to paint it you then realize it’s impossible. It can only be painted as it is immediately seen, in front of you, and then modified by the feeling that it transmits.

De Grandi’s works are increasingly attracting art world and press attention via a series of international exhibitions and performance/installations, with her paintings finding eager collectors in New York, Milan, Tokyo and London.

A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Tom Burke CBE, Alan Rankle and John Stezaker will accompany the exhibition.

Project Space Bermondsey
183 -185 Bermondsey St.
London SE1 3UW
(adjacent to White Cube Bermondsey)

In Association with:

Exhibition Sponsors:

Sophie Morrish – Island Time: North Uist Works
2018-07-31 - 2018-09-01
Island Time: North Uist Works
Sophie Morrish
31 JULY – 1 SEPTEMBER
Curated by Mel Gooding
For ten years artist Sophie Morrish has lived and worked on the remote Outer Hebridean island of North Uist. During that period her artistic practice has been continuous with her life: walking, finding, photographing, identifying and collecting the natural objects cast by the Atlantic upon the island’s shore, and registering the changing skies and clouds, the rhythm of the tides, the littoral light and weathers.
This long-term artistic process places Morrish squarely in the line of those contemporary artists who work within the ambit of landscape and the natural world: Herman de Vries, Richard Long, Chris Drury, and Giuseppe Penone.
This spectacular exhibition constitutes nothing less than a thrilling phenomenology of deep time and natural processes in a unique place, insular and marine. In its presentations – drawings, photographs, arrays and arrangements — the immediacy of real time, its stark lives, deaths and transmutations, is inserted within the vastness of cosmic and oceanic time, measured by the phases of the moon, the circling sun, and the endless rocking of the sea upon the shores of the world.
Mel Gooding is the author of Song of the Earth: European Artists and the Landscape (Thames and Hudson 2002) and Herman de Vries: Chance and Change (Thames and Hudson 2006)
Catalogue Available

Illustrated: Detail of Constellation (After Fire), burnt animal bones on board, 2018

MEDIUM:OIL (part 3) Abstract Realities
2018-07-10 - 2018-07-28
ABSTRACT REALITIES
Stephen Newton
10 – 28 July

Newton is not a realist, but a new kind of surrealist. Psychoanalytic theory has moved away from drive theory towards relational theory, and so has the most subtle and sophisticated surreal art, Newton’s paintings being exemplary. All the more so because they incorporate drive, as their excited painterliness indicates, into their realism. That is, their rendering of objects – the desolate and isolated objects – in his empty space, sometimes cosmically and threateningly empty. The stark geometry of the space – the confrontal planarity of the rooms – makes its emptiness more intimidating.

Newton’s work offers ‘radically Distilled imagery, simple – even childlike iconographies represent a far more primeval Creative force that stir (often uncontrollable) sensations of recognition in those that take the time to consider and reflect on them.

ABSTRACT REALITIES is supported by State Magazine
http://www.state-media.com

—–
Tuesday to Saturday
11 am – 6 pm
183-185 Bermondsey Street, SE1 3UW, London

MEDIUMOIL
A summer season dedicated to the art of painting
illustrated: Stephen Newton, Communion, 2018

MEDIUM:OIL (part 2) The Inner And the Outer
2018-06-26 - 2018-07-07
The Inner and the Outer
26 – 7 July

Opening event: Tuesday 26th June, from 6 to 9 pm
Finissage: Meet the Artist, Saturday 7th July, 12-3 pm

Co-curators: Trevor Burgess and Marguerite Horner
Artist: Trevor Burgess, Caroline Burraway, Nelson Diplexcito, Oli Epp, Marguerite Horner, John Kiki, Lee Maelzer, Mona Osman

“For the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without”. C.G. Jung

The process of painting and drawing is a subjective encounter between inner and outer worlds. Hence the paradox of painting that a decorative surface is able to act as mode of communication. Every mark on the surface faces outwards to the world and inwards to the artist’s mind.
Is there a point where something seen transforms into and coincides with something imagined? Where inner and outer worlds fuse?
Artists Marguerite Horner and Trevor Burgess have brought together eight contemporary artists whose work can make us aware of this paradox, that the quality of intense concentration that the artist directs outwards onto the visual becomes, in the process of painting, a mode of access to an inner life.

Image © Marguerite Horner, “Verge”, 2013, oil on linen, 50 x 50 cm
Marguerite Horner writes of “the external world as a trigger or metaphor for experiences.” The paintings may depict suburban or urban houses, cars, freeways yet these are a gateway to subjective experiences that may evoke transience, intimacy, loss and hope.

Image © Nelson Diplexcito “Robe”. 2017, oil on paper, 51 x 68.5cm
For Nelson Diplexcito there is a starting point in the direct encounter with images of various kinds, whose resonance is found in the development of the work through a process of what might called a search for painterly analogy. It is only through persistence in a process of detours and revisions that the work, as he says, “begins to look back at you”.

Image © Lee Maelzer “Yellow stairs”
Lee Maelzer has made her own the overlooked, overgrown, neglected, decaying crannies of our 21st-century environment – whether experienced and photographed by her directly or constructed through the dystopian mixed media collages she makes as source images. It is through the finely judged tonal and chromatic intensity of the realization in paint that these places transform into a state of mind that you enter and inhabit.

Image © Trevor Burgess “Two boys, Granary Square”. 2015, oil on board, 100 x 100cm
For Trevor Burgess, the paintings start with his visual experience of everyday public spaces captured in snapshot photos. He says it is important that the paintings have a starting point in something he has seen and experienced, but there is always a gap between the appearance and the experience, which painting makes explicit.

Image © Caroline Burraway’s “Untitled 18” charcoal, 120 x 120 cm
Caroline Burraway’s relationship to her photographic source material is more direct. Her process of charcoal drawing intensifies the impact of the image – portraits that seek to restore power to people who have suffered, often in a historical and political context. In this case, the artist directs the creative process outwards inviting empathy with the subject.

Image © Mona Osman “Et puis Je fume” 2017, mixed media, 150 x 120cm
But painters can equally come at painting from within their imaginations. Mona Osman starts with the populous contents of her inner world which teem over the canvas. Her personal experiences take a visible form that give them a narrative and pictorial logic.

Image © John Kiki “The sculptor”, 2018, acrylic and collage on canvas, 68 x 63cm
John Kiki’s process of making figure paintings is an endless tirelessly inventive play with the creative potential of his medium, where inner and outer worlds vividly replenish each other.

Image © Oli Epp “You spin me right round”, 2018, oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 150 x 180cm.
Oli Epp‘s paintings are informed by everyday experiences and observations. They are autobiographical; sometimes confessional, sometimes irreverent and frequently handled with a humorous sense of pathos. His work focuses on situations that involve himself, or others that he has witnessed, in public and private moments that pass by as unremarkable, at a glance. But documenting these unreported tragedies in paint is, for him, an act of discovery.

THE INNER AND THE OUTER exhibition is part of
MEDIUMOIL
A summer season dedicated to the art of painting

Illustrated: Oli Epp You spin me right round, 2018

RICOCHET: David Bowie 1983 by Denis O’Regan
2018-06-19 - 2018-06-23 | Gallery 1 + 2 + 3, 183 - 185 Bermondsey Street, London, SE1 3UW, United Kingdom
Image: Ricochet: David Bowie 1983, book content
Ricochet: David Bowie 1983 by Denis O’Regan

19th-23rd June

The exhibition features the limited edition book and an exhibition of photographs from the Serious Moonlight tour.

Published by Moonlight Books on 20th June 2018, the thirty-fifth anniversary of David’s Serious Moonlight tour concert in Berlin, Ricochet : David Bowie 1983 is a unique limited edition piece of art charting David Bowie’s 1983 world tour, a luxurious boxed set featuring offstage photographs, lyrics, exclusive interviews, memorabilia, vinyl & fine art prints.

The book is an official David Bowie product, in collaboration with David’s official tour photographer Denis O’Regan, It is the most ambitious Bowie publishing project ever, focusing entirely on just one year in David’s life when he toured the world for the first time in five years.
Limited edition of 2000; signed and numbered by Denis O’Regan, supplied with an authenticated certificate featuring the official David Bowie estate stamp designed by Jonathan Barnbrook. Clothbound hardcover book with four supplementary volumes, limited edition vinyl and three limited edition prints housed in an acrylic slipcase. With nearly 1000 images, each personally approved by Bowie, many of which have never before been published, the main book in the Ricochet limited edition provides an intimate portrait of one of music’s biggest stars. Featuring personal photographs of the musician traveling the world as well as live and backstage shots, it offers unprecedented access into Bowie’s life.

The boxed set contains four supplementary volumes including memorabilia, lyrics, tickets and extra photographs, many of them revealing a more intimate side of Bowie, and showing his personal choices and contact sheets, as well as a limited edition 12 inch red vinyl, featuring the tracks Ricochet and Let’s Dance, re-mixed by Nile Rogers, plus three 20 x 16 inch limited edition prints all signed and numbered by Denis O’Regan.
To help collectors protect their investment, Moonlight Books have partnered with Tagsmart, a London-based British technology company to tag and authenticate the David Bowie Estate stamp and the set of three limited edition prints that accompany each numbered limited edition. Tagsmart pioneered the application of DNA tags to authenticate artworks and is now the go-to provider of tagging and certification services in the fine art market. It was the only such business highlighted in the 2017 Deloitte Art and Finance Report. The company uses physical DNA Tags to identify artworks via an online service. Artists use the service to verify their work and issue Certificates of Authenticity to collectors, who can access artwork data and manage their collections by building an immutable digital provenance history over time.

The exhibition sponsored by Olympus

from 11 am to 6 pm
183-185 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3UW

Image © Denis O’Regan, David Bowie Cracked Actor, 1983.

MEDIUM:OIL (part 1) Two Painters
2018-05-28 - 2018-06-15
Two Painters
Summer season at Bermondsey Project Space
Featuring DAVID ROYLE (UK) and GIANLUCA PISANO (Italy) in May and STEPHEN NEWTON (UK) solo show in July.
As part of the Project Space summer season dedicated to the triumph of oil painting, Pisano’s Tales from Another World and David Royle’s Moving Matisse Furniture will be on display from 28 May until 16 June.

The Exhibition is part of
MEDIUMOIL
A summer season dedicated to the art of painting

Illustrated: David Royle, Le Reve Perturbe | Gianluca Pisano, Antonio

Queer Gaze from Poland - A portrait of Love and Desire
2018-05-22 - 2018-05-26
Image by Kinga Michalska, Guy and Jamaal, Montreal, Qc, 2017

Queer Gaze from Poland
A portrait of Love and Desire
22-26 May 2018
Curator: Grażyna Siedlecka
Co-curators: Gosia Fricze, Katarzyna Roniek
Private view: 23 May, 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Free entry

Fresh From Poland and Bermondsey Project Space invite people of all nationalities and identities to ‘Queer Gaze from Poland. A Portrait of Love and Desire’ group photography exhibition.

The show celebrates the practice of ten emerging and mid-career artists: Pamela Bożek, Mateusz Cyrankowski, Mateusz Grzelak, Agata Kalinowska, Krystian Lipiec, Kinga Michalska, Oiko Petersen, Jerzy Piątek, Natalia Podgórska and Łukasz Rusznica. Unveiling material that has never been exhibited in the United Kingdom before, the show gives a rare opportunity to explore the different ways in which artists raised in Poland process and embrace their own sexuality. The exhibition consists of intimate portraits, snapshots, photographic diaries and art books.
Most of the selected photographs focus on portraying friends and lovers in everyday settings in an almost documentary way, aiming to tell real stories about people and relationships rather than simply creating beautiful images. No political comments are made. Some of the works are kept in a deadpan style, while others carry a strong emotional charge. Works are created in different styles and techniques, but what they share is a deep attachment to direct mature storytelling and maintaining a strong intimate relationship with subjects portrayed in a broad range of moods, but mostly as sexually charged creatures.
The works included in this show could not be displayed in Poland without being a political statement. The curators aim to present them the way there are: as beautiful, captivating works by talented photographers who were given the space to express themselves in an inclusive environment without prejudices.
Social background
Although homosexuality in Poland is legal and protected by general anti-discrimination law, 70% of the population (according to a CBOS opinion poll from 2014), backed by the Catholic Church and the majority of politicians, consider same-sex relationships as unnatural and immoral. Outside of a few bigger cities it is impossible to be openly queer and have a respectable life. Much oppression comes from society: ‘Things are so bad I don’t know where to start’, says Kinga Michalska. ‘Even in big cities, it is very common to see “No way for gay” graffiti all over the walls. Pride Parades in Poland are always accompanied by violent demonstrations by legal neo-Nazi organizations who chant hateful songs wishing death to queer people. They take pictures of people in the parade and try to find them later and beat them up in a dark corner at night’. The other kind of oppression comes from society as a whole: ‘I was born in a big city and it was easy for me to create a bubble where discrimination could not enter. I think it got worse for me as I grew older and the reality of Polish legislation and prejudice hit me. Growing up you can establish your own rules and if you’re lucky enough they won’t be broken, but when I realized that I was a part of a broken society where my love life was someone else’s biggest concern, that’s when I started feeling disadvantaged and lonely’, explains Natalia Podgórska. There is also the third form of oppression: the one that comes from inside, rooted in religious upbringing. Jerzy Piatek told us: ‘My identity was formed in a very fluid and natural way. From the beginning, I understood my sexual needs and didn’t find them strange. When I was a teenager I started to discover the exciting and mysterious world of my desires. Unfortunately, thanks to the Catholic religion, I realized quite quickly that I’m “different” and at this point, my natural way of maturation was brutally interrupted and an internal conflict appeared – conflict and great suffering, which kids should never go through’. ‘I’ve never given much thought to the role of my sexual orientation in the context of the church because I left it long before I was able to describe myself as gay, but I saw boys and guys who tried to find themselves as Catholics, believers, and sometimes as priests’, adds Mateusz Cyrankowski. ‘As an atheist, I prefer to stand aside and not to comment, because everyone has their own way to go. I only know that I do not want to have anything to do with religion’.
Due to the social, political and religious situation, LGBTQ+ artists do not get enough visibility and recognition in their own country. ‘It feels to me that it’s not a good time to show queer projects in Poland. It is difficult to say whether any art gallery really, without fear of losing financing, vandalism or harassment, would decide to put up anything that aroused controversy, because the area of art has already been absorbed by politics’, explains Mateusz Cyrankowski. ‘Problems with funding, finding a space, being able to get all the model releases. All these are just a part of the rocky road that an artist has to go through’, adds Natalia Podgórska. Some of the artists hide their identity and do not bring up queer-related topics in their practices at all; others keep working for a small, private audience or emigrate in search of a family and creative freedom, like Kinga Michalska, who explained her decision to emigrate in these words: ‘Other than a few dingy gay clubs for men only, there was really no queer community that I knew of in Warsaw. When I finally met some lesbians they wouldn’t accept me because I dated people of different genders so I wasn’t lesbian enough. I left Poland because even as a young adult I could not find many people who I related to. Discovering the queer community in Montreal definitely helped, but I am still working though a lot of oppression I internalized growing up in conservative Poland.’

Image by Krystian Lipiec from the “Between Us” series, 2012

More about the artists and exhibited works
Pamela Bożek’s practice employs multidisciplinary approaches. She focuses on the issues of minorities and women’s rights. For Queer Gaze from Poland, she turned the camera inwards and came up with a self-portrait taken during her pregnancy. While in a same-sex relationship she decided to have a baby with her girlfriend. In Poland it is unimaginable to be a lesbian expecting a child.
Mateusz Cyrankowski is mostly interested in expectations of masculinity in the socio-cultural context. Using an instant camera he portrays guys met on the internet, in gay clubs, and sometimes lovers. His selection for the exhibition, as he said, ‘will include a sequence with only one model who I decided to additionally mark with lines like those of butchers’ schemes’.
Mateusz Grzelak’s work is part of a greater project that portrays Vlad, the artist’s Ukrainian boyfriend. He moved to Poland at the age of 17 to study. He started to be bullied by his family when they found out about his sexual orientation. The artist tries to depict the subject’s struggle with forming a new world around himself, between the conservative family where he finds no acceptance, and his own identity and emotional needs.
Agata Kalinowska for many years has been working in a diary-like way, photographing a close circle of friends and the changing relationships between them and with those around her. Accidental analogue shots of intimate or wild moments are mixed with calm, balanced photographs. Her practice brings to mind the mood of works of Corinne Day and Nan Goldin.
In Krystian Lipiec‘s intimate snapshots can be found all kinds of emotions: desire, closeness, anxiety. As he says, ‘it’s a melancholic story about my relations with the people from the pictures, and about the places that have been marked in my memory’. Spiced up with analogue grain and imperfection, the photographs seem to tell the raw but poetic tale of intense bonds and polyamorous relationships.
Kinga Michalska emigrated to Montreal in search of a chosen family. Now she documents the queer community she became part of, calling her way of working “a love letter” to those close to her. ‘I want my pictures to feel empowering for people who I represent, so I give them agency on how they want to be portrayed’, she explains. ‘I photograph LGBT people because I feel a sense of kinship with them, but also these people often had to work really hard to accept themselves no matter what other people think, so they often hold a very fierce, authentic presence that I love to capture’.
Oiko Petersen is another artist who decided to leave Poland and moved to Berlin where he now lives and works. At the beginning of his career he mostly worked with marginalized groups (the queer community, people with Down syndrome). In recent projects, he focuses on deeply personal stories. He often visually refers to a motif of travel, searching for answers to the questions posed by his own infatuations and heartbreaks.
Jerzy Piątek is fascinated with the theme of nature as a wild and independent power that is forced to coexist with human civilization. In the work shown as a part of Queer Gaze from Poland, he combines the motif of flora with the male body, where a man acts as a symbol of homosexuality, perceived by society as something that is uncontrollable and spreads ‘like a weed’. On the other hand, as the artist explains, ‘a body is an affirmation of life, it fits perfectly with the world of plants; they complement each other’.
Natalia Podgorska emigrated to London. She is fascinated with ‘people who look like sculptures and sculptures that look like flesh’. The work presented at the show is a part of an ongoing series that combines archival works with staged portraits of close friends. She approaches her practice through the use of past experiences, and she recreates them in abstract or surreal forms. As most of the exhibited artists, she doesn’t perceive her practice as queer, but she adds that ‘based on who I am and what my experiences are, most definitely some of my work could be interpreted as queer’.
Łukasz Rusznica is a photographer, educator, and curator who runs his own photo gallery in Wroclaw, Poland. He is working slowly on a long-distance project in a way he calls ‘organic’, mixing an almost scientific approach with poetry and raw analogue aesthetics with beauty. Most of his projects have explored the place of the body and human experiences in the context of chemistry, physics, and biology, seeing people as trapped and governed by a complex system of nature. His latest work, part of which will be exhibited in London, is engaged in the process of aging and personal attraction to older men.
Grażyna Siedlecka

Find out more: bit.ly/Queer-Gaze-from-Poland
Sponsor: Blaze Image
Prints and publications will be available for purchase at the location.
For more information please contact: contact@freshfrompoland.com
#queergazefrompoland

The Kingdom
2018-05-15 - 2018-05-19
Images: © Aidan O’Neill
The Kingdom
by Aidan O’Neill
May 15th – 19th

New limited edition book and exhibition of photographs in aid of mothers2mothers

This spring sees the publication of The Kingdom, a new, limited edition book by Irish photographer Aidan O’Neill. To coincide with the book’s publication and Photo London 2018, an exhibition of O’Neill’s photographs will take place at Bermondsey Project Space.

Inspired by the work of charity mothers2mothers, who aim to eradicate paediatric AIDS, O’Neill gave up a successful career as a fashion photographer in London to spend six months living and working in Swaziland, a country where it is currently estimated that one third of the population is living with HIV.
Over the duration of his stay, what had originally begun as a document of the charity’s work grew to become a rounded, insightful and beautiful portrait of a country living with the highest prevalence of this heartbreaking disease, in the world. In the book O’Neill explores the myriad ways that infection at this scale can impact a nation as a whole, creating a window into the everyday lives of the Swazi people dealing with this issue.

100% of profits made from the sale of prints and the book will be donated to mothers2mothers, to support their projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, where their goal is to eliminate the transmission of HIV from mother to child, and create healthy families.
Effective and inexpensive medical interventions are available that can keep mothers and babies healthy. Without these, up to 40% of infants born to HIV-positive mothers will contract the virus. With treatment, that number can be reduced to 1.6%. Through The Kingdom and his recently founded not-for-profit organisation Art Aid, O’Neill hopes to help mothers2mothers fulfill their ambition to see an HIV free generation in the near future.
Prints and book will be available at the exhibition and can be purchased online at www.aidanoneill.com/sales
All funds raised will go directly to mothers2mothers
For further information, images or to interview Aidan O’Neill and / or representatives of mothers2mothers, please contact Bakul Patki b@bakulpatki.com / +44 (0) 7984 462 358
www.artaid.world / www.m2m.org

Xhibit 2018
2018-04-19 - 2018-05-12
Above: Jo Lane, Wimbledon College of Arts, UAL. Graphite, holographic sketch of African hair, challenging Western notions of beauty.

Xhibit – the annual exhibition showcasing the best emerging talent from UAL – returns on 19 April until 12 May.

Run by Arts SU, Xhibit 2018 is open to all students, studying at any level, across all disciplines. With no set brief – artists are free to explore any topic and express it through any medium. The result is a powerful collection of work, featuring 32 artists from across all of UAL’s six world-leading colleges.

Xhibit 2018 judging panel
Frances Morris – Director of Tate Modern, UAL Honorary
Amal Khalaf – Project Curator, Serpentine Galleries, Co-director for Global Art Forum 10, Founding member of art collective GCC
Mike von Joel – Editor in Chief, STATE/f22 Art Director of Bermondsey Project Space
Patrick Laing – Product designer, working across Industrial Product, Spatial, Homeware, Jewellery to VR Game Design
Nadia-Anne Ricketts – Founder and creator of BeatWoven
Leah Kahn – Activities Sabbatical Officer, Arts SU

Xhibit 2018 artists
Annie-Marie Akussah | Carlos Alba | Rita Ataide Novais | Tabitha Beresford-Webb | Johanna Blaha | Anke Buchmann | Thomas Cardew | Rafael Morales Cendejas | Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark | Sophie Colfer | Yuqi Deng | Lara Geary | Penny Hartley | Eva He | Miles Johnson | Jo Lane | Vera Lee | Ciara McNeill | Orelie Pascale | Chris Makin | Rosie McGinn | Catherine Miller | Mayli Mountford | Katarina Rankovic | Anatolii Shabalin | Carlos Sebastia | Gwenllian Spink | Roisin Sullivan | Anna Tamas-Katzer | Kris Tralewski | Klara Vith | Haocheng Wu

Dougie Wallace - The Series
2018-03-28 - 2018-04-14
Above: © Dougie Wallace, from Stags Hens & Bunnies, a Blackpool Story Series

Dougie Wallace
‘The Series’

Stags Hens & Bunnies, a Blackpool Story
Harrodsburg
Road Wallah
Shoreditch Wild Life
Well Heeled

Images from the artist’s acclaimed galleries of street photography
Galleries One, Two & Three
INCLUDING
Book Launch
WELL HEELED
Dougie Wallace will be signing copies of his latest book Well Heeled
THE EXHIBITION RUNS
28 MARCH – 14 APRIL

Project Space Outreach Programme 2018
2018-03-20 - 2018-03-24
My HOUSE My SCHOOL My STREET
Platanos College
20 – 24 March
For the third year, Bermondsey Project Space and OLYMPUS have selected a local school for the Photography Outreach Programme, that invites students to turn their eyes away from their own reflected image of the selfie and rediscover the beauty and poetry of their everyday places: My House – My School – My Street.
On the 21st of March, three students will be awarded a 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize. Winning students will each receive an OLYMPUS camera.
The jury was again overwhelmed with the work produced by students. BPS Gallery Director Paulina Korobkiewicz indeed said:
This contest is designed to recognise and exhibit works of students with great talent and encourage them to later be educated within the contemporary art school system or simply continue creating throughout life. We hope to inspire and empower youth around the Borough of Southwark to express their desire for positive change through visual storytelling.

Environmental Photographer of the Year Award 2018
2018-03-20 - 2018-03-24
CIWEM
EPOTY
ENVIRONMENTAL PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2018
20 – 24 March
Managed by the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Managment (CIWEM) the competition presents a unique and prestigious opportunity to share the aim to nurture a safer sustainable world.
Open to all professional and amateur, national and international photographers of all ages, the CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year is an international showcase for the very best in environmental photography. Established in 2007 the competition plays a vital role in enhancing our understanding of the causes, consequences and innovative solutions to our most pressing global environmental problems, and is one of the fastest growing photographic competitions in the world. The competition encourages entries that are contemporary, creative, resonant, challenging, original and beautiful, but most of all, pictures that will inspire people around the world to start taking care of our environment.
The winning photographs come together to form the most outstanding collection of environmental, social and natural photographs in the world. With images of people and places struggling with the effects of a changing climate and social inequity, technological innovations helping us achieve environmental improvements and the incredible diversity of the natural world, the Environmental Photographer of the Year also celebrates the splendour, drama and variety of life on Earth
Private View 21st March, 6 – 9 pm
An exhibition supported by Olympus UK
Above: Jose Luis Rodriguez, Flight for Life
Jose Luis Rodriguez was awarded the Changing Climates prize for his outstanding ‘Flight for Life’ image, showing a kingfisher caught mid-flight, in the shadow of the severe pollution caused by the numerous factories in the background. He said: “Winning this category is a huge honour as it allows me to showcase my work and send a public message on the importance of protecting the environment.”

Counterfeit
2018-03-06 - 2018-03-17
Counterfeit
Heyse Ip, Amelie Mckee, Ambar Quijano, Florentine Ruault
6 – 17 March
The term “counterfeit” is commonly defined as:
<an exact material imitation, with the intention to deceive or defraud>.
The artists reinterpret the term “counterfeit” as an imitation of both physical and immaterial content. In this case, the term “counterfeit” becomes a metaphor for the difficulty of identifying true from false; falsehoods necessarily having a basis in reality.
COUNTERFEIT features Amelie Mckee and Ambar Quijano’s ‘Replicas of Bio-structures’ and series of photographs. They include pieces from the events: ‘Fossils of Today’ and ‘The North Sea’s Extended Research Program Conference’. By intertwining both factual information and imagination, it becomes difficult to distinguish the true from the false, enabling different entry points into a complex story. Using a range of scientific and journalistic formats, the artworks further address the unclear boundaries between fact and fiction.
The exhibition further showcases Heyse Ip’s work, ‘Model Models’, a series of images re-photographing architectural models, mounted onto standing frames. These images bridge the photographic plane with the physical space it occupies. This creates the idea of the model as both the subject of images and its physical arrangement. A minimal and empty presentation distorts the scale of these spaces. As a whole, the images question notions of representation through physical layering.
Florentine Ruault’s presents a series of digital drawings that remove the cultural and stylistic features that characterize each city. The repetition of a geometric and colorful aesthetic refers to the cities’ homogenization; a process that is currently increasing in many cities’ urban landscapes. The result is a graphic interpretation of the multiple cities, which become inseparable in the way they are depicted.
Catalogue available

Image by Amelie Mckee and Ambar Quijano
