Stanley Picker Gallery

As part of Arts Council England’s newly announced National Portfolio, Stanley Picker Gallery is to receive a significant increase in its public funding over the three year period commencing April 2015.

The new investment of £80,000 per annum marks a 55% increase in Arts Council England’s support, and a major endorsement of the Stanley Picker Gallery’s programme of innovative new commissions across the fields of art and design. The Arts Council England uplift is to be matched by further funds from the Stanley Picker Trust with the aim of increasing the reach and engagement of the Gallery’s programme, whilst a new partnership with the Jerwood Charitable Foundation will support the development of an exciting new programme of digital co-commissions.

Stanley Picker Gallery Director David Falkner says of the news:

“We are thrilled that the Stanley Picker Gallery here at Kingston University has been given such huge vote of confidence from Arts Council England in challenging times, by increasing its support of the valuable work we do bringing cutting-edge arts practice to the outer edges of Greater London. We have worked hard for many years to support contemporary artists and designers, at crucial stages of their careers, to make ambitious new work that is first premiered here at the Gallery before going on to be seen by audiences far beyond Kingston. This increased funding will mark a major shift in our organisation, allowing us to be even more ambitious with our future programme both onsite, offsite and online, with the Stanley Picker Trust also generously increasing their support for the work we do, and as we initiate an exciting new collaboration with the Jerwood Charitable Foundation to further expand our work into the digital sphere.”

Originally shown at the venue in Kingston upon Thames, the Stanley Picker Gallery’s commissions have been seen by audiences nationally and internationally, the past year alone witnessing Stanley Picker Fellowship commissions by Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price,  designer Marloes ten Bhömer and artist Andy Holden  presented to audiences at Whitechapel Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum and Spike Island Bristol.  Current Fine Art Fellow Laura Oldfield Ford recently exhibited at Tate Britain in the highly acclaimed Ruin Lust, whilst Design Fellow Fabien Cappello is currently showing in Useful & Beautiful at the Geffrye Museum, London.

The Stanley Picker Gallery also receives dedicated funding from Kingston University itself to deliver an extensive programme of Participation activities with schools and other partner organisations in the local area, to engage local residents, children and young people in its broad programme of exhibitions and events.

Stanley Picker Gallery is delighted to announce the appointments of artist Cally Spooner and designer Yuri Suzuki as Stanley Picker Fellows 2016, at Kingston University London.

Cally Spooner (b. 1983) is an artist and writer born in London, where she is currently based. Her work consists of media installations, essays, novels and live performances such as radio broadcasts, plays and a musical, which grapple with the organisation and dispossession of that which lives. She often uses rehearsals, or the episodic form, as a means, and an end, in itself. Recent solo shows include New Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Aspen Art Museum, and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2015). Her essays/writing have appeared in Flash Art and Artforum; her book of scripts is published by SlimVolume (2016) and she is the author of the novel, Collapsing In Parts published by Mousse.

Over the course of her Fellowship research, Spooner will seek a cross-disciplinary exchange with Kingston University’s Schools of Humanities; Performance and Screen Studies; and the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), to unpack the politics, ethics and economics of collaboration in the creative industries. Operating both practically and academically, her Fellowship will become groundwork for the formation of a more or less functional performance company. Through study-groups, networking, publishing and knowledge building, Spooner’s research activities will explore and test  models  of generative, collective production,  alongside analysis of contemporary states of management and power; directorial presence, authorial absence, the trusting in (or harnessing of) the genius of one’s ‘cast’.

Yuri Suzuki (b. 1980) is a sound designer and electronic musician born in Tokyo and based in London. Suzuki’s projects explore the realm of sound, interaction and electronics through designed objects. Since 2013, he teaches at the Royal College of Art in London and works as an associate for Disney, New Radiophonic Workshop and Teenage Engineering. Suzuki is the founder of Yuri Suzuki Ltd (YS Lab) – an R&D consultancy working with companies including Google, Panasonic and Disney. His works OTOTO and Colour Chasers were acquired by MoMA in 2014.

Suzuki’s design practice raises questions around our relationship to sound, and how music and sound may affect people’s minds. He is interested in how contemporary products and infrastructures remain often under-developed in their sound features, while being highly refined in terms of visual design and technology. Suzuki will use his Stanley Picker Fellowship to work with Kingston University’s teaching staff and students to investigate the psychological and physical agency of sound and explore how more thoughtfully designed soundscapes could improve our daily lives. By staging a series of design experiments, workshops and interviews in collaboration with sound practitioners, including musician Matthew Herbert among others, Suzuki will seek to develop a number of designed products proposing new ways in which sound can inhabit the everyday.

Kingston University Researcher and Dorich House Museum Curator, Dr Fiona Fisher has been shortlisted for a major Arts and Humanities Research Council prize for A Modernist in Suburbia,  made in collaboration with artist-filmmaker Gilly Booth of hijack, which  examines the work of architect Kenneth Wood and features the impeccable late-modernist house he designed for Stanley Picker in Kingston upon Thames in the late 1960s. Directed by filmmaker Gilly Booth, Dr Fisher wrote and researched the film which has been nominated for the Anniversary Award – Best AHRC/AHRB funded film since 1998. The film was publicly premiered at the Stanley Picker Gallery in 2012 as part of The Occupants: Contemporary Perspectives on the Picker House alongside works by artists Cullinan Richards, Matthew Darbyshire, Andy Holden, Elizabeth Price and Bridget Smith and writer/curator Tom Morton.

The AHRC’s Research in Film Awards mark their tenth anniversary and are designed to recognise the creative and innovative work being undertaken at the interface between research and film by world-leading researchers, practitioners and filmmakers. The winners will be announced on November 12 2015 at a special ceremony at the British Film Institute in London.

Kingston University’s School of Architecture & Landscape has received a nomination for the  Temple Gate  project by undergraduate students last summer led by tutors Takeshi Hayatsu and Simon Jones. The Stanley Picker Gallery collaborated with the students who designed and constructed a five metre tall Temple Gate in the grounds of the University’s Dorich House Museum. One of 38 projects nominated for the inaugural Rose Awards, launched to celebrate staff success. The Temple Gate project has been been nominated under the category Exceptional Contribution to the Community & Environment. Awards will be announced on 19 October 2015.

Artist Nicole Wermers has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2015. Her nomination follows the solo presentation Infrastruktur at Herald St Gallery in London and the completion of Wermers’s recent Stanley Picker Fellowship with her exhibition  The London Shape  in Spring 2014. Wermers is due to produce a Stanley Picker Gallery Edition to conclude her Fellowship, the details of which will be available over the coming weeks.

Stanley Picker Fellow Elizabeth Price was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize in 2012.

The Turner Prize is awarded to a British artist under 50 for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the preceding year. The 2015 exhibition will be presented at the Tramway in Glasgow, an international art-space renowned for commissioning, producing and presenting contemporary arts projects.

The members of the Turner Prize 2015 Jury are:
Mr Alistair Hudson, Director, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
Jan Verwoert, Critic and Curator
Ms Joanna Mytkowska, Director, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art
Ms Kyla McDonald, Artistic Director, Glasgow Sculpture Studios
The jury is chaired by Dr Penelope Curtis, Director of Tate Britain.

The winner of the prize will be announced on 7 December 2015.

Editioned Work for Refurbished Café

Stanley Picker Fellow Nicole Wermers has completed a commissioned work for Tate Britain consisting of a ‘double-fronted’ teaspoon designed for public use within their newly refurbished Café, Members Room and Whistler Restaurant, reopening in November 2013. The spoon will be used alongside an otherwise regular cutlery in the manner of an endless edition.

Entitled Manners the unusual spoon has two bowls, one at each end of the handle, subtly different in size and design to reflect the shape of spoons at different periods of modernity. 20th Century art has a strong connection with cafés and the associated bohemian culture and its rituals. The spoon is at the centre of that ritual, being the tool to mix together its ingredients. Manners is a conceptual and sculptural intervention within the transitional spaces of Tate Britain which play host to the intimate, everyday ritual of preparing and drinking tea and coffee.

The transformation of the oldest parts of Tate Britain by architects Caruso St John will combine striking new architectural elements and the revealing of beautiful original features throughout the building. With this in mind, Manners is a deliberately subtle intervention, which plays on the idea of “Kunst am Bau” ad absurdum and questions the nature of an artist commission in a museum’s café. In deliberate contrast to the Rex Whistler mural, which wraps around the room and envelops the visitor, Manners is almost invisible upon entering the spaces and yet most diners will come into physical contact with the work.

Wermers’ ongoing interest in the transitional public spaces of cities, such as museums and department stores, lately focused on cafés informed by a period of residency in Rome, that resulted in an exhibition Il Dehors(2012) at the Villa Massimo/German Academy in Rome. An installation of borrowed and rented outdoor furniture and table accessories of various Roman bars and restaurants, the identically set-up units, complete with sugar and napkin dispensers, table cloths and ashtrays, crowded the gallery space as if were a public piazza while reflecting on the way public space is structured and commodified.

For her current Stanley Picker Fellowship at Kingston University, Wermers is developing a body of new work, furthering her research interests around issues of design and public space, towards a solo exhibition at the Gallery in Spring 2014.

The new spoon will be unveiled at the re-opening of Tate Britain on 19 November 2013.

Artist Elizabeth Price (Stanley Picker Fellow 2005) has been awarded the Turner Prize  2012 for her solo exhibition earlier this year at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, including the video installation The Woolworths Choir of 1979. Currently showing at Tate Britain, the work deftly juxtaposes a study of ecclesiastical architecture with an archive of pop performances and footage of the real life story of a devastating fire in a Manchester branch of Woolworths that killed 10 people.

Awarded the prize by actor Jude Law at a ceremony on Monday 3 December, in her acceptance speech Price commented  that her career as an artist would not have been possible without the ongoing support of public institutions who have supported her practice over the years. Price received the Stanley Picker Fellowship in 2005 and has recently said of the  experience that  it gave her “a really significant opportunity, early on in my video work, when I wasn’t an obvious suspect”.

The artist’s Stanley Picker Fellowship commission At The House of Mr X (2007), filmed entirely on location at the Picker House on Kingston Hill (pictured above) was exhibited again recently at the Gallery as part of the exhibition The Occupants: Contemporary Perspectives on the Picker House.

Stanley Picker Gallery Director David Falkner says of the news:
“Elizabeth’s Turner Prize win is fantastic news for the Stanley Picker Gallery here at Kingston University, and a clear message that we are selecting the right candidates to join our Fellowships programme. In a year that both Price and current Fellow Andy Holden were also granted the Paul Hamlyn Award, and previous Design Fellows El Ultimo Grito received the London Design Medal, Price’s Turner Prize win marks the end of a spectacular year for the Stanley Picker Fellowships, affirming the significance of our programme in supporting the very best art and design practitioners in developing their careers.”

The Turner Prize exhibition is open at Tate Britain until 6 January 2013, with Price  showing alongside fellow nominees Paul Noble, Luke Fowler and Spartacus Chetwynd.

Our congratulations to current Stanley Picker Fellow Andy Holden and 2005 Fellowship recipient Elizabeth Price, also nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, who have both received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists 2012. The announcements were made during a recent ceremony at the organization’s new headquarters in London King’s Cross. The artists are showing together at the Stanley Picker Gallery until 24 November 2012 as part of the exhibition The Occupants: Contemporary Perspectives on the Picker House.

Holden and Price join visual artists Ed Atkins, Pavel Bchler and Lis Rhodes, as well as composers Steve Beresford, Eliza Carthy and Edmund Finnis, to each receive 50,000 over three years to spend as they wish.

“Since 1994, PHF has given nearly 4m to artists and composers to buy some time, pay some bills, dream some dreams. Its one of the best investments weve made,” commented PHF chair Jane Hamlyn, Paul Hamlyn’s daughter and the founding director of Frith Street Gallery.

Previous beneficiaries of the grant include, for the visual arts, Mark Leckey, Tomma Abts, Jeremy Deller, Ben Rivers, and Rose Wylie.

Two previous Stanley Picker Fellows have been given prestigious accolades this year, confirming their individual contributions to the worlds of fine art and design and bringing prominence to the Gallery’s Fellowship programme through their developing career trajectories.

Stanley Picker Fellow (2005) Elizabeth Price has been nominated forthe Turner Prize 2012for her solo exhibition earlierthisyear at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.

Currently showing at Tate Britain alongside fellow nominees Paul Noble, Luke Fowler and Spartacus Chetwynd is Price’s filmThe Woolworths Choir of 1979, a work partly based upon the real story of a fire in a Manchester branch of Woolworths more than twenty years ago. In 2007 the artist presented At the House of Mr X for her Fellowship exhibition at the Stanley Picker Gallery. Inspired by the Picker House, the film is currently being shown as part of The Occupants exhibition dedicated to arts patron Stanley Picker on the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

The Turner Prize 2012 is open at Tate Britain until 6 January 2013. Elizabeth Price will be discussing her video installations at Tate Britain on Tuesday 13 November at 6.30pm. The winner will be announced on Monday 3 December 2012duringa live broadcast by Channel4.

The very first Stanley Picker Fellows in Design in 2004, El Ultimo Grito have now been awarded the London Design Medal 2012, given each year to an individual/s who have made a significant contribution to design and to London. Previous recipients include Marc Newson, Paul Smith, Zaha Hadid, and Thomas Heatherwick.

El Ultimo Grito’s Roberto Feo, Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, and Rosario Hurtado, herself a Kingston University alumna, were both presented with the award at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as part of the London Design Festival 2012, now in its sixth year.The 2012 panel included Alexander Payne, Head of Design at Phillips de Pury, gallery owner and curator Libby Sellers, Martin Roth, Director of V&A, Gwyn Miles, Director of Somerset House and Ron Arad, winner in 2011.

El Ultimo Grito are also currently showing at Derwent Gallery London as part ofa programme of exhibitionsentitled Exchanges Around Construction curated by Andrew Bick. Their exhibition Designing An Echo runs until 24 November 2012.