BP 10th British International Print Biennale: Britain and Australia

 

Organised and toured by Bradford Art Galleries and Museums
Sat 12 Nov – Sat 10 Dec 1988

The 1988 Australian Bicentennial celebrations offered an excellent opportunity to explore the tradition and quality of Australian printmaking alongside its British counterpart. Thirty artists show a huge variety of techniques: screenprints, Xerox, lithograph and woodcut, demonstrating the versatility of this medium.

The selectors aimed to include the work of those who have recently left college such as Emma Rose and Simon Packard with the older generation represented by artists who include John Bellany and Anthony Davies.

Supported by the Arts Council of Great Britain

Sir Sidney Nolan: Figures in a Landscape

Organised and toured by the Royal West of England Academy
Sat 12 Nov – Sat 10 Dec 1988

This exhibition celebrates paintings made between 1937-87 by Sir Sidney Nolan. His early works was characterised by bold, almost naive imagery and an engaging sense of humour. After army service in the Australian Outback, Nolan create a new, more authentic vision of Australia, conveying the clarity of light, the vivid colour and sharp detail of the varied landscape. His series of paintings of Ned Kelly are classic images, adding a mystic dimension to the essential character of this typical Australian hero. This exhibition will also contain his deigns for the stage, including ‘Rite of Spring’ and the forthcoming ‘Abduction from the Seraglio’ by Mozart.

Supported by the Arts Council of Great Britain

Ralph Brown: Sculpture and Drawings

Organised and toured by the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, Leeds
Sat 1 Oct – Sat 29 Oct 1988

The eminent British sculptor, Ralph Brown, is 60 this year and his birthday is celebrated by a retrospective exhibition. The exhibition spans some four decades from the days of his shows with the ‘Young Contemporaries’ through the savage expressionism of the 1960s to the present day refinements of a more serene classical vision.

This is the first major exhibition of the sculptor’s work and the Mead Gallery is its only venue outside Ralph Brown’s home city of Leeds.

David Hugo: Between Scylla and Charybdis

Curated by the Mead Gallery
Sat 1 Oct – Sat 29 Oct 1988

David Hugo is a young British sculptor whose work has aroused considerable interest both in this country and abroad. For the first six months of 1988 he was in residence at the University of Warwick during which time he produced three new groups of work: ‘Pillars of Wisdom’, ‘Alembics’ and ‘Experiments in Perspective’, a total of sixteen sculptures.

Hugo’s work is mainly in wood and has a strong sense of theatricality. His fascination with scientific equipment, astrolabes and alchemical stills feature in the ‘Alembics’ sequence. The work Sensedatum was acquired for the University of Warwick Art Collection

African Vision
Sculpture and Masks from West Africa

 

Sat 28 May – Sat 25 Jun 1988

These carvings were collected primarily for their artistic interest and, in the case of the Garman Ryan Collection, are known to have had a direct influence on the work of Jacob Epstein, some of whose drawings are included in the exhibition. Their beauty and energy derives however, from their original purpose which expresses beliefs and a strong cultural identity.

The exhibition is drawn from collections in the West Midlands, notably the Danford Collection (University of Birmingham) and the Garman Ryan Collection (New Art Gallery, Walsall) and from the Duncan and Sugden Collections, neither of which have had major public exhibitions.

Researched by Marion Johnson and Allan Leary of the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. Organised and toured by the West Midlands Area Museum Service.

The Baron de Ferrieres Collection

Organised and toured by Cheltenham Art Gallery
Mon 25 Apr – Sat 21 May 1988

17th – 19th century Dutch and Belgian Paintings from Cheltenham Art Gallery

Collected in the mid-nineteenth century by the second Baron de Ferrieres, these paintings were presented to Cheltenham Art Gallery by his son in 1898. Among the 17th century paintings in the collection is a self portrait by Gerard Dou and two moralising allegories by Jan Sleen. Nineteenth century Dutch and Belgian paintings are rare in British collections and are here well represented in the landscapes of Cornelius Springer and Barend Cornelius Koekkoek.

Metal and Motion: Contemporary Sculpture

Organised and toured by Brighton Museum and Art Gallery with support from the Henry Moore Foundation
Mon 25 Apr – Sat 11 Jun 1988

This exhibition explores three major themes: the development of metal sculpture from the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary aspects of kinetic art and the inter-relationship between ‘craft’ and ‘sculpture’. It includes work by Zadok Ben-David, Kate Blacker, Kevin Atherton and Shelagh Cluett. The influence of Tinguely and Roland Emmett is evident in much of this work where wit plays a large part and demands a response from the viewer.

Also supported by the Arts Council of Great Britain

Anthony Whishaw: Reflections After 'Las Meninas'

 

Organised and toured by the Royal Academy of Arts and the John Hansard Gallery
Mon 15 Feb to Sat 12 Mar 1988

This exhibition, first shown at the Royal Academy, presents a group of recent paintings and drawings executed by Anthony Whishaw which have been inspired largely by Velasquez’s painting ‘Las Meninas’.

‘Las Meninas’ or The Maids of Honour by Diego Velasquez is in the Prado, Madrid and depicts the five year old Infanta Margarita of Spain, her maids of honour, the dwarf Maria Babola and dog and Velazquez himself. The King of Spain and his second wife are reflected in the mirror.

Two of his own paintings of interiors, ‘Interior Triptych’ and ‘Matedero Municipal’ reminded Whishaw of ‘Las Meninas’ and inspired him to explore Velazquez’s painting, the personalities of the figures, their positions in the picture, the mirrors and the doorways.

Hannah Hoch: Collages

Organised by the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Stuttgart and Goethe Institute
Mon 11 Jan – Sat 6 Feb 1988

Hannah Hoch (1889-1978) occupies a significant position in German art for her contribution to Dada and for her pioneering role in the development of collage as an art form. Her collages are more correctly termed photomontages – made from photographs and pictures cut from books, newspapers, magazines and posters. These assemblages of ready-made materials lend a semblance of reality to something entirely unreal. A contemporary of Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters in the 1920s, Hoch continued to interrogate this way of producing images into the 1970s, creating images that are bizarre, witty and disturbing.

Knowing Your Place: Artists' Parish Maps

Organised and toured by Common Ground, the London Ecology Centre
Mon 11 Jan – Sat 6 Feb 1988

Today, maps tend to be regarded in a utilitarian light and are expected to be objective, universally comprehensive and to avoid those idiosyncratic details and features that give a place an individuality.

Common Ground, the arts and conservation group, commissioned 18 leading artists to make a ‘map’ of a place well known to them in the medium of their choice: painting, sculpture, quilting, tapestry, embroidery and photography. The exhibition includes works by Adrian Berg, Anthony Gormley, Simon Lewty, Ken Kiff and David Nash.

A work from this exhibition by Simon Lewty was bought by the Friends of the Mead for the University Art Collection.