Stanley Picker Gallery

Wednesday 11 October 2017

Inspired by the collaborative nature of the exhibition 31 Candles: Jessi Reaves feat. Bradley Kronz and Jessi Reaves (Waiting for Boots) at Dorich House Museum, On Collaboration is a conversation staged within the show itself and led by Ellen Mara De Wachter, author of Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration (Phaidon, 2017) with guest speakers Cullinan–Richards and Samuel Levack & Jennifer Lewandowski.

Ellen Mara De Wachter is a writer and curator based in London. She is a frequent contributor to Frieze magazine, and her writing has featured in numerous publications and exhibition catalogues. Her book ‘Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration’, published by Phaidon, explores the phenomenon of collaboration in the visual arts and its potential in society at large. De Wachter is a Visiting Lecturer in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, and has taught at the Royal Academy Schools, Goldsmiths College, Brighton University, Newcastle University among other places. In 2013-15 she was Curator of Public Collection Development at the Contemporary Art Society, where she was responsible for CAS’s acquisitions scheme for museums across the UK. Prior to that, she worked at various arts organisations including the British Museum and the Barbican Art Gallery.

Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards are an artist duo whose work explores ‘the exhibition’ as a medium itself through the use of their studio based production. They use paintings, sculptural support structures, lighting systems and found objects to investigate ideas of contingency, provisionality, fluidity and interconnectedness in relation to making artwork. For a recent exhibition Cullinan Richards created spaces for dialogue around feminist thinking in a show titled: ‘Of Other Spaces: Where does Gesture Become Event?’, at Cooper Gallery Dundee 2016 -17, linking the exhibition throughout with a series of specially commissioned structures collectively titled A Modular Infrastructure Acting in Concert with Cooper Gallery. Made from steel scaffolding and mirrored plywood panels, these structures functioned as both artworks and display units for groupings of other artist’s work, documentation and archive material.Two recent major works for Charles H Scott Gallery, Vancouver CA, in February 2017 titled: Pleistocene and Feeling Guilty About Painting were included in the Exhibition Goodbye Charles developing Cullinan Richards interest in the function of narrative in ‘staging’ exhibitions..

Samuel Levack & Jennifer Lewandowski’s expanded practice includes film, performance, installation, poetry and music. Their work has been shown in exhibitions, performances and film screenings in the UK, Europe, and the USA. Together with their band Das Hund, they have performed internationally and are currently recording their debut album For Freedom. Since 2011, they have curated the artist-run gallery French Riviera in Bethnal Green, east London. In 2016 they received an Artists International Development Fund award from the British Council and Arts Council England, for their Alternative Living Tour, an artist residency in Joshua Tree and a series of performances in Los Angeles. Their new film Peace Flags 4 Chaos, filmed in London, Somerset, Colorado and California during 2016, will be included in The Housing Question, the upcoming exhibition at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK opening in October 2017.

Wednesday 22 November 2017

To mark the opening of Céline Condorelli’s solo exhibition, Prologue, which forms part of P!CKER, curated by Stanley Picker Gallery with Prem Krishnamurthy / P!, Condorelli is in conversation with Krishnamurthy discussing Herbert Bayer’s legacy and P!’s own institutional story.

Céline Condorelli is an artist based in London. Recent exhibitions include Proposals for a Qualitative Society (Spinning), Stroom Den Haag, NL, Corps á Corps, IMA Brisbane, Australia in 2017; 11th Gwangju Biennale, Liverpool Biennial 2016, 20th Biennale of Sydney, and Concrete Distractions, Kunsthalle Lissabon in 2016; bau bau, HangarBicocca, Milan in 2015; as well as Céline Condorelli, Chisenhale Gallery, London, Positions, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the publication The Company She Keeps with Bookworks in 2014. Previous exhibitions include Puppet Show (various venues, 2014), Additionals, Project Art Centre, Dublin, as well as exhibitions at venues ranging from the Grazer Kunstverein, Hessel Museum, Castello di Rivoli, SALT Istanbul, LUMA Arles, and others. She is currently Professor at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) Milan, and one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, as well as the author and editor of Support Structures, published by Sternberg Press (2009/2014).

Prem Krishnamurthy is a Founding Principal of design studio Project Projects, recipient of the Cooper Hewitt’s 2015 National Design Award for Communication Design, the USA’s highest recognition in the field. From 2012–2017, Prem established and led the experimental gallery P! in New York City’s Chinatown, while also curating exhibitions andprograms at Para Site (Hong Kong), SALT (Istanbul), and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. Recent books as co-editor include Speculation, Now and Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. He has taught and lectured in art and designprograms, non-profit spaces, museums, and universities worldwide, and is on faculty at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and Barnard College.

Friday 9 February 2018

Michael Marriott, Stanley Picker Fellow in Design 2017, presents an introduction to his fellowship research.

Born and based in London, Marriott has been working as a designer since 1993. Trained as a furniture designer, which still forms the core of his practice, his work has broadened to incorporate regular exhibition, product and interior design projects. In all his varied practice there is a common core though, which is a search for the elemental nature of the thing in hand.

He is known for making supremely well detailed and highly functional objects, renowned for their keen and economical grace. He has recently launched his first injection moulded product, a wall mounted coat hook, named after the Anglo-Hungarian architect Ernö Goldfinger. During his Fellowship, he will investigate alternative means of marking and colouring plywood – one of the materials he employs most extensively in his work – with methods that don’t rely on brush strokes, screenprinting or out-sourced services.

Thursday 28 September 2017

As part of P!CKER, designer, curator, and educator Prem Krishnamurthy presents his genre-defying talk ‘P!DF’, an interactive presentation that charts emerging forms of creative practice.

Prem Krishnamurthy is a Founding Principal of design studio Project Projects, recipient of the Cooper Hewitt’s 2015 National Design Award for Communication Design, the USA’s highest recognition in the field. From 2012–2017, Prem established and led the experimental gallery P! in New York City’s Chinatown, while also curating exhibitions andprograms at Para Site (Hong Kong), SALT (Istanbul), and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. Recent books as co-editor include Speculation, Now and Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. He has taught and lectured in art and designprograms, non-profit spaces, museums, and universities worldwide, and is on faculty at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and Barnard College.

“The question is, is making art—and within that, I am a dancemaker—a self-congratulatory redundant practice, or—if there is a real pursuit of the nature of the beast to ground level, knowing there is no ground—a humble service?” Sarah Michelson

Sarah Michelson stays clinging to the ice mountain of dance. She has served as associate director of Movement Research, editor-in-chief of Performance Journal, and is currently an associate curator of dance at The Kitchen.

On resistance in painting

“Personally I like the way that paintings can be so non-compliant – that it’s in their material nature to behave badly.  You could say that paint is resistant; it seems always to want to change to rules, upset the status quo, to resist fixed interpretation.”

For the first of the 2016 Stanley Picker lectures, South African artist Ansel Krut discusses his latest series of works, in relation to the theme of ‘resistance’ and the contemporary relevance of flowers.

Dear Pascal

… I have made these paintings in a kind of white heat, throwing myself into painting more completely than I have been able to do for some years … and I think that it has forced me into something more elemental in my own working practise.  Perhaps something more fundamental to myself as an artist.  All bar two of the images are of flowers. It is a theme I stumbled into… I have always painted flowers, maybe one or two paintings a year, but this is the first time I have settled on them as a theme for an exhibition. Historically I suppose flowers as a subject tend to be thought of as being slightly domestic, bourgeois, but of course if you look closely at flowers they are incredibly exotic, sometimes they are unbelievably so, almost to the point of seeming extraterrestrial. It is a strange thing for them to be cut and displayed as decoration, tamed as it were. I suppose I try to express this strangeness by juxtaposing them with the strangeness of their containers, vases that resemble bodies, or have something of the body about them.  Sometimes the flowers are not in vases but bound together, another kind of forced relationship…

I have painted flowers that have personal meaning for me, some I grew up with in South Africa and some I got to know later….  With one exception I have not felt the need to have the flowers in front of me when I painted them… The 2 paintings that are not of flowers are both of books burning their own content. The idea of books being burned is so freighted and seems to me to touch on something of the current climate of cultural destruction – but that they should be destroying themselves seems even more ramped up and potent. The self-awareness that this implies is shared by the flower paintings, and …there is l think … a compelling overlap of interests.

All the best

Ansel

(From an email February 2016)

Ansel Krut (b.1959 Cape Town, South Africa) lives and works in London. Krut completed a BA Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (1982), he then attended Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (1982-1983) and received a MA painting from the Royal College of Art, London (1986). Krut was awarded the Abbey Major Scholarship in Painting, British School at Rome (1986-1987). From 2006-2015 Krut was a Lecturer in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London and from 2005-2007 he was a Drawing Fellow at Wimbledon College of Art, London and Artist–lecturer at The National Gallery, London. Krut’s recent solo exhibtions include Verbatim, Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, UK (2014); Ansel Krut, Modern Art, London (2014); Ansel Krut, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA (2013); Ansel Krut, Kade, Amersfoort, The Netherlands, invited by Robbert Roos (2011); Ansel Krut (solo presentation), The Armory Show (2011); Ansel Krut, Modern Art, London (2010). His recent group exhibitions include The Violet Crab at DRAF, David Roberts Arts Foundation, London (2015); Feels Like Heaven, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2014); Live and Let Die, Modern Art, London (2014); The Tyranny of Grammar curated by John Strutton at Fishmarket Gallery, Northampton (2011); Art Basel Miami Beach, Modern Art (2010).

Since 2014, the ICA has collaborated with The Contemporary Art Research Centre at Kingston University, London to host the Stanley Picker Public Lectures on Art. The programme was established in 2007 by the artist Elizabeth Price to provide a platform for prominent contemporary artists and thinkers to present their ideas and work to a public audience.

Doug Ashford is a teacher, artist and writer. He is Associate Professor at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art where he has taught three-dimensional design, sculpture, public art and theory seminars since 1989.

In 1981, Ashford became a member of the artists’ collective Group Material, his principal art practice until 1996. Group Material produced over fifty exhibitions and public projects internationally, using museums and other public spaces as cultural arenas in which audiences were invited to imagine democratic forms. Prominent in this history are the exhibitions: The Castle (documenta 8, Kassel, Germany, 1987), Democracy (The Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1988) and AIDS Timeline (The Berkeley Art Museum 1989, Wadsworth Atheneum, 1990, The Whitney Museum, 1991). Group Material’s work in exhibition production, public cultural display, and the aesthetic mobilization of politics continue to affect the world of visual culture and other disciplines.

Since 1996, Ashford has gone on to make paintings, produce exhibitions and publish articles independently, with his creative labor primarily located in the classroom. His most recent publication is Who Cares (Creative Time, 2006), a book project built from a series of conversations between Ashford and an assembly of other cultural practitioners on public expression, beauty, and ethics. Recent exhibitions of paintings include the Sharjah Biennial 10, (2011) and Abstract Possible, Malmo Konsthall; Museo Tamayo and other locations (2010-12) and dOCUMENTA 13 (2012). A collection of essays, Doug Ashford: Writings and Conversation, (Mousse Publishing, 2013), was published on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition at the Grazer Kunstverein.

Gavin Turk (born 1967) is a British-born, international artist. His installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. Concerned with the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work, Turk’s engagement with this modernist, avant-garde debate stretches back to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. Turk uses his signature as a recurrent motif through which to explore the way an artist’s mark can embody aesthetic and commercial value.

In 1991, the Royal College of Art refused Turk a degree on the basis that his final show, Cave, consisted of a whitewashed studio space containing only a blue heritage plaque commemorating his presence ‘Gavin Turk worked here 1989-91′. Instantly gaining notoriety through this installation, Turk was spotted by Charles Saatchi and has since been exhibited by many major galleries and museums throughout the world.

Turk’s work has been included in many seminal exhibitions including the ground-breaking POP LIFE at Tate Modern as well as the Venice Biennale 2009, the 46th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul in 1999; Material Culture, Hayward Gallery, London in 1998 and Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, Saatchi Collection, London in 1995.

Born in 1975 in Munich, Sophie von Hellermann lives and works in London. She studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf and the Royal College of Art, London. Her subject matter ranges from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights to Einstein’s revolutionary physics to the life of Nico from The Velvet Underground.

She portrays these subjects with the same token lightness, blurring public fable with romantic vision. In von Hellermann’s works, personal narratives and fantasies are the product of desire and partial perceptions, bleeding into one another within a figuration characterised by ambiguous moments and abstract spaces.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Firstsite, Colchester (2013); Le Consortium, Dijon (with Josh Smith) (2009); Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (2009); Vilma Gold, London (2008); Greene Naftali, New York (2007); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2006); Neuer Aachen Kunstverein, Aachen (2006) and Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium (2006). Sophie von Hellermann is represented by Vilma Gold, London, Galerie Hussenot, Paris, Greene Naftali, New York, and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles.