Heather & Ivan Morison
The opposite of all those things
27 September – 8 November 2008
For their exhibition at Grundy Art Gallery, Heather & Ivan Morison have created a body of entirely new work that pushes the boundaries of their practice.
At the centre of the exhibition are two large kite sculptures, entitled 'Beautiful, Wise and Loving' and 'The Opposite of All Those Things'. The artists’ starting point for these works was a visit to Quartzite, Arizona, USA. This small town in the desert holds the largest rockhound swap-meet shows in America. The artists travelled to the desert in search of mineral samples of uncanny natural geometry, with forms that looked like they had been machined to perfection. The rocks they found were used to inform the geometric structure of these sculptures, which the artists produced in collaboration with Kite Related Design, a company specializing in the manufacture of three dimensional fabric structures and kites. Whilst the sculptures retain the essence of the forms of the rocks, they are physically opposite: large, lightweight structures produced from man-made materials, and designed to fly. 'The Opposite of All Those Things', the larger of the two, is a construction of clashing cubic elements, measuring over five metres long and made from a dense black Ripstop fabric. It was flown on Fleetwood beach before the exhibition opened and will be flown again upon the close of the exhibition. In flight it becomes an ominous, heavy-looking black rock, a meteorite held floating in the sky moments before impact; in the gallery it retains its ominous presence, but is static, captured and held floating in space.
Also presented is a timber replica of one of the four parts of 'The Opposite of All Those Things'. Beautifully made from planed ash, this is a secondary sculptural translation of the cubic forms of the kite. Forms that were painstakingly designed to achieve flight have been incarcerated into wood.
A guardian performs a set of tasks during each day. At the centre of these tasks is to maintain a fire in the stove installed in the gallery space, which is used to heat water in a kettle to make tea for any visitor who wishes to accept the guardian’s hospitality. The guardian is also there to invite and encourage visitors to browse the selection of apocalyptic and post apocalyptic novels contained within the most comprehensive catastrophe reference library in the UK. Housed on shelves built into two large purpose built plinths come workbenches; the library contains novels dealing with the effects of man made disasters, and the problems and ways of surviving natural disasters. Upon one plinth sit two large mud towers which function quite directly as a model for post apocalyptical survival, whilst on the other is a roughly slug shaped mud form, which invites elliptical readings and which the guardian sprays with a mist of water every hour and gently strokes whilst whispering ‘I am so sorry’.
In the corner of one room are bundles of Blackpool’s Gazette newspaper from the day the exhibition opened. They act as seats for visitors to rest upon whilst enjoying their tea or reading books from the library. And inside the paper are two announcements within the public notice section of the classifieds, which provides a key to the exhibition: ‘He was beautiful wise and loving’. ‘She was the opposite of all those things’.
The exhibition is funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.
Top of the Bill
Posters and Ephemera from the National Fairground Archive
and
Showtown
100 Great Posters Celebrating Blackpool's Entertainment History
21 June - 26 July 2008
'Admission All Classes' presents two exhibitions of posters and ephemera celebrating the history of popular entertainment.
Top of the Bill from the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield and Showtown from Leisure Parcs’ collections of Blackpool entertainment, celebrate the breadth and diversity of entertainment in Blackpool, the UK, and across the world.
The exhibitions contain material spanning over two centuries with more than two hundred posters on display. They celebrate a time when talking pigs, educated fleas and parachuting cats performed alongside more traditional stars such as Fred Karno’s Company and when Blackpool was the Mecca for international stars of stage and screen.
Top of the Bill also includes tourism posters from Visit Blackpool’s collection and rare and unusual ephemera material from the National Fairground Archive.
The National Fairground Archive was inaugurated in 1994 with the support of the Showmen's Guild of Great Britain and the Fairground Association of Great Britain. It is a unique collection of photographic, printed, manuscript and audiovisual material covering all aspects of the culture of travelling show-people, their organisation as a community, their social history and everyday life; and the artefacts and machinery of fairgrounds.
'Admission All Classes', is a partnership between Blackpool Council and the National Fairground Archive, that began in July 2007 and will run until October 2008. Upon its completion, the project will have realised ten themed show-biz weekends celebrating Blackpool's rich history of music hall, variety and circus, exploring aspects of mass entertainment and popular fun between 1850 and 1950. The project has been made possible by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Utagawa Hiroshige
The Moon Reflected
Later woodblock prints from the British Museum
Curated by Julian Opie with the assistance of Timothy Clark
Exhibition organised by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
8 March – 26 April 2008
This exhibition, curated by renowned British artist Julian Opie, consists of woodblock prints by 19th century Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige. The Moon Reflected is the result of Opie’s longstanding interest in Hiroshige. Opie’s preference for Hiroshige’s later work is significant, as it tends to be broader in style and less narrative, thus accentuating more aesthetic concerns. Both artists focus on landscape and figures, refining visual information to arrive at stylised conclusions, flattened compositions that are abstractions of everyday life.
Born in Tokyo in 1797, Hiroshige studied printmaking and painting, becoming an illustrator of comic poetry and storybooks. By 1830, he was concentrating on making prints of famous Japanese landscapes. This exhibition features works from three series: 'Famous Views of the Sixty-Odd Provinces' (1856), 'One Hundred Famous Views of Edo', (1856-58), and 'Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji' (1858). Their formal quality tends to be accentuated by the artist’s choice of a vertical format, never before used to such an extent in Japanese landscape prints.
Hiroshige’s last series, 'One Hundred Famous Views of Edo' (1856-58), was originally intended to be one hundred images but there are more due to the popular demand. The imagery features fascinating details amidst a range of evocative landscapes. Rivers, hills, bridges and temples are depicted in these breathtaking compositions, each work revealing their different aspects depending on the weather, time of day and season.
Also included in this exhibition are a number of the Hiroshige’s sketchbooks and the famous Snow, Moon and Flowers triptychs. Beautiful and unpretentious, these works epitomise Hiroshige’s vision, extraordinary for their breadth and ambition.
A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition which includes an interview between Julian Opie and Timothy Clark (Japanese Section, the British Museum) and an essay by Henry Smith (Columbia University).
This Blackpool showing of the exhibition is funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Jennifer Douglas
Fantastica
8 March - 26 April 2008
Grundy Art Gallery presents a major exhibition of drawing, sculpture and installation by Gateshead based artist Jennifer Douglas.
Douglas’ practice includes an intuitive, playful process of making, exposing the artist’s wonderful sense of feeling for material and colour. Her materials are selected for their distinctive qualities: brightly coloured wood, rope and acrylic sheets. Pointy, fat, thin, small, tall, bright coloured objects, standing upon pools of latex, or hung or leaning against the wall, producing densely filled, luminous spaces that employ an ambiguous layering of depth and focus.
The immediate sense of playful intuition belies a more rigorous and demanding investigation of ‘matter’ and its conceptual significance. Key to the work is Douglas’ ongoing exploration of colour: colour inherent in and applied to the found object, and in relation to architectural and sculptural space.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the novel ‘The Never Ending Story’, written by Michael Ende. Fantastica is the fictional world in which the novel begins. This reference to a fictional world alludes to the artist’s view of her practice as the realisation of artworks that have evolved from the edges of the familiar to something more magical through the creative decisions of her imagination.
Douglas’ process for making work begins with her drawings, constructed using the technique of papier collé, favoured by Matisse during his late career. Shapes are cut from paper, wood, coloured vinyl and acrylic sheets, and then layered. For Grundy, Douglas will reconstruct a drawing entitled Underland, to ambitious dimensions, produced during the artist’s recent residency at Art Gene, Barrow-in-Furness.
The artist’s drawings provide her with a method to more easily experiment with materials, allowing the unexpected effect of different materials to provoke new directions, and suggest starting points for her sculpture, creating a dialogue between one and the other; a kind of map from which the viewer can negotiate their way around the artist’s imagination.
Jennifer Douglas was born in Amersham, England in 1975 and studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle, before completing an MA in Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums across the UK and abroad including Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Tramway, Glasgow, Hales Gallery, London, Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and Tensta Konstall, Stockholm.
The exhibition is funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.
Open2
artists from Blackpool Fylde and Wyre
19 November 2007 - 5 January 2008
Open is Grundy’s annual exhibition providing an opportunity for local people to exhibit their artwork in the gallery.
The exhibition aims to celebrate the creativity that exists locally, and showcase a diverse range of media.
Over 270 artworks, many for sale, are included in this year's exhibition, including painting, photography and sculpture, from professional and amateur artists.
All artworks entered into the exhibition have been included - none have been rejected - enabling the exhibition to be as diverse and eclectic as possible.
Shigenobu Yoshida
22 September - 3 November 2007
Grundy Art Gallery presents the first UK solo exhibition by Japanese artist Shigenobu Yoshida. Using video, photography and installation, the artist explores the scientific and expressive properties of light.
This Blackpool exhibition will include three of the artist’s films: 'Bordeaux', 'London-Penzance' and 'Passage of Light'. Each was filmed through a prism held over the camera lens, splitting the light into its spectral colours.
'Bordeaux' and 'London-Penzance' record the passing landscape viewed from the window of a speeding train, travelling in and between the named locations. The contours and mass of passing objects and landscape are abstracted by the prism and transformed into rapidly moving bands of colour. In 'Passage of Light' we gaze upon a sunlit pool of water rhythmically pulsating below a bright-white reflection of flickering sunlight.
Each film is a simple expression of the natural qualities of sunlight; mesmerising in its psychedelic, silent beauty.
Yoshida’s installations of coloured sunlight, entitled 'Infinite Light' are achieved through a process of placing coloured vinyl - red, blue, yellow - on the exterior of a window pane. By undertaking this very simple method of colouring light, the artist draws our attention to our fascination with light and our attraction to it. At Grundy, Infinite Light will be installed on the windows and doors of the gallery entrance. As with many of Yoshida's works, sunlight is not only the fundamental element, it is crucial to its success; and it is with a poetic sense of naïve optimism that the artist has chosen to recreate this work in Blackpool during the British autumn and early winter, which can be poignantly translated into a typically British state of mind: all is well when the sun is shining.
The artist invites us to join him in his worship of the sun, and in his contemplative journey in pursuit of its visual and emotional pleasures.
Shigenobu Yoshida has exhibited extensively throughout Japan. His work was first shown in the UK as part of the Hayward Gallery exhibition Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art, in 2001.
The exhibition is funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and supported by The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, and The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.
Matisse: Drawing with scissors
A Hayward Touring exhibition
22 September - 20 October 2007
The French painter, sculptor and designer, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was one of the 20th century’s most influential artists. His vibrant works are celebrated for their extraordinary richness and luminosity of colour. Matisse: Drawing with Scissors, a Hayward Touring exhibition from the Southbank Centre, London, features thirty-five lithographic prints of the famous cut-outs, produced in the last four years of his life, when the artist was confined to his bed. It includes many of his iconic images, such as 'The Snail' and the 'Blue Nudes'.
Matisse continued creating highly original works into his eighties. For his cut-outs he used paper hand-painted with gouache, laid down in abstract or figurative patterns: ‘the paper cut-out allows me to draw in the colour … Instead of drawing the outline and putting the colour inside it…I draw straight into the colour’.
The colours he used were so strong that he was advised by his doctor to wear dark glasses.
The lithographic reproductions in this exhibition are taken from a special double issue of Verve, a review of art and literature, published by Tériade, a major publisher of fine art books in 1958.
Matisse began his working life as a lawyer, before going to Paris to study art in 1890. At first strongly influenced by the Impressionists, he soon created his own style, using brilliant, pure colours, and started making sculptures as well as paintings. In 1905 he and his colleagues were branded the Fauves (wild beasts) because of their unconventional use of colour, and it was during this time that he painted his celebrated Luxe, Calme et Volupté (Luxury, Tranquillity and Delight).
‘There is no gap between my earlier pictures and my cut-outs’, Matisse wrote;
‘I have only reached a form reduced to the essential through greater absoluteness and greater abstraction’.
Rembrandt as printmaker
A Hayward Touring/ British Museum Partnership UK exhibition
30 June - 8 September 2007
The 400th anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt (1606-1669) is the occasion to celebrate the work of one of the greatest artists of all time. His outstanding achievement as a graphic artist is supremely well represented in the collection of the British Museum, whose expert Martin Royalton-Kisch has made the selection of 60 prints for this Hayward Touring exhibition that comes to Blackpool as its final venue in June.
Rembrandt was the first modern etcher, producing more than 300 prints over a period of 40 years. His influence has been incalculable, profoundly affecting subsequent graphic art, encompassing some of the most radical and contemporary forms of expression. The exhibition will show the whole range of his work, including self-portraits, biblical scenes, landscapes and character studies. Some of Rembrandt’s etchings were so sought after in his lifetime that they commanded higher prices than his paintings. The exhibition includes his masterpiece as a printmaker, Christ healing the sick, which was known as the Hundred guilder print, because it changed hands several times for what was then an enormous sum.
Rembrandt is famous for his command of light and darkness, exemplified by the nocturnal scene of The three crosses. This monumental print is generally regarded as one of the high points of his career. Two different versions will be shown, giving fascinating insights into his working methods. The exhibition also includes the evocative landscape, The three trees, in which Rembrandt creates, in layer upon layer of tone, graduations of distance and atmosphere with breathtaking subtlety.
At the other extreme from his highly finished prints, is the rapid sketch from nature, Six’s bridge. The story behind this print is that Rembrandt allegedly produced it after Jan Six, a Dutch landowner, wagered him to complete an etching in the time it took a servant to fetch a pot of mustard from a nearby village.
Rembrandt’s profound understanding of human character is revealed in his portraits and self-portraits. The exhibition includes vivid self-portraits: the artist posing at the age of 24, open-mouthed with wild, curly hair, wearing an expression that he then transposed to the face of a beggar in a study of the same year. In other self-portraits he is wide-eyed with a look of astonishment, or frowning fiercely. In his thirties, he portrays himself proudly in Renaissance costume leaning on a sill in a pose inspired by Titian. A decade later, he portrays himself humbly working at a window with etching needle in hand. These are among the many masterpieces to be seen in this important Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition of one of the world’s greatest artists.
This Blackpool showing of the exhibition is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Annie Whiles
Sideshow
30 June - 8 September 2007
Grundy Art Gallery presents new drawings by British artist Annie Whiles, which explore the artist’s fascination with the juxtaposition between public and private activity, and the relationship between artefact and art.
Her drawings of domestic interiors, which frequently include 60’s and 70’s style furnishings, are simple linear representations. They have a printed quality; bold, black unmannered traces of forms on white paper. Stylistically these drawings have developed from Whiles looking at the cartoon process used in preparation for tapestry and Gustav Stickley’s illustrative designs for Arts and Crafts interiors; evolving from her previous work in embroidery and woodcarving.
Whiles’ subjects are not direct observations but ready mades, taken from found reproductions, which have already been visually processed and stylised. She presents us with a careful amount of information on each object, positioned ‘just so’, and in doing so creates space for the viewer to contemplate its journey from ordinary to extraordinary; its position between artefact and art.
‘Often the subjects chosen have an amazing starting point. Not because they are, within themselves, anything extraordinary or unique in terms of proposition or perspective but because they are very ordinary. She wants them to represent something other than their external manner.
The lines describe what is not there. The drawings represent nothing and plenty more besides.’
Bernard Walsh, 2007
Cabinets, adorned with well-proportioned pot plants and vases of flowers; ceramic plates with bird motifs. Objects to decorate our living spaces often without functionality or excluded from such a purpose for presentation sake. Left out are the imperfections, for us to relate our own personal domestic order.
Sideshow will include new works commissioned by Grundy, which depict planters discovered by the artist during visits to Blackpool town centre, and those adorning Bed and Breakfast establishments. These works, including Strongman and Troupe, refer to Blackpool’s rich and important entertainment history and tradition. At Grundy, this ‘garden’ leading into an ‘interior’ makes reference to Blackpool’s own visual culture. More specifically we are made to consider Grundy’s place, with Whiles’ works on its walls, within Blackpool’s organic commonplace creativity.
The exhibition is funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Annie Whiles completed her MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in 2000, where she is now a lecturer in Art Practice. In 2007 her solo exhibition entitled Cuckoo was shown at the Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London. Recent group exhibitions include Thy Neighbours, Ox 2, Space Station Sixty Five, London 2005; Cloud and Vision, Museum of Garden History, London 2005; Death is Part of the Process, Void Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland, 2005.
Gereon Krebber
Reinhard Wieczorek
5 May – 16 June 2007
Grundy Art Gallery presents exhibitions of new and recent work by German artists Gereon Krebber and Reinhard Wieczorek, organised in collaboration with the
Aūgūst Everding Council Culture Centre Bottrop, Germany
London based artist Gereon Krebber has exhibited widely across Europe, since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2002. Krebber produces sculpture from familiar everyday materials, playfully exploring their inherent qualities through processes of manipulation; the final forms directed by this journey. The results are incredible ‘extraterrestrial’ objects, which often play upon deadpan humour.
Recent work includes 'Squeezed', 2004, produced from cling film, timber and balloons; its seven-metre structure obstructed the entrance of the gallery space, and protruded into the street. Krebber was awarded the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2003, and commissioned to produce 'Tin', 2004. Shaped like a conventional-looking tin with its top slightly askew, 'Tin' is monumental in size, challenging our preconceptions of scale and our curiosity of what could be stored inside.
For this Grundy exhibition, Krebber will produce site-specific work, in response to the gallery’s Edwardian architecture and features.
Reinhard Wieczorek’s paintings are explorative of the artist’s natural and urban environments. Their energised colour and expression depict subjects as diverse as natural landscapes, everyday incidents, industry, architectural structures, animals, and fictional characters.
At times figuratively depicting specific structures, such as roads, or vistas such as valleys or day-trippers beside the sea, Wieczorek’s paintings also transcend their subject matter into exuberant washes of gestured painterly-surfaces and colour.
Born and based in Bottrop, Wieczorek has exhibited extensively across Europe and in 1995 won the Cultural Award of the city of Bottrop. This will be the artist’s first UK exhibition and will include recent and new paintings and drawings.
James Duncan
5 May – 16 June 2007
Grundy Art Gallery presents new and recent paintings by Manchester based artist James Duncan.
Duncan is multiply disabled. As well as the physical effects of cerebral palsy, he is both visually and hearing impaired.
His paintings depict objects, chance encounters and natural environments. Informed rather than restricted by his disabilities, his works include only the essential elements of their subjects. They are considered and simple; there is no hidden complexity. Disregarded is the detritus that surrounds our focus of a form or object.
Landscapes become bands of solid colours and forms; a flower in a vase is ordered into five colour elements; a boulder becomes a monumental blue shape.
The painting surface, applied with controlled gestures, becomes a construction of flat patterns, free floating objects and interlocking shapes. It is a simplicity that heightens our visual appreciation for how we experience our environments. Duncan invites us to uncomplicate things and share in an unabated enthusiasm and mystery towards nature.
Stuart Edmundson
20 January - 3 March 2007
Grundy Art Gallery presents a major exhibition of new and recent work by Manchester based artist Stuart Edmundson. Edmundson's practice encompasses painting, drawing and sculptural. He produces work concerned with abstraction and an often playful process of making; creating assemblages, drawings and objects using unremarkable functional objects.
Edmundson’s assemblages and objects retain the identity and characteristics of their materials, and their production and final form is directed by the inherent set of physical restrictions imposed by their materials and those of the space in which they exist.
Within Grundy’s largest exhibition space, the artist will construct an assemblage comprising of pink and white striped paper bags. The bags are folded, cut and pinned to an expanse of gallery wall in a manner that allows the bag's design to evolve within its given space into a drawing of cross-hatching and an illusionary sculptural form.
Structures comprising of sheets of white Perspex, adorned with light bulbs and supported by timber frames, sit a-blaze with light. These works, as with Edmundson’s entire practice, have evolved from his previous responses to contemporary abstract painting practice, and demonstrate the artist’s convictions to create pure works of art.
Small delicate towers made out of cocktail sticks sit vulnerable upon the gallery floor, their development curtailed for risk of collapse that building higher or bigger would induce. Although they exist as finished works, they suggest proposals for larger, more ambitious structures.
Such proposals also appear as written statements or drawings for unrealized projects - due to a lack of funding or the practicalities of their production and display - these simple statements express an idea and its set of rules : "Make a maze in a space out of mirrored walls". By suggesting the work through a drawing or statement in an uncomplicated manner, the artist enables the viewer to perceive the work through their own imagination.
The Fylde Collection
Paintings from the Fylde Borough Council Collection
20 January - 3 March 2007
Grundy Art Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of some of the finest works from the Fylde Borough Council Collection.
Fylde is a borough of Lancashire, the border of which runs alongside Blackpool, and includes the towns of Lytham, St. Annes on Sea and Kirkham as well as numerous smaller rural villages.
The Collection was begun in 1925 with a donation of one work from John Booth, of the northern-based supermarket chain Booths, and now exceeds over two hundred artworks, primarily 19th century painting. The Collection’s most supportive patron was Alderman James Herbert Dawson who presented over fifty works and whose unrealised ambition for the Collection was the construction of a gallery in Lytham St. Annes in which the Collection could be displayed.
This exhibition will include thirty of the finest works from the Collection, many never before exhibited publicly.
The first three works to enter the Collection were by Richard Ansdell, (1815 -1885), and a number of the artist’s works are included here. Ansdell’s heroic paintings followed the manner of Sir Edwin Landseer - highland landscapes depicting sporting scenes and animal based narratives using a highly skilled painting technique. The artist lived for a time on the Fylde Coast and it is he after whom the local area of Ansdell is named.
Also included is Charles Burton Barber’s (1845 - 1894) painting entitled In Disgrace, 1886, which is an exquisite example of the English painter’s work. Considered as one of England’s finest animal painters, Barber's sentimental work was enjoyed by Queen Victoria, who commissioned the artist to produce pictorial records of many favoured Royal pets.
Other artists included in the exhibition include Maud Earl, Andrea Landini and Eugene de Blass.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Fylde Borough Council.
Open
artists from Blackpool Fylde and Wyre
27 November 2006- 6 January 2007
Grundy has invited the residents of Blackpool and the neighbouring districts of Fylde and Wyre to enter their artwork into its first ever open exhibition. Two hundred and fifty people accepted the invitation and the gallery has become a showcase of painting, photography, collage, printmaking and computer generated images.
The exhibition is sponsored by Seniors the Fish Experience, Normoss and Thornton, and is also supported by Wyre Borough Council. It will run alongside the Blackpool Art Society's 122nd Annual Exhibition.
Jordan McKenzie, Untitled: Dark Mirror
Yuji Watabe, Mist
30 September - 11 November 2006
Grundy Art Gallery is pleased to present exhibitions of new work by Jordan McKenzie and Yuji Watabe, bringing together works that share a poetic sense of "something dark" beneath the otherwise highly individual approaches to contemporary drawing practice.
Jordan McKenzie is a British artist based in London. His practice explores drawing and the process of mark making in relation to the body. For this Grundy exhibition, McKenzie has been commissioned to produce a new work - Untitled: Dark Mirror.
Untitled: Dark Mirror consists of sixty mirrors, hung side by side around the walls of a single gallery space. The mirrors, collected from second-hand shops and car-boot sales, have been sandblasted and the resulting opaque non-reflective surfaces graphited over. Accompanying the installation is the faint sound of graphite being drawn upon glass. McKenzie’s labour intensive and time consuming process, has removed the original reflective quality of the mirrors, and replaced it with a dark polished surface. A reflective quality remains however, and the objects retain their identity, encouraging the viewer to make attempts to catch their reflection, not quite visible but not quite invisible. To view oneself in these dark surfaces requires active engagement with the work.
During the exhibition private view, McKenzie will perform 'Drawing Breath', his acclaimed performance work. Approaching one audience member at a time, the artist takes hold of their hand and places it on his chest, clasping it there whilst slowly breathing in and out once. He then moves to a small table where he sits and takes a paper bag and covers it in charcoal, before walking towards a wall where there is a taped rectangle corresponding to the height and width of his body. He then blows into the bag and bursts it against the wall. Through the sound of the bursting bag and the charcoal marks on the wall, the artist creates a visible and dramatic representation of human breath.
Yuji Watabe is a Japanese artist, based in Fukuoka. Having exhibited throughout Japan, his work was included in the Hayward Gallery, London exhibition Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art, in 2001.
Watabe’s carefully produced figurative drawings are drawn directly onto the wall. Their strong linear qualities emphasize the contours of his subjects. They appear like memories of friends and locations projected from the imagination.
For this Grundy exhibition, Watabe will recreate a work entitled Mist, a strong graphic and linear composition of a dense forest figuratively reproduced, but equally abstract. It will be monumental in scale, filling the walls of Grundy’s largest exhibition space - 14 metres long, 7 metres wide, 4 metres high - surrounding its audience. Like McKenzie, Watabe deploys a technique that is clearly time-consuming and emphasizes temporality in general - the work destined to be embedded beneath a layer of paint on the gallery walls.
Geoff Buono
Blackpool Beach
12 August – 16 September 2006
This Grundy Art Gallery exhibition includes eight large-scale photographic prints from Geoff Buono’s series 'Blackpool Beach', a work produced over a two-year period during the resort’s summer season. Twice a day Buono would set up his camera in the exact same location and position at the end of the South Pier and record the seascape that lay beyond.
Anticipating one grey day after another, Buono first conceived his series as square blocks of recurring fields of grey and brown split by the horizon, expressing the subtle qualities of light, air and water, dismissing the typical ‘romantic sunset’ images of the seaside.
From Buono’s repetitious and obsessive routine emerged a series of images featuring vivid blue skies and water, and golden-coloured beaches that were at odds with his, and the commonly accepted perception, of the British northwest seaside environment. It became apparent that there are not as many grey days as Buono first anticipated and he was frequently confronted with the romantic images he had set out to dismiss.
Taken from the very edge of the pier, the work leaves us unsure of scale or perspective; at times we are detached from the scene beyond us, looking down upon the figures set against the broad horizontal bands of earth and water, whilst in others we are confronted by an expanse of water.
'Blackpool Beach' is essentially about the location in which it was produced, documenting its everyday human activities and its natural environment; the rigid gaze emphasizing the passing of time and the temporality of our existence, set against the infinite mass of air and water.
Fried
Blackpool’s Fish and Chip Shops
12 August – 16 September 2006
Fried is an exhibition of photographs produced by the owners, families, staff and customers of twelve Blackpool fish and chip shops. The primary aim of the exhibition is to value the special relationship Blackpool has with fish and chips, and the ‘cafe culture’, that surrounds it. Blackpool has its own set of aesthetics and cultural traditions, which we find fascinating and are proud of. We wanted to celebrate the personal touches and hand-made qualities of these small businesses in contrast to the corporate style of the growing number of multinational organisations that now occupy high streets the world over.
Over the course of a year, we visited fish and chip shops across the length and breadth of Blackpool and made a shortlist of venues that we found interesting in terms of style, decoration and location. Those who accepted our invitation to take part in this exhibition range from licensed award winning restaurants on the outskirts of the town, to those catering for Blackpool’s millions of visitors, and the small bars serving their local communities.
It is an essential element of the exhibition that the owners of these places produced the photographs. We asked them to examine their daily routines, and the environments they have created within their shops and those that exist immediately outside. We told them to consider everything as interesting and gave them a week to produce their photographs.
This exhibition is a selection of over one hundred and sixty of these photographs, all of which are personal interpretations of the exhibition’s aim, and wonderful images in their own right.
Geoff Buono and Stuart Tulloch
Exhibition Curators
This exhibition has been funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
John Gay: Blackpool 1949
Photographs from the English Heritage National Monuments Record
24 June - 16 September 2006
(Now on show in our upper gallery space)
This exhibition highlights the evocative photographs of John Gay who recorded Blackpool holidaymakers during the summer of 1949.
John Gay was renowned for his work in national advertising campaigns, magazines and books. Gay, who changed his name from Hans Gohler, was a German émigré who came to England in 1933, and later settled in Highgate, London. Born in 1909, at Karlsruhe, Germany, his interest in photography first became apparent after he left school and attended art college in Paris. He worked as a professional photographer in Germany before leaving for a new life in England.
Best known for his architectural photographs, Gay’s photographs were published in six books. His second book 'Prospect of Highgate & Hampstead' (1967) established his career as an architectural photographer. In 1972 he published 'London’s Historic Railway Stations' with Sir John Betjeman, and in 1984 he published his most well known book 'Highgate Cemetery', with Felix Barker; a subject close to his heart, having been actively involved in its rejuvenation, which followed years of neglect after World War Two.
This exhibition demonstrates Gay’s ability to capture ordinary people at ease on holiday. Produced for Country Fair Magazine, Gay’s photographs illustrate Blackpool during a period when the British seaside holiday was immensely popular and provide fascinating documentation of Blackpool’s social history.
The photographs in the exhibition form part of the English Heritage National Monuments Record archive; a public archive containing eight million images, relevant to archaeology, architectural history and the social history of England.
Organised in collaboration with the English Heritage National Monuments Record.
Mike Marshall
At The Edge Of The Known World
24 June - 29 July 2006
Grundy Art Gallery presents a major exhibition of video, photography and sound work by British artist Mike Marshall. Marshall’s work explores the edges of the familiar, focusing in on places, situations and aspects of experience often passed by or only half noticed. The artist uses his chosen media to carefully take apart and re-assemble his subject matter, finding both interest and an often beguiling intensity within what he terms ‘the background noise of life’.
'Birds Sing In Response To A Distant Calamity', 2006 is a new multi-speaker soundscape produced for this exhibition. The artist has meticulously orchestrated a variety of birdsong to construct a sonic environment, bringing the outside into the confines of the main gallery space. A distant boom triggers a flurry of activity, birds call and respond from one speaker to another, their abstract sonorous language overlapping and merging then gradually subsiding before another distant boom disturbs the approaching tranquillity. The work functions at different levels: what on the surface may appear as a pleasant ambience reminiscent of days spent walking through countryside is at the same time a precise ordering of a competitive struggle for territory and survival.
'A Place Not Far From Here ', 2005 is a video work set in a clearing of tropical woodland, sunlight flicking through the foliage. Shot from a chair that swings from a tree, the scene gently floats and turns. Accompanied by an amplified ambient sound track, a bass note occasionally punctuates the calm to lend momentum along with close whispers of words caught in the first moment of formation. There is a sense of semi-conscious quiet relaxation evoked by this work, at the same time colliding with a feeling of disquieting suspense.
Marshall’s large-scale photographic works attempt to go beyond the photographic moment into prolonging a temporal activation of experience, slowing down the time of looking in order to reveal an acute sense of presence. Thickets of vegetation, front gardens, distant boats foregrounded by wild grass; these scenes have a subtlety to their construction while appearing as stumbled across without any predefining motive. Each depicts a densely filled, luminous space and employs an ambiguous layering of depth and focus, placing the viewer in an uncertain threshold between a kind of ‘blank staring’ and a concentrated, detailed looking.
Organised in collaboration with Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Lindsay Seers
I can’t tell you
6 May – 10 June 2006
Lindsay Seers’ work over the past ten years has evolved as an autobiographical narrative that relates her attempts to become a camera, her involvement in ventriloquism and her most recent attempts to become a projector. Seers has performed and made hundreds of images by using her own body as a camera, locating the photographic process inside her body to become an image receptor - her mouth cavity is the camera body and her lips the shutter and aperture. Photographs made in this way are red from the light that passes through the blood of her cheeks, framed by her teeth and blurred by her body.
Seers’ recent work explores the three main phases of her process (camera; ventriloquist; projector) in the form of documentary works and a bookwork. The DVD works draw inspiration from biographies made about artists for TV/cinema; these pieces feature a number of voices elucidating the theory and impulse behind the artist’s processes and their results.
A newly commissioned DVD work for Grundy, entitled 'Under the influence of Magicians', specifically draws on the ventriloquist phase of Seers’ work. The film plots the odd coincidences that connect the artist and her ventriloquist Aunty (Barbara Seers) to Cyril Critchlow (a Blackpool magician) and to the history of Blackpool’s entertainment industry. The work features Blackpool’s Grand Theatre and a ‘Midget Town’, which was a popular attraction before the outbreak of the war.
Seers’ work as a whole draws on photographic theory, recent developments in neuroscience, philosophy and literature to create Brechtian influenced stories that go beyond fact and fiction to create their own truths.
A Gasworks, London, touring exhibition in association with The City Gallery, Leicester and Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool.
Picasso: Histoire Naturelle
29 April – 3 June 2006
This set of 31 prints is considered by many to be one of Picasso's most important graphic productions. In them, the artist depicts animals, birds, insects and other creatures.
Begun in 1936 for the picture dealer and publisher, Ambroise Vollard, Picasso created these images to accompany the classic 18th century text, 'Histoire Naturelle', by the eminent French naturalist, George‑Louis Leclerc de Buffon. Combining a wide variety of techniques, including lift‑ground aquatint, etching and drypoint, Picasso produced images of great clarity, immediacy and beauty. The prints, accompanied by extracts from Buffon's text, were eventually published in 1942 by Martin Fabiana (following Vollard's death in 1939).
Animals appear frequently in Picasso's work ‑ most importantly the bull, horse and pigeon, all of which had great personal significance for him and are evident in his powerful 'Guernica' painting of 1937, executed at the same time as his illustrations for 'Histoire Naturelle' were underway. Of the many creatures drawn by Picasso in 'Histoire Naturelle', the bull, his favourite, is the only animal to occur twice.
Picasso: Histoire Naturelle is a Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition from South Bank Centre, London on behalf of Arts Council England.
Tanya Axford
The B-side
28 January - 4 March 2006
Tanya Axford makes films, installations and interventions, in which she orchestrates situations and objects into compositions of sound and movement.
Her materials are the mass-produced objects, popular culture, domesticity and events of ordinary life, manipulated into playful performances and 'magical' environments, which expose their inherent characteristics or comic potential.
Mundane rituals interwoven with folly is a recurring theme in Axford’s work. Shopping and cleaning are subjects covered in two new films, which will be shown here for the first time. In 'Scanning the Horizon', 2005, the contents of a shopping trolley are meticulously and fanatically ordered by colour and tone on the supermarket checkout. 'Rodeo Rodeo', 2005, features the artist struggling to control an industrial floor polisher in a comical performance that resembles a rodeo cowboy controlling his horse.
The exhibition also includes Axford's recent work entitled 'View Halloo', 2005, commissioned by Turner Contemporary, and first shown at Droit House, Margate; realised at Grundy on a larger, more ambitious scale. Like most of Axford's installations, 'View Halloo' is constructed from an accumulation of identical objects - here, crystal wineglasses stacked upon spinning record player turntables. 'View Halloo' is a sound installation, and intervention. It demands our attention through the sound of clattering glass that is audible throughout the gallery; however our presence besides the work renders it suddenly silent and motionless. Unsettling as it is striking, we are made to feel self-conscious of our surroundings and presence in the room; in order to see the work the viewer must remain still, held captive by their own curiosity.
This is Axford’s first solo exhibition in the North West of England, and is supported by Arts Council England. She has produced work for Locus+ and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, and has recently been represented by Workplace Gallery, Gateshead.
Pleasure Beach: photographs from the archive,
a tribute to Geoffrey and Lilian Doris Thompson
26 November - 14 January 2006
Chronicling more than a century’s worth of images, the exhibition illustrates the history of the family-owned park, and pays special tribute to two of its most influential figures.
Entitled Pleasure Beach: photographs from the archive, a tribute to Geoffrey and Lilian Doris Thompson, the exhibition features 60 photographs from the Pleasure Beach archive and captures the transformation of the park from its embryonic beginnings at the turn of the 20th century, to the 'action-packed' amusement park it is today.
Through photographs of its iconic buildings and architecture, and those illustrating the change and development in popular culture, the exhibition gives visitors a historical snapshot of one of the most loved amusement parks in the world.
Spotlight on Victor Pasmore
From the Arts Council Collection
26 November-14 January 2006
Bringing together 15 paintings, drawings, reliefs and prints from the Arts Council Collection, Spotlight on Victor Pasmore features the work of one of the pre-eminent British artists of the post-war period.
Charting Victor Pasmore’s career as it evolved from early figurative paintings to full abstraction, this National Touring Exhibition from the Hayward Gallery reveals a sensitivity to form, balance and shape that runs throughout his work. Included is one of the Arts Council Collection’s key paintings – The Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White (1950-51) – the swirling forms in which refer back to some of the most powerful paintings of nature, from Leonardo to Turner.
Over the course of a long profession, Victor Pasmore’s art changed direction several times, moving from atmospheric views of the Thames in the 1940s to abstract works in the 1950s and 60s. Early on he was associated with the Euston Road School and its search for an objective recording of visual reality. After a dramatic conversion to abstraction in 1948, he produced some of the most radically uncompromising paintings and reliefs of the period - a move which renowned critic Herbert Read described as ‘the most revolutionary event in post-war British art’.
The Grundy Salon
30 July – 2 September 2005
Blackpool Council commissioned the building of the Grundy Art Gallery in 1908, following a bequest of thirty-three artworks and a financial gift from brothers Cuthbert and John Grundy.
The gallery opened in 1911, and in 1912 a purchase fund for new artworks was set up. The collection now contains close to two thousand objects, including Victorian oils and watercolours, modern British paintings, contemporary prints jewellery and video, and photographs of historic Blackpool. The Grundy Salon features two hundred of these artworks, including some that have never been publicly displayed in the gallery.
Artists included: Anna Airy, Craigie Aitchinson, Patience Arnold, John Smith Atherton, Delmar Banner, Frank Moss Bennett, Samuel John 'Lamorna' Birch, Nina Blaker, Edgar Bundy, Harry Bush, Jeffrey Camp, Vera Cave, Yvonne Cole, Thomas Sidney Cooper, Tulley Crook, Laurence Daws, Lisa de Montford, Frank Dicksee, Fred Elwell, Florence Englebach, Thomas Faed, Alan Freer, Fransceco Furini, Henry Gillard Glindoni, Alan Gordon, Jules Goupil, Cuthbert Grundy, John Grundy, Edward Hargitt, George Elgar Hicks, Robert Alexander Hillingford, Patrick Hughes, Augustus John, David Johnson, Quentin King, Harry Kingsley, Nick Kowalski, Achille Lauge, Rowland Lindup, John Linnell, Patti Mayor, Reginald Mills, Danka Napiorkowska, Paul Nash, Brendan Neiland, Makoto Nomura, Julius Olsson, Malcolm Osborne, Picasso, John Piper, Princess Patricia of Connaught, J. Charles Ricketts, Fred Roe, Bevis Sale, William Shayer, Howard Somerville, Charles Spencelayh, Emillio L. Tafani, Joseph Thors, Albert Turner, Eugene Verboeckhoven, Pauline Vivienne, Harry Watson, James Webb, Lucy Kemp Welsh, John Thomas Whitaker, Elizabeth Wood, Claire H. Yarrington, Lesley Young.
Peter Liversidge
What You'd Expect
6 June-16 July 2005
Peter Liversidge’s work explores his twin obsessions: the myth of the American West and the glamour and desirability of luxury goods. His investigations across these themes take in painting, sculpture, installations and public projects. Uniting these numerous and diverse approaches is the artist’s distinctive ‘hand-made’ aesthetic.
This Blackpool showing of What You'd Expect brings together works produced over the past six years, together with new works commissioned especially for this showing at Grundy including re-created neon signs made out of Blackpool Rock, and a gin multiple which will be produced during the opening of the exhibition on 4 June.
Liversidge will transform Grundy into a panorama from the North Montana Plains - a place he has never been. The artist’s Boulders, Rocks and Stones series, an on going work consisting of fragile caricatures assembled from packing materials and tape, is accompanied by fencing installed to restrict and guide our movement around the gallery space, and paintings depicting herds of roaming buffalo and buzzards. Together they capture a fantasy image of the American West; a sublime wilderness untouched by mankind - an image much stronger in our imaginations than the one we would find in reality.
What You'd Expect will include works from Liversidge’s series of paintings recreating advertising logos of famous multinational companies and the luxury goods they produce. His clumsy yet sincere painting style removes their desirability and the slickness of their advertising campaigns, thus exposing their ordinariness and the absurdity of the promises they claim possession will guarantee.
This Grundy showing will also include Liversidge's recent paintings of Olympic logos from the past four decades. In Liversidge's paintings, the Olympics, which epitomise physical perfection and achievement, become a symbol of our aspiration to achieve the impossible. This is a touring project initiated by Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art and supported by Arts Council England.
A 112-page publication accompanies the exhibition.
Social Club
Works on paper by Pavel Büchler, Dean Hughes, David Mackintosh, David Osbaldeston and Martin Vincent.
9 April - 21 May 2005
This exhibition of drawings and works on (and with) paper offers Blackpool a small sample of contemporary art from the dynamic and diverse contemporary art scene of Manchester.
The exhibition brings together works that share a poetic sense of "something dark" beneath the otherwise singular and highly individual approaches - from Martin Vincent's reductive treatment of momentous issues in the form of sheet music and David Osbaldeston's self-mocking hand-made art fanzines, to David Mackintosh's bleak and disturbing ink sketches, Pavel Büchler's illegible diary and Dean Hughes' obsessive play with unremarkable everyday materials. This "darkness" contrasts with the economy, immediacy and formal elegance of the means by which it is expressed. It creates a tension between an existential pathos and anxiety and the often ambiguous humour which is equally characteristic of the work.
First shown at galleri s.e, Bergen, Norway in 2004, this Blackpool showing will include new works and is supported by Arts Council England. A catalogue published by i3 will accompany the exhibition. |