Search results for ""whitechapel gallery""

The perfect primer on acclaimed French artist Sophie Calle. Sophie Calle is a French writer, photographer, installation artist and conceptual artist. Her work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is renowned for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives, which she has deployed in her acclaimed works Suite Venitienne, The Hotel and Address Book. She has had major exhibitions all over the world, including at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and has worked closely with the writer Paul Auster. The Guardian called her ‘the Marcel Duchamp of dirty laundry’, and she was among the names in Blake Gopnik's list 'The 10 Most Important Artists of Today', with Gopnik arguing, 'It is the unartiness of Calle's work — its refusal to fit any of the standard pigeonholes, or over anyone's sofa — that makes it deserve space in museums.'

Read more less

Bryan Robertson (1925-2002) was the greatest director the Tate Gallery never had. In 1952, at the age of 27, and against formidable competition (which included David Sylvester and Lawrence Gowing), he became Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, a post he held until 1969. While there he effected a revolution in the British museum world, bringing the more innovative and radical American and European contemporary artists to the UK, as well as programming a series of exhibitions devoted to British artists in mid-career. He was the first to show Pollock, Rothco, Rauschenberg and Johns in England, matching this with historical re-evaluations of Turner, Stubbs, Bellotto and Rowlandson. Among Europeans he showed Mondrian, de Stäel, Malevich and Poliakoff , and the English artists included Barbara Hepworth, Alan Davie, Ceri Richards and Keith Vaughan. Among younger painters and sculptors he identified the New Generation of Caro, Hoyland, Riley, Jones and Caulfield, and stage-managed a flow of exhibitions which transformed the Whitechapel and made it the gallery to visit. Robertson was a man of vision and flair, and this book celebrates his lasting infl uence over the way we look at and think about art, as witnessed through the words of his friends and contemporaries and in excerpts from his own written works.

Read more less

The most exciting rising stars in contemporary art – who’s who and what’s next – featuring 107 artists born since 1980, as chosen by a new generation of art experts and leaders This stunningly illustrated survey brings together more than 100 of the most innovative and interesting contemporary artists working across all media and spanning the globe. These are tomorrow’s art superstars as chosen by the future leaders of the art world: the curators, writers, and academics with their fingers on the pulse of contemporary art and culture. Artists featured include: Lawrence Abu Hamdan; Farah Al Qasimi; Korakrit Arunanondchai; Firelei Báez; Meriem Bennani; Amoako Boafo; Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley; Jordan Casteel; Jesse Darling; Jadé Fadojutimi; Louis Fratino; Lauren Halsey; Kudzanai-Violet Hwami; Joy Labinjo; Lina Lapelyte; Carolyn Lazard; Ad Minoliti; Tyler Mitchell; Toyin Ojih Odutola; Ima-Abasi Okon; Thao Nguyen Phan; Christina Quarles; Tschabalala Self; Paul Mpagi Sepuya; Shen Xin; Avery Singer; Martine Syms; Salman Toor; Zadie XaThe 100+ nominators originate from institutions including: Baltimore Museum of Art; Bellas Artes Projects (Manila); ESPAC (Mexico City); The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre (Ho Chi Minh City); KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin); MoMA (New York); Museo de Arte Moderno (Medellín); Museums Victoria (Melbourne); RAW Material Company (Dakar); Sharjah Art Foundation; Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong); Tate Modern (London); Whitechapel Gallery (London); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); and X Museum (Beijing)

Read more less

Multiple Exposures – Allen Jones & Photography explores the numerous ways in which artist Allen Jones has engaged with the possibilities of this medium. Historian Philippe Garner has researched Jones’s extensive archive to develop and present the insightful narratives implicit in this remarkable, often surprising selection of images. Studying at Hornsey School of Art, then at the Royal College of Art till 1961, Jones achieved swift success within a dynamic roster of artists celebrated as ‘The New Generation: 1964’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Alongside his practice as a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Jones nurtured an ongoing fascination with photography. This volume – an important addition to the literature on Jones’s oeuvre – reveals how he was first drawn as a student to the camera’s potential, making his earliest experiments in black and white. Through the sixty-plus years of Jones’s career – using camera and, more recently, iPad, and iPhone – photography has become ever-more integrated within his wider practice as an artist. We observe his incorporation of ‘found’ photographs within his early collaged works; we discover the photographs he has taken as a visual ledger of all that intrigues him; we see a telling selection of the imagery that he has collected, mostly drawn from vernacular sources, such as post cards, newspaper cuttings, and magazine tear-sheets; we find his playful images of his studio and its juxtapositions; and we follow his investigation of the ways in which his paintings and sculptures can interact and invite fresh readings when transmuted into photographs. The images in Multiple Exposures, mostly hitherto unpublished, are supported by an introductory text by Philippe Garner and by revelatory chapter introductions and pertinent pull-quotes by Allen Jones. The dynamic design of the book is by the legendary graphic artist David Hillman.

Read more less

Thirty-five years of South African artist William Kentridge’s dynamic, cross-genre art, with essays by Ann McCoy, Zakes Mda, and Ed Schad, a conversation between the artist and Walter Murch, and an unpublished lecture by Kentridge. This far-reaching book presents Kentridge’s dynamic art practice, which originates in charcoal drawing and expands into intersections with film, sculpture, opera and theater performances, printmaking and many other mediums. The volume is organized chronologically and thematically, emphasizing Kentridge’s destabilizing of South African and global narratives through openness to uncertainty, the generative power of the artist’s studio and perpetual change, all as conditions for illuminating repressed and silenced voices in historical records. An essay by curator Ed Schad is presented along with studio photography, archival material and illuminating illustrations of Kentridge’s work, joining essays by globally recognized literary figures and thinkers Zakes Mda and Ann McCoy. Notably, the volume features a conversation between Kentridge and the famous film and sound editor Walter Murch, as well as a never-before-published lecture by the artist. The work of William Kentridge (born 1955) has been seen in museums and galleries around the world since the 1990s, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Musée du Louvre in Paris, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, the Kunstmuseum in Basel and Zeitz MOCAA and the Norval Foundation in Cape Town. Opera productions include Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Shostakovich’s The Nose and Alban Berg’s operas Lulu and Wozzeck. In 2016 Kentridge founded the Centre for Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, a space for responsive thinking and making through experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary art practices. The center hosts an ongoing program of workshops, public performances and mentorship activities.

Read more less

An overview of John Stezaker’s film still collages, this book showcases the evolution of the artist’s relationship with a specific material. Leading British collage and appropriation artist John Stezaker began his ongoing series of film still collages in 1979 – the result of a period that marked a crucial change in the direction of the artist’s work, which had previously been centered around a text-based ‘conceptualism’. The series moves with Stezaker’s changing interests, using stills from classic American-period Hitchcock films as raw material before shifting towards the undistinguishable mass of 1940s and early 1950s low-budget studio films. Featuring collages based on a combination of film still excisions and superimpositions, this ongoing series is catalogued comprehensively for the first time in this volume, which brings together Stezaker’s earliest film still collages with his most recent. Full-colour illustrations are accompanied by an essay by David Campany and a conversation between the critic and the artist. John Stezaker (b.1949, Worcester) is one of the leading artists in contemporary photographic collage and appropriation. Employing vintage photographs, old Hollywood film stills, travel postcards and other printed matter, Stezaker creates small-format collages that bear qualities of Surrealism, Dada and found art. Stezaker studied at the Slade School of Art and has taught at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins School of Art, London. In 2012 he was awarded the Deutsche Börse photography prize following a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. His work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990s and is held in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Arts Council England; and Tate.

Read more less

A forensic conceptualist's inventory of the ordinary and extraordinary lives in a Venetian hotel In 1981 Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid for the Hotel C in Venice, Italy. Stashing her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, she not only cleans and tidies, but sorts through the evidence of the hotel guests' lives. Assigned 12 rooms on the fourth floor, she surveys the state of the guests' bedding, their books, newspapers and postcards, perfumes and cologne, traveling clothes and costumes for Carnival. She methodically photographs the contents of closets and suitcases, examining the detritus in the rubbish bin and the toiletries arranged on the washbasin. She discovers their birth dates and blood types, diary entries, letters from and photographs of lovers and family. She eavesdrops on arguments and love-making. She retrieves a pair of shoes from the wastebasket and takes two chocolates from a neglected box of sweets, while leaving behind stashes of money, pills and jewelry. Her thievery is the eye of the camera, observing the details that were not meant for her, or us, to see. The Hotel now manifests as a book for the first time in English (it was previously included in the book Double Game). Collaborating with the artist on a new design that features enhanced and larger photographs, and pays specific attention to the beauty of the book as an object, Siglio is releasing its third book authored by Calle, after The Address Book (2012) and Suite Vénitienne (2015). Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.

Read more less

Throughout his international career spanning more than thirty years, artist and writer David Batchelor has long been preoccupied with colour. ‘Colour is not just a feature of [my] sculpture or painting,’ he notes, ‘but its central and overriding subject.’ This new publication is devoted to an ongoing series of sculptures titled Concretos. First made in 2011, Concretos combine concrete with a variety of brightly coloured – and often found – materials.The publication features a text by Batchelor charting the origins and development of Concretos. He reveals that the first Concreto was made after encountering coloured glass shards embedded in a concrete wall in the back streets of Palermo. Over time these Concretos, their title a nod to the Latin American art movement to which Batchelor’s work is much indebted, have become more complex adventures in layering, pattern and process. Elements such as acrylic plastic, spray and household gloss paint, steel, fabric and found objects all find themselves set in a concrete base. The most recent works, titled Extra-Concretos (2019–) retain much of the simplicity of the early pieces while working on a much larger scale.In an essay commissioned for the publication, curator Eleanor Nairne considers Concretos in light of their material possibilities. Nairne’s vivid text draws connections between the sculptures and a wide range of art historical and literary references. Some of the playful and sensual characteristics of Batchelor’s artistic vocabulary are considered in relation to floral bouquets, sewing-machines, ice cream and poetry.Architectural historian Adrian Forty’s essay discusses concrete’s physical qualities and relationship with modernity. He notes that the imperfect nature and apparent neutrality of the material is key to its enduring place within architecture, design and in Batchelor’s case, contemporary sculpture. ‘In the Concretos,’ asserts Forty, ‘concrete plays a necessary part in allowing colour to be itself. Present, but at the same time part of the barely noticed, half-invisible infrastructure of the city, concrete’s very neutrality performs an unexpectedly active part in these works.’The publication is edited by David Batchelor and Matt Price, designed by Hyperkit, printed by Park, London, and published by Anomie, London. The publication coincides with the first large-scale survey exhibition of Batchelor’s work taking place at Compton Verney, Warwickshire in 2022. The publication has been supported by Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and Arts Council England.David Batchelor was born in Dundee in 1955 and lives and works in London. In 2013, a major solo exhibition of Batchelor’s two-dimensional work, ‘Flatlands’, was displayed at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and toured to Spike Island, Bristol. Batchelor’s work was included in the landmark group exhibition ‘Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015’ at Whitechapel Gallery, London. ‘My Own Private Bauhaus’, a solo exhibition of sculptures and paintings by Batchelor was presented by Ingleby Gallery during the Edinburgh Art Festival, 2019. Between 2017 and 2020 a large-scale work by Batchelor was displayed in the collection of Tate Modern. He is represented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, and Galeria Leme, São Paulo. Batchelor’s portfolio also includes a number of major temporary and permanent artworks in the public realm including a chromatic clock titled ‘Sixty Minute Spectrum’ installed in the roof of the Hayward Gallery, London.‘Chromophobia’, Batchelor’s book on colour and the fear of colour in the West, was published by Reaktion Books (2000), and is now available in ten languages. His more recent book, 'The Luminous and the Grey' (2014), is also published by Reaktion. In 2008 he was commissioned to edit ‘Colour’ an anthology of writings on colour from 1850 to the present published by Whitechapel/MIT Press.

Read more less