Opening Tomorrow
TEN LONDON
ARTISTS RESPOND TO MODERN ITALIAN ART
Another
Country: London
Painters in Dialogue with Modern Italian Art brings together the work of ten highly respected London-based
artists. It will be on view at the Estorick
Collection of Modern Italian Art, 39a Canonbury Square, London
N1 from 28 April to 20 June 2010.
The artists have formed a group based on
friendship rather than any shared style or technique, and have shown together previously
at a group show held in Italy
in 2007 curated by Lino Mannocci. For this exhibition, each member of the
group has opened a visual dialogue with a particular artist represented in the
Estorick Collection or, in the case of Ida Barbarigo and Filippo de Pisis,
closely connected to those represented.
The approaches taken by these artists to
the project have been varied. Despite exhibiting together in Italy and the
fact that two of the artists (Lino Mannocci and Arturo Di Stefano) are Italian
by birth or parentage, the link between them and their chosen interlocutor is
often understated. Each of the painters involved has written a text for the
exhibition catalogue exploring their relationship with the twentieth-century
Italian artist they have chosen; these links are explored further by Brendan
Prendeville of Goldsmiths College, University
of London, in his catalogue
essay.
Tony
Bevan, who has chosen Giorgio
Morandi, is one of today’s leading figurative painters. His focus on the
vulnerability of the human body and frequent use of his own body in his
painting allies him to such artists as Georg Baselitz, Philip Guston and Arnulf
Rainer. Recently he has also focused on abstracted architectural subjects such
as corridors, rafters and stacked furniture, which often have a disturbing,
uncomfortable presence.
Arturo Di
Stefano’s paintings
– drawing on literary references as diverse as The Odyssey and The
Wasteland – engage in a dialogue with the past while remaining
contemporary in method and execution. From mythological subjects to unpeopled
cityscapes, the world he presents is one of haunting power. Arcades
and corridors are recurring themes in his work, as are holy relics; they
project a silent emblematic presence while also containing an enigmatic
narrative quality. Di Stefano has also chosen Giorgio Morandi as his
‘friendship’ for this exhibition.
Luke
Elwes (Zoran Music) came to
prominence in the early 1990s with a series of exhibitions resulting from his
travels to remote regions, and his paintings are both a distillation of that
experience and a reflection on the passage of time and the trace of history.
His work documents the inner experience of his journeys by exploring the
memories which surface through the act of painting, a process which, for Elwes,
is ‘a continuous process of loss and recovery’.
The paintings and
drawings of Timothy Hyman (Mario
Sironi) create a personal mythology of London,
where he grew up and continues to live. In compositions of visual and
narrative complexity, echoes of Lorenzetti's Well-Governed City may coexist
with the carnivalesque excess of Gillray and Ensor, and the self-interrogation
of Beckmann. Hyman has also worked periodically in India,
closely associated with Bhupen Khakhar and the painters of the Baroda School.
Andrzej
Jackowski’s paintings and
drawings make poetic spaces for and out of memories and desires. In his poetic
canvases people, objects, animals and buildings become containers, places of
temporary refuge. They are places that not only evoke the past but also define
and give form to the present. Jackowski’s chosen artist is Carlo Carrą.
The work of Merlin James (Medardo Rosso) has been
described as ‘post-avant-garde painting’ and his thematic approach
is highly diverse: erotic figuration; land- sea- and skyscape; various
conditions of abstraction; interior and exterior architecture; references and
echoes from past art. This multiplicity is not, however, the result of any
conceptual project, and he has repeatedly affirmed the work’s intuitive
nature and underlying coherence as painting. Collage and cutting-out are
frequently employed, and his concern with the physicality of the painting is
always paramount; each is its own physical world.
Glenys
Johnson (Ida Barbarigo) was
initially involved in performance art as well as painting, touring in the late
1970s with the Theatre of Mistakes. In 1989 she had a solo show at the
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London
and since then has exhibited widely in the UK,
Germany, Italy, Spain
and Russia.
Her works of the 1980s were often politically charged and she has frequently
addressed life in the modern metropolis, as in the recent monochrome canvases
that universalise the cityscape of London
and present the city as a place in flux, either on the point of growth or
collapse.
Alex
Lowery (Filippo de Pisis) examines
the expressive possibilities open to a contemporary figurative painter. He is
best known for the series of over 200 paintings that focus on the small channel
port of West Bay
in Dorset. The results are abstracted,
enigmatic, and deceptively simple and understated. Lowery draws on traditions
of landscape painting as well as diverse contemporary and historic influences,
ranging from Alex Katz to Morandi, from Corot to Dutch 17th century
painting. Recently Lowery has worked from the island
of Portland, and on the west coast of Ireland following a 2008 residency in County Mayo.
The paintings and prints
of Lino Mannocci (Giorgio de
Chirico and Carlo Carrą) have strong roots in the Italian Novecento while their
distinctive narrative quality is informed by his love of literature and
mythology. His transient subjects – sea, smoke, clouds – are
realised with minimal means: a range of whites, soft blues and browns. His
surfaces, always pared down to the simplest forms, are luminous and elegiac.
Thomas
Newbolt’s paintings,
usually centred on the human figure, have a physical urgency that evokes a
powerful response in the viewer. His raw energetic forms, often worked from
life, are steeped in historical and literary references, and draw in particular
on the expressive figuration of Rembrandt, Goya, Daumier and Beckman. Newbolt’s
chosen artist is Marino Marini.
The exhibition represents a coming
together of cultures. It highlights both the parochial nature of much of
painting’s vocabulary and, by contrast, its universal accessibility. As
Brendan Prendeville says in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue: “It
is in painting that the transforming power of art is most evident, for it can
draw on what we might – if we follow Richard Wollheim – regard as a
natural and universal faculty for seeing something as other than it is...
Accepting that this potential in painting is universal, we might encapsulate its
‘Italian’ realisation in an aphorism: painting takes us to another
country.”
For detailed press texts, high-res images and
futher information, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Annie Roper
Sue Bond Public Relations
Hollow Lane Farmhouse, Hollow
Lane, Thurston, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, IP31 3RQ
T: +44 (0) 1359 271085 F: +44 (0) 1359 271934 www.suebond.co.uk
