Exhibition: R. B. Kitaj – Obsessions

Until 16th June 2013, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

This exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, subtitled ‘Analyst for Our Time’, will feature over 70 major paintings, sketches and prints presenting an overview of all periods of Kitaj’s extensive oeuvre from the 1960s to his death in 2007. It will consider Kitaj’s early presentations of a fragmented world, reflecting his interest in art history and intellectuals such as ‘Aby Warburg’, and his paintings and collages addressing issues of European politics, philosophy and literature such as ‘The Murder of Rosa Luxembourg’ and ‘The Rise of Fascism’. It will also include Kitaj’s remarkable portraits of personal friends and figures he admired such as his portrait of David Hockney, ‘The Neo-Cubist’, and fictional characters from literature such as ‘The Arabist’ His fascination with the relationship between the body, sexuality and history is presented in a series of powerful paintings of bathers including ‘Self-Portrait as a Woman’ and ‘The Sensualist’.

Conference: The End of an Era? New Perspectives on Edwardian Art

Friday, May 10, 2013, 5:30 pm–7:30 pm, and Saturday, May 11, 2013, 9:30 am–5:45 pm
, Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven

Keynote Lecture: The Rhythm of Time in the Arts of Edwardian Britain, Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art

This international symposium coincides with the Center’s major exhibition Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, curated by Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art, and Andrea Wolk Rager, Visiting Assistant Professor, Case Western Reserve University. Although King Edward VII reigned for only nine years, he gave his name to an era remarkable for its opulence and its contradictions. This symposium will offer a forum for considering the state of the field of interdisciplinary studies of the Edwardian period. Presenting a series of position papers in response to key themes, speakers will examine why the Edwardian era continues to exert a powerful afterlife and provide new interpretations of the art of the period. Participants will also have the opportunity to tour the exhibition with the curators. Speakers include: Cassandra Albinson (Yale Center for British Art), Tim Barringer (Yale University), Grace Brockington (University of Bristol), Michael Hatt (University of Warwick), Linda Ferber (New-York Historical Society), Pamela Fletcher (Bowdoin College), Barbara Gallati (Independent Curator), Morna O’Neill (Wake Forest University), Susan Sidlauskas (Rutgers University), Sarah Turner (University of York), and Alison Inglis (University of Melbourne).

The symposium is free and open to the public. Advance registration is recommended. Register online through May 8. On-site registration will begin at 9:00 am on May 11. For further information, please contact Research (ycba.research@yale.edu).

 

Exhibition – Close to the Heart: British Miniatures

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, until 5 May 2013

17th- to 19th-Century British Miniatures from UK Private Collections. Small masterpieces of British portraiture from two celebrated UK private collections – including a tiny portrait mounted on a finger-ring, of 18th-century British actor impresario David Garrick – are displayed in this exhibition, some for the first time ever. The exhibits range in date from about 1600 to 1850, and include exquisite examples by such leading names in the field as Nicholas Hilliard, Isaac and Peter Oliver, George Engleheart, Richard Cosway, John Smart and Sir William Ross. Together they will provide one of the finest displays of miniatures to be seen anywhere in the UK outside London. This exhibition is curated by Robert Wenley, and has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Bonhams.

New Title: Rose Finn-Kelcey

In the 1970s Rose Finn-Kelcey became a central figure in the emerging communities of performance and Feminist art in the UK. This book, published by Ridinghouse and released by Cornerhouse books in February 2013, is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist. It documents more than four decades of her art and includes over 150 illustrations, as well as important essays by Guy Brett, Sarah Kent and Michael Stanley. The complex thinking embodied in her work has touched on such themes as power and the dilemmas of mastery; the myth of the artist; the gaining of a voice; the deceptions of value; the nature of collaboration; the surrogate performer; spirituality; longing and death. The performance Glory (1983) was a compelling reaction to the Falklands War, while Bureau de Change (1987) was a response to the auction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers – a striking visual polemic against dehumanised values as well as a complex meditation on art and creativity. Finn-Kelcey’s work featured in a recent exhibition, alongside the Feminist performance artists Rose English, Carolee Schneemann and Alexis Hunter at the Richard Saltoun Gallery  earlier this year, entitled Taking Matters into Our Own Hands.

Exhibition: Elizabeth Frink – A Retrospective

Elizabeth Frink, Riace Figure III, 1986.

Until 21st April 2013, The Lightbox, Woking

The first Elisabeth Frink retrospective since the artist’s death in 1993 is currently on display at The Lightbox in Woking. This show of her works on paper and her distinctive pitted bronzes includes the most well-known subjects – men, horses, birds and religious objects. The artist, who grew up in wartime near an airbase in Suffolk, created some of the most evocative images of masculinity of the 20th century – anonymous warrior figures often sporting goggles, helmets or masks. They are barrel-chested, long-limbed and handsome, and variously appear conflicted, vulnerable, gung-ho and, in the case of the monumental Goggle Head busts, other-worldly, aloof and threatening. There are a range of talks and events throughout March and April at the gallery in connection with the exhibition.

Exhibition: John Piper – The Mountains of Wales

John Piper, Rocks at Capel Curig, c.1950. © The John Piper Estate.

The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, Until 7th April 2013

John Piper began to draw and paint the landscape of North Wales in the middle of the Second World War. He was sent to Snowdonia in 1943 by the War Artists Advisory Committee, and rented a succession of cottages there between 1945 and 1956; two of them, at Maes Caradog and Pentre, situated in the awe inspiring glacial valley of Nant Ffrancon. For Piper, the result of this relocation was a shift from picturing the landscape of the lowland countryside to that of the sublime Welsh mountains. The large drawings and paintings that he made in Snowdonia are amongst his strongest works and tell of Piper’s close understanding of the landscape of that place, and his connection with the rock and sky surrounding him. This exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery has been brought together by the National Museum of Wales from the collection of a private owner who has built up a wonderful group of works focused on this subject. The Whitworth will augment the exhibition with its own dramatic work by Piper of The Slopes of Glyder Fawr, 1947.

Seminar / Exhibition / Performance – Invisible Knowledge: Collaborative Art Practice

Kingston University, 22nd – 23rd March

This two day event focuses on the collaborative work of the leading Irish Live Artist Áine Phillips, showcasing her work with collaborators Alex Chase White (UK), Rachel Davies (UK), Vivienne Dick (Ireland), Spike (UK) and Manuel Vason (Italy/UK). Funded by Culture Ireland and staged by Kingston’s University Visual & Material Culture Research Centre, the programme features three forms of artistic collaboration: a display of photography and film, a performance by Áine Phillips & Spike, and a public seminar.

Exhibition: Sylvia Sleigh

Tate Liverpool, until 3 May

Although widely over-looked in the field of modern and contemporary art, Sylvia Sleigh was a realist painter who became an important part of New York’s feminist art scene in the 1960s and beyond. She was particularly well-known for her explicit paintings of male nudes, which challenged the art historical tradition of male artists painting female subjects as objects of desire. The exhibition at Tate Liverpool will be Sleigh’s first UK retrospective, and the largest exhibition of her work to date.

Sleigh trained in painting at Brighton art School at a time when female art students were, as she recalled, ‘treated in a second-rate fashion’. Despite having a solo exhibition at Kensington Art Gallery in 1953, she received little public recognition until her move to New York in the 1960s. There Sleigh and her husband, the art critic and Guggenheim curator Lawrence Alloway, together created a home that welcomed artists, writers and musicians, many of whom Sleigh painted. These works radiate a sense of friendship and emotional attachment between the artist and her sitters, in addition to presenting an array of significant cultural figures from the time.    

Closing Soon: Turner’s Sussex at Petworth House

Petworth House and Park, until March 13

Turner’s Sussex is the first exhibition to examine and celebrate the artist’s work in the county of Sussex. View around 40 carefully selected exhibits, mainly drawings and watercolours, which represent the wide-ranging importance of Sussex to his art. There is also the rare opportunity to view the Old Library, used by Turner as a studio and not normally open to visitors. The works on display are all loans, and are drawn from major national and regional collections, as well as from private owners. Highlights include the unprecedented opportunity to see the pencil sketch of Petworth House, which Turner made in the park in 1809. See it alongside the finished oil painting he made from it – the 3rd Earl of Egremont’s first commission from the artist. Other exhibits represent both iconic and rarely seen works. They feature views of Arundel, Brighton, Chichester, Hastings, Lewes, Rye and Shoreham among many Sussex locations. Included in the Petworth section is a group of the famous small watercolour sketches on blue paper. Now largely held at Tate Britain, they were made of the house and park in 1827. Those selected for Turner’s Sussex did not feature in our 2002 Turner at Petworth exhibition, and some haven’t been exhibited for many years.

Exhibition: William Scott

Tate St Ives, until 6 May 2013

February 2013 marks the centenary of the birth of William Scott (1913–1989). Across a career spanning six decades, Scott produced an extraordinary body of work that has secured his reputation as one of the leading British painters of his generation. Exhibiting in America and Europe from the early 1950s, Scott is renowned for his powerful handling of paint in his exploration of still life, landscape and nude, and of the unstable boundaries between them. This will be the first major showing of the artist in the UK for over 20 years.