Stanley Picker Gallery

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (b. 1973, London) is a British artist whose practice intertwines performance, sculpture, painting, installation and video. Chetwynd’s performances and videos harness elements of folk plays, street spectacles, music videos and surrealist cinema. They generally employ troupes of performers—friends and relatives of the artist—and feature handmade costumes and props. Through meandering, improvisatory and often burlesque dramas, she has ranged across a panoramic range of subjects. Chetwynd’s performances strike a darkly carnivalesque note, and tread an ambiguous line between melodrama, arcane ritual, and pop-cultural spoof.

The artist was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2012. Major performances include The Green Room (Nottingham Contemporary, 2014), Home Made Tasers (New Museum, New York, 2011-12), The Visionary Vineyard: Dreaming of Free Energy (Hayward Gallery, London, 2011, part of British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet), and A Tax Haven Run By Women (Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, London, 2010). Recent solo exhibitions include Help! I’m trapped in a Muzuzah Factory (Le Consortium, Dijon, France, 2008) and Spartacus Chetywnd (Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland, 2007). Forthcoming solo presentations include those at Studio Voltaire, London, CCA Glasgow, and Cricoteka: Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor, Poland.

Katrin Plavcak was born in Gütersloh, Germany in 1970 and was raised in Zeltweg, Austria. The artist graduated from the Federal Academy for Social Work in Vienna in 1995 and from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1999, after which she spent several study periods abroad in Africa, the United States and China. She was guest lecturer in painting and graphic arts in Ursula Hübner’s class at the Linz University of Arts and Industrial Design, and taught in Antje Majewski’s classes at the Berlin-Weissensee Art Academy and the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel. Painting stands at the centre of the artist’s practice. In her exhibitions, images and objects exist in dialogue with one another as if they are one work. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Solo exhibitions include Gallery Mezzanin (Vienna, 2014), Croxhapox (Ghent, 2013), Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri (Seggiano, Italy 2013), Dispari & Dispari Project (Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2012), Kavi Gupta (Berlin, 2012), Österreichisches Kulturforum (Prague, 2012), Städtische Galerie (Waldkraiburg, 2011), Galerie Mezzanin (Vienna, 2011), Secession (Vienna, 2009), after the butcher (Berlin, 2008).

Stephan Dillemuth sees art and its distinct qualities as a tool for research and critical reflection of the circumstances of contemporary life. With its inherent methods of reflection, analysis, and experimentation, art, he believes, creates beauty, but it also has the potential to change society. His inquiry into recent changes in the idea of the public sphere takes place against the backdrop of our globalised, localised and fragmented publics. Here we can see  historical trajectories of liberation, e.g. those of bohemia, lebensreform and self-expression intersecting with new technologies of surveillance and control in order to establish a new ideology of ‘freedom’ as a totalitarian rule. What are the conflicts at hand?

Stephan Dillemuth teaches at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts and he has shown all over the world including Bergen Assembly (Bergen, 2013),  Secession (Vienna, 2012), Manifesta 8 (Murcia, 2010), Transmission Gallery (Glasgow, 2010), Galerie für Landschaftskunst (Hamburg, 2009), Reena Spaulings Fine Art (2008), Galerie Christian Nagel (Köln, 2007), American Fine Arts, Co., (New York, 2000), Friesenwall 120 (1990-1994), Sommerakademie Kunstverein München (Munich, 1990) and UTV (1995-1997).

Ab Rogers Design (ARD) opened their Stanley Picker Fellowship exhibition A Day in the Life of Ernesto Bones as part of the British Council programme at Beijing Design Week 2011.

Originally shown at the Stanley Picker Gallery in the spring, ARD’s narrative installation of the fictitious Ernesto Bones was inspired by objects from the real Picker House on Kingston Hill, and was made in close collaboration with students from Kingston University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.

Based on the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse – invented in Paris in the 1930s – the story of a single day in the life of the character Ernesto Bones was created by twenty-four invited creative experts, including artist Charlotte Cullinan, chef Heston Blumenthal, Design Museum Director Deyan Sudjic, and the children’s illustrator Sara Fanelli amongst others.

In China the exhibition will be installed in the courtyard buildings of No. 7 Zhujia Hutong in the Dashilar area of Beijing, part of the historic region south of Tiananmen Square. A new fully illustrated book, in both Mandarin and English with an introduction by Gallery Director David Falkner, is published to accompany the exhibition.

Artist Andy Holden  is currently staging his solo exhibition Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity! 1999-2003: Towards a Unified Theory of MI!MS at Spike Island, Bristol, having developed the project during the period of his Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University.

The exhibition investigated a manifesto Holden and friends wrote and distributed as teenagers for a self-initiated art movement known as MI!MS (Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity), which stated:

MI!MS is about the willingness to be lied to and the will to believe! It’s about the intense sadness of our unrealistic dreams, and the intense joy of our desire for them. We should not be cynical about the emotions in our work – we are simply cynical about the means we have to express those emotions.

As part of the wider MI!MS project, Holden teamed up with Roger Illingworth, childhood friend and fellow band-member from The Grubby Mitts, to revisit and rework a series of songs that they initially composed as teenagers, which were performed in Kingston upon Thames by pupils from Tiffin School Chamber Orchestra and Tiffin Children’s Chorus, the latter comprised of children from primary schools across South West London, and accompanied by readings from actor Sam Marsh.

Commissioned by the Stanley Picker Gallery, the Music Of MI!MS was premiered at the Rose Theatre Kingston as part of the International Youth Arts Festival 2013, with sound recordings and film-footage of the event forming a integral part of the new exhibition, originally staged at the Zabludowicz Collection London (Autumn 2013). A limited edition CD of the live recording was  released through the Stanley Picker Gallery and Holden’s Lost Toys record label  in 2014.