Henry Moore Institute – 1913: The Shape of Time

22nd November 2012 – 17th February 2013

1913 was an extraordinary year in the histories of modern European art, seeing artists explore increasingly experimental ways of representing the complex life of the modern world. This year produced thinking that would resonate its way through the future. It saw Guillaume Apollinaire’s Cubist Painters, the start of the publishing life of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Sergei Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring, Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops and the Armory Show in New York. 1913 witnessed international discussion of the 24-hour clock (which was adopted in France the year before) and the division of the globe into sequential and simultaneous time zones. The dominant theoretical concept of the year was simultaneity, an idea taken by many artists to advocate greater abstraction, multi-perspective viewpoints and simultaneous renditions of memory, intuition and experience. 1913: The Shape of Time investigates how sculpture was uniquely positioned to give shape to such ideas through its materiality, spatiality and power of its ancient figurative traditions.

Display: Helen Chadwick’s ‘Wreaths to Pleasure’ @ Henry Moore Institute

Helen Chadwick, Wreaths to Pleasure, 1992-3. Photo: c. Helen Chadwick Estate.

Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Until 17th February 2013

The Helen Chadwick: ‘Wreaths to Pleasure’ display at the Henry Moore Institute charts the creative and practical processes of ‘Wreaths to Pleasure’ (1992-3), a series of thirteen circular photographs mounted in coloured enamel frames. Each image captures a sculptural composition formed of a heady mix of substances and materials, photographed from above. Delicate flowers are suspended in transient states, poised between life and death, in a variety of organic and toxic liquids ranging from tomato juice to Windolene.

This display presents Helen Chadwick’s (1953-96) preparatory material for the ‘Wreaths’ alongside examples of finished works. It is drawn principally from The Helen Chadwick Archive, which was generously gifted to Leeds Museums and Galleries by the Helen Chadwick Estate in 2002. The Helen Chadwick Archive has been consulted by a number of researchers developing work on Chadwick’s artistic practice, and items from the collection have been loaned to museums around the world.

Talks Series: Sarah Lucas @ Henry Moore Institute

Sarah Lucas, NUD 2, 2009. Photo c. the artist and Sadie Coles HQ London.

12 September – 3 October 2012

During its exhibition Sarah Lucas: Ordinary Things, the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds will be running an exciting programme of lectures that address the sculptural concerns of Lucas’ artistic practice – encompassing topics as varied as multiculturalism, humour, Lucas’ relationship to Modernism, and Freud. Many exhibitions and discussions of Lucas’ work have focused on her as a central player within British art in the 1990s, whereas this programme of academic talks and the exhibition Ordinary Things aim to offer a counter position of the sculptural rather than the sensational. Accompanying the exhibition, the HMI have also produced a fantastic catalogue, with essays by Lisa Le Feuvre, Gilda Williams, Anne M. Wagner and Deborah Orr.

Call for Papers – Photography and the Histories of Sculpture: What role has photography played in forming sculpture’s place in art history?

Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941). Waxing Hot from Eleven Color Photographs. 1966–67/1970/2007

39th Annual AAH conference and bookfair, University of Reading, 11 – 13 April 2013 Conveners: Henry Moore Institute (Lisa Le Feuvre and Jon Wood)

This session asks: what role has photography played in forming sculpture’s place in art history? Working across disciplines and histories of sculpture, exhibition-making, museum studies and photography, this session discusses the formation of art historical narratives, seeking to unpack past narratives and ask questions of how future narratives might be constructed. Addressing the role photographs and their producers have played in articulating sculptures’ meanings and histories, this session invites papers that take stock of the impact of photography on the histories of sculpture and its shaping of understandings of ‘sculpture’ by: communicating exhibitions, collections and works; distributing, interpreting and fictionalising sculpture; developing art historical analyses and positions; enabling research of sculpture.

Exhibition – Sarah Lucas: Ordinary Things

Henry Moore Institute: 19th July – 21st October 2012

Ordinary Things takes Sarah Lucas’ (b. 1962) recent series of sculptures ‘NUDS’ (2009-) as a starting point, looking forward and backward across an artistic practice that has engaged with the possibilities of sculpture for over two decades.

Many exhibitions of Lucas’ work have focused on her as a central player within British art in the 1990s. Ordinary Things offers a counter position: this exhibition of thirty sculptures turns to the sculptural rather that the sensational, positioning Lucas’ work within an art historical lineage that addresses the materials and processes of sculpture. From ‘Big Fat Anarchic Spider’ (1993) to ‘NUDS’ (2009-2010), to ‘Unknown Soldier’ (2003) and ‘Jubilee’ (2012), via ‘Suffolk Bunny’ (1997-2004), ‘Au Naturel’ (1994) and ‘Penetralia’ (2008),Ordinary Things identifies Lucas’ consistent questioning of the definition of sculpture. Lucas works with the ‘ordinary things’ that form our surroundings and assumptions.

Michael Dean, Ed Atkins and Becky Beasley @ The Henry Moore Institute

The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds has announced a series of events for May/June 2012. The series runs alongside the current exhibition curated by Michael Dean, for which he has commissioned new work for the Institute that re-imagines Galleries 1,2 & 3, and involved inviting artists artists to make use of the exhibition space and his sculptures, as projection screens and sound stages. In May Ed Atkins is Dean’s guest, and in June, Becky Beasley.

Ed Atkins: A Primer for Cadavers 23rd May 2012: Atkins will screen a selection of his high definition videos on to the surface of Michael Dean’s large sculpture ‘health (working title)’. Atkins conjures surface, substance and embodied frequencies from the digital ether. His videos push to the peak of representation that which is both preposterously life-like and utterly dead.

Becky Beasley, in collaboration with Chris Sharp: 13 Pieces, 17 Feet 6th June 2012: Inspired by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s extraordinary 1878 panoramic photograph of San Francisco, and performed by writer, performer and sound artist Melanie Wilson, this monologue in thirteen parts uses multiple voices to follow an alternating structure between historical fictions and abstract texts.

Discussion: On Sculpture in Art Magazines @ Henry Moore Institute

29th February 2012, Henry Moore Institute Library, 6.00pm – 7.30pm

This event with David Briers, Anthony Davies and Jo Melvin will discuss art magazines in the 1960s and 1970s (complimenting the United Enemies exhibition currently running at the Henry Moore Institute) as a crucial site for the circulation of ideas about sculpture, as vehicles that used their pages as sites for wrestling with the problems of sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. This is no charge for this event but booking is essential as places are limited. Please contact Kirstie Gregory - kirstie@henry-moore.org

Events Announcement for Henry Moore Institute

The Henry Moore Institute’s United Enemies film screenings , Wednesdays 1, 8 and 15 February 2012, 6pm, at Leeds Art Gallery Lecture Theatre

As part of our current exhibition United Enemies: The Problem of Sculpture in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, the Henry Moore Institute presents three film screenings. United Enemies examines the problem of sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s, presenting work by over fifty artists made in a period when the very idea of sculpture was radically contested.

Each screening highlights the three key provocations that organise this exhibition: ‘Manual Thinking’, ‘Standing’ and ‘Groundwork’, presenting rarely screened films made by artists in the exhibition alongside radical and influential work produced by British experimental filmmakers of the period. The series features live expanded cinema works performed in person by David Dye and Malcolm Le Grice and the guest attendance of Sebastian Boyle of The Boyle Family.

Wednesday 1 February 2012 6 – 8 pm
 ‘Manual Thinking’ 
Featuring ‘Western Reversal,’ a Super-8 film performance by David Dye.
Films by John Blake, Shirley Cameron & Roland Miller, David Crosswaite, Peter Gidal, John Hilliard, Derek Jarman, David Lamelas, Liliane Lijn, Barry Martin, Paul Neagu and William Raban.

Call for Papers: Branching Out – Botany and the Sculptural Object

Yves Klein, Tree - Large Blue Sponge, 1962

Conference to be held 27th October 2012; Call for Papers deadline 2 April 2012

This conference organised by the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, seeks to explore how botanical imagery, fantastical and decorative or realistic and pedagogic, has formed a powerful undercurrent in European sculpture and engagement with the object since the seventeenth century, inspiring artworks ranging from Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (1622-5) to the relief sculpture of Gilbert Bayes’ The Lure of the Pan Pipes (1932-33). Often expressing a multiplicity of ideas about nature, the perennial appeal of botanical symbolism to sculptors has resided in its ability to negotiate a complex network of meanings, standing at the interstice between the sacred and profane; mysticism and science; conservation and consumption; colonization and transplantation; growth and decay.

Discussion: United Enemies @ Henry Moore Institute

Gathering of artists participating in 'Arte Inglese Oggi' in Trafalgar Square, 1975

Event at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, January 18th 2012, 2pm-4pm

This discussion event is a unique opportunity for British art researchers to view the current United Enemies exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds with the curator of the show, Jon Wood, and some of the artists whose work is on display, including Shirley Cameron, Paul de Monchaux, Garth Evans, Barry Martin and Leonard McComb.

United Enemies examines the problem of sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s, presenting work by over fifty artists made in a period when the very idea of sculpture was radically contested. Cutting across practices, institutions, publications and exhibitions, the exhibition begins with Roelof Louw’s ‘Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges)’ (1967): a work containing over 6,000 oranges painstakingly composed in order to be physically participated in and enjoyed – the pyramid depletes as visitors help themselves to oranges. Three provocations organise this exhibition: ‘Manual Thinking’, ‘Standing’ and ‘Groundwork’. Discussions will focus on these concerns and will pay particular attention to the art educational contexts of sculptures exhibited.  Refreshments will be provided following the discussion. This event is part of the Institute’s current research into sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s.

The galleries of the Henry Moore Institute are open until 9pm on Wednesday evenings. This is no charge for this event but booking is essential. Please contact Kirstie Gregory – kirstie@henry-moore.org