Arts Council Collection Acquisitions 2013 –14
Arts Council Collection Acquisitions 2013 –14
Contents Phillip Allen
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Ed Atkins
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Pablo Bronstein
Members of the Acquisitions Committee 2013–14 Jill Constantine, Acting Head, Arts Council Collection Caroline Douglas (April – September 2013) Peter Heslip, Director, Visual Arts, Arts Council England Natalie Rudd, Curator, Arts Council Collection Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery
The external advisers to the Acquisitions Committee for 2013–14: Lisa Beauchamp Martin Herbert Alex Farquharson Elizabeth Price
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John Brown
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Chris Clinton
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Georgia Hayes
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Raphael Hefti
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Roger Hiorns
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Lucy Hutchinson
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Ian Kiaer
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Anja Kirschner & David Panos
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Katrina Palmer
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Laure Prouvost
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James Richards
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Emily Speed
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Barbara Walker
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Stuart Whipps
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Phillip Allen Phillip Allen‘s paintings are the result of a continuous practice of sketching. Working on a small scale, the sketches chart the inception and development of his abstract forms and arrangements. He then develops these ideas into distinctive paintings, executed predominantly in oil on board. To create an illusion of perspective, Allen often applies thick globules of paint to the borders of the work, creating a three-dimensional frame for the imagery within. These impasto borders operate as a skin or marker between the outside and inside spaces of the paintings; defying the traditional the picture frame or encroach into the picture with an overwhelming presence. Within these borders, Allen’s lucid paint strokes evoke motifs of hallucinatory and kaleidoscopic dreamscapes. The imagery in 4th degrees communication styles directly by the mosaic ceiling of the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence. The work has used the visceral and graphic properties of paint as the crux of the paradox between representation and process.
4th degrees communication styles, 2011 Oil on board 153 Ă— 121 cm
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Ed Atkins Ed Atkins’ Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths is a follow-up to his pilot project, Material Witness (or A Liquid Cop). Here, Atkins’ shifty, protean protagonist is not so much undercover as in too deep – his identity hidden; his body immersed and submerged. of the ocean, he is the unquiet voice of the repressed, the face of the unfathomable (albeit a face that is framed and sometimes lost behind its mass of tangled, swirling hair). Netted by digital motion capture techniques and embellished through computer sentation are vividly entwined in this image, lending Atkins’ investigations a material, almost forensic resonance. Animators grail) of computer graphic verisimilitude. Get it right and your character is immediately believable. Get it wrong and it is an
of Atkins’ work, however, that frisson of indeterminacy lingers indelibly, haunting and troubling the mind.
Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, 2013 Single screen HD projection with 5.1 surround sound 12 minutes 51 seconds Edition H/C Commissioned by Jerwood Visual Arts and Film and Video Umbrella for the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards. With support from Arts Council England. Extracts of The Morning Roundup by Gilbert Sorrentino used with permission from and thanks to Christopher Sorrentino.
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Pablo Bronstein Pablo Bronstein approaches his interest in architecture through a wide range of media – from drawing, sculpture and installation to performance. One of his key interests is how architecture has the ability to intervene in personal identity and inform our movements, behaviours, and social customs. He states that although his practice is drawing, it is the conceptual implication of the work that is the most important aspect. Museum Section with Artwork was commissioned for the Hayward Touring exhibition Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing, curated by Brian Dillon, and encapsulates the many spectacular and bizarre objects within the exhibition, in an imaginary building. Trojan Horse is a video work that was produced for Pablo Bronstein’s postgraduate diploma show at Goldsmiths College, London.
Museum Section with Artwork, 2013 Ink and watercolour on paper 150 × 230 cm Trojan Horse, 2005 Video transferred to DVD 6 minutes 35 seconds Edition AP Gift of the artist 2013
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John Brown The Grass Series is an attempt to render photographically the essence of Chinese calligraphy and the writings of the New England Transcendentalists. Transcendentalism is an American literary, political, and philosophical movement, which developed in the early nineteenth century in reaction to rationalism. Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living.
12 Photographs from The Grass Series, 1980 Chloro-Bromide photographic prints 14.8 Ă— 20.9 cm Gift of the artist 2013
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John Brown
”The Professors Series started with my reading of the religious know the meaning and form of Christianity and they were referred to as ‘Professors of the Truth’. I consider that environmentalists have now taken on this mantel of truth and so I created a series
Some years earlier I had seen a 1930s photograph by Paul Nash, or a contemporary of his, of three balanced stones on a beach that had stuck in my mind. I took a lead from this and created a series of balanced sculptures. The pieces range from 2ft to 5ft in height and are precariously balanced; too much movement in the studio would bring them down. They deliberately have a white, featureless background. The purpose of the works was to give three-dimensional form to the idea of balance and moderation, as without it things fall apart.” Text courtesy of the artist.
4 Photographs from The Professors Series, 1989 Chloro-Bromide photographic prints 21.5 × 16.3 cm Gift of the artist 2013
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Chris Clinton Chris Clinton uses familiar objects and reclaimed materials to create artworks that refer obliquely to contemporary popular culture and our disregard for out-dated media. Nascar # Kevin Richards and Spiderman belong to a series of reworked readymade novelty paper coil dartboards. These paper unwound and then rewound by hand, so the artist physically alters the object through a preconceived process. This act both removes the initial object and replaces it with a new entity, with the individual works being likened to portraits of the subjects they represent. The reference to the dartboards previous identity and association to a particular brand or franchise lives on in the title of the work. Text courtesy of the artist.
Spiderman, 2013 Reworked novelty paper-coil dartboard Diameter: 49cm Nascar #29 Kevin Hardwick, 2013 Reworked novelty paper-coil dartboard Diameter: 49 cm
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Georgia Hayes Georgia Hayes paints subjects that have a visual or emotional impact, drawing inspiration from friends, animals and objects in museums. Her new paintings have drawn on a mix of past and recent histories, including those of Western, Middle Eastern and Ancient Egyptian cultures. SAVED BY DROWNING (SICILIAN FOUNTAIN 2) is the second painting in a series of three inspired by drawings Hayes made of a fountain in Ortigia in Sicily depicting Artemis, the Greek goddess of hunting, childbirth and the wilderness. Hayes uses sketches, photographs and images from the media and folk and street art as a starting point for her work, and Birdcatcher is derived from a striking photograph in a newspaper of a man carrying a bird. The paint, colour and form dictate how the work evolves, and Hayes aims to paint with a freedom viewer to revisit the familiar with renewed interest.
SAVED BY DROWNING (SICILIAN FOUNTAIN 2), 2013 Oil on canvas 183 Ă— 183 cm Birdcatcher, 2012 Oil on canvas 100 Ă— 100 cm
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Raphael Hefti Raphael Hefti’s work focuses upon photography and sculpture, the former often having resulted from experiments in the latter. In the series Lycopodium, colour photograms resembling burning spores of the moss plant Lycopodium to expose photographic paper. Lycopodium, known as witch powder in the Middle Ages due to its combination of explosive and healing properties, was used in early photography, explosives and homeopathy. It burns slowly and above the surface of the paper, so that light exposes the photopaper without it burning the surface.
Hefti’s sculptural pieces reveal his interest in the aesthetic potential of chemical processes and technical procedures. The series Subtraction as Addition features double-glazed and colourful units of glass intended to be displayed propped against a wall, across a corner or in front of a window. To create them, Hefti exploits accidents in the process used to make the in museums around the world. By pushing the production processes to their extremes, Hefti makes the glass anything but invisible, creating abstract compositions on the surface and maxi-
From the Series ‘Lycopodium’, 2012 Photogram on photographic paper 185 × 106 cm
From the Series ‘Subtraction as Addition’, 2013 Museum glass 220 × 120 × 3 cm
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Roger Hiorns This limited edition was produced to coincide with the installation at Yorkshire Sculpture Park of Roger Hiorns’ Seizure, 2008/2013 which was acquired by the Arts Council Collection in 2011. from the panel of copper sulphate crystals that was cut out fabricated in London in 2008. Voided of colour, the pure white panel can be seen to make oblique reference to early twentieth-century British modernist works – such as the tectonic relief panels of Mary Martin – with their concern for the use of industrial materials commonly associated with the most advanced architecture of the time. Seizure, 2008/2013 was donated by the artist, Artangel and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation through the Art Fund, with the support of The Henry Moore Foundation. It was commissioned by Artangel and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation with the support of the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Untitled, 2013 26 × 43 × 8.5 cm Edition 8/50
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Lucy Hutchinson Blonde is part of a series of works entitled For Home and Country that examine bicultural interactions in a globalised world. Focusing on cultural differences and the trade of cultural goods between China and the UK, Lucy Hutchinson examines and articulates a ‘class system’ derived from her familial relationships, identifying three distinct groups; working-class, middle-class and Chinese-class. Blonde is one of three self-portraits in the series, each of which are representative of one of the groups in Hutchinson’s selfwhich Hutchinson has developed from eighteenth-century designs and depicts the everyday life of each ‘class’ of the artist’s extended family. The design is also printed on the ‘face-kini’ she wears. These sun protection masks are commonly worn in China on the beach in order to shield the wearer’s face from exposure to the sun and prevent tanning which would indicate a lower class. The wig and face-kini remove Hutchinson’s identity through the use of mass produced items which instantly attach a brand and label to the wearer, associating her with a particular social and cultural group. Conversely, the mask can be read as providing protection as the design links to a particular group or ‘tribe’. This makes the wearer a part of a wider community, giving them a sense of belonging in an increasingly globalised world.
Blonde, 2013 Digital print on foamex 90 × 100 cm
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Ian Kiaer Ian Kiaer revisits a premise he has explored through a number of years and museum shows: The Black Tulip, by Alexandre Dumas. Like the nineteenth-century novelist, Kiaer is attracted by the idea of continually returning to what some believe is a redundant endeavour. For Dumas’ Dutch protagonist, this was For Kiaer, it is to make paintings after paintings. Black Tulip, Glasshouse, comprises a white screen hanging low from the ceiling with a projected image of a white cloth with an a sixteenth-century watercolour by the Huguenot artist Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, portraying a woman’s body covered of a glasshouse designed for a private house in Dublin by the Irish iron-founder Richard Turner. Each element of the work brings composition that occur in both glasshouse and studio.
Black Tulip, Glasshouse, 2012 Pencil, acrylic, tape, canvas, taffeta, lighting gel, perspex, polystyrene, cardboard, plastic, copper wire, projection screen, slide projector, 35 mm slide Drawing; 121.9 × 91.4 cm Projector screen: 137.2 × 129.5 cm Polystyrene: 61 × 80 cm Model: 29.8 × 54.6 × 30.5 cm
Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London Photo: Dave Morgan
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Anja Kirschner & David Panos Anja Kirschner and David Panos have been collaborating on longreferences juxtaposed with historical and literary sources, in order to reimagine established narratives through a method of storytelling and allegorical associations. By reworking the past they are able to interrogate the future. POLLY II: PLAN FOR A REVOLUTION IN DOCKLANDS draws on references It alludes to Polly, 1728, John Gay’s censored sequel to the popular Beggar’s Opera, 1727, which resurrected the character of the robber Macheath in the disguise of the African pirate captain Morano, scheming to take revenge on a colony in the West Indies, and is populated by many of the characters made popular Polly, the vengeful whore Jenny Diver, and the treacherous and greedy Peachum – fencer, thief-taker and king of the beggars – and portrays them surviving in a lawless zone, set to be redeveloped into luxury waterside living, as a comment on the social
POLLY II : PLAN FOR A REVOLUTION IN DOCKLANDS, 2006 Format: SD / PAL / 16:9 Anamorphic 30 minutes Edition 3/5
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Katrina Palmer Death, sex, loss and sculpture collide in Katrina Palmer’s new installation, Reality Flickers. The melodrama begins with an encounter between the protagonist, Reality Flickers, and the Heart Beast, otherwise known as ‘the dog’, ‘the fucker’ or ‘the trickster’. All that remains is a retrieved oversized steel locker and the reverberant narrative in its walls. In Reality Flickers, found and imagined objects provide the catalyst for obscure internal narratives and critical speculation. Combining writing, installed audio recording and live performance, Palmer’s practice relocates sculpture within shifting,
Reality Flickers, 2013 Mixed material installation with 13 minutes audio recording Dimensions variable
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Laure Prouvost Grandma’s Dream was created as a companion piece to Wantee, Prouvost explores the sorrows and dreams of her grandmother, the abandoned partner of Prouvost’s missing artist ‘grandfather’. I Need to Take Care of My Conceptual Grandad and The Artist sculptures and monologues. In the rosy, blue sky visions of Grandma’s Dream, planes that are half-teapot, half-plane serve where conceptual art takes care of dinner. However, the work is suffused with anxiety, and Prouvost combines language and images to construct invented storylines that seduce and disturb,
Grandma’s Dream, 2013 HD Video 8 minutes 55 seconds Edition 2/3
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James Richards “The censored images in Rosebud were shot in a library in Tokyo. I came across them by accident while researching there in the spring of 2012. The books, monographs on Mapplethorpe, Tillmans and Man Ray, were being imported into Japan from in Japan forbids a library from having books with any images that might induce arousal in a viewer. So after negotiations with the Director, it was agreed that customs workers would go through the shipment and sandpaper away the genitals from any contested images. The video is focused on the violence of the action of sandpapering – to the point where glossy black printer ink gives way to the scuffed and bruised paper stock underneath. There’s something intense but also futile in these marks. The video is a study of rubbing against and along different surrubbed along a boy’s body. Around the same time as this I was working a lot with a small underwater camera, carrying it constantly and building up an archive of footage of water – puddles, passages of a submerged camera looking up at the water’s surface, the slow rotating of the lens in the meniscus of a river’s shallow bed.” Text courtesy of the artist.
Rosebud, 2013 8 minutes 40 seconds Edition AP © the artist and Rodeo
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Emily Speed Build Up with the acrobalancers’ bodies as material, the work features a series of exercises in construction, mimicking architectural details, where the body becomes an element in a cyclical repetition of movement developing a rhythm of building and collapsing. The work continues to explore a previous work, Human Castle, 2012 derived from Castell – a Catalonian tradition of building human towers dating from the eighteenth century, which was originally developed for the Edinburgh Art Festival. The work was also inspired by Forrest Wilson’s drawings in the book What It Feels Like To Be a Building, 1969, which explore the forces of architecture. The acrobalancers were asked to make constructions with their bodies that explored balance, tension, strain and the dependence upon the cooperation of several people to make something work.
Build-Up, 2012 Dimensions variable
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Barbara Walker Barbara Walker produces expressive paintings depicting the social interactions that take place where people meet, such as in a church, a dancehall, or a barber’s shop. Boundary I is taken from the body of work Private Face that focused on the AfricanCaribbean community of Birmingham, where the artist lives. Considering her work to be social documentary through painting, Walker wishes to challenge the stereotyping and misunderstanding of the African-Caribbean community, and offer a positive alternative in a mainstream setting. Text courtesy of the artist.
Boundary I, 2000 Oil on canvas 182 Ă— 121 cm
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Stuart Whipps A Fragment of Birmingham Central Library depicts a brick taken from a decorative cladding of a wall in Birmingham’s Central Library. The library opened in 1974 and is scheduled to be demolished in 2015. The photograph is part of an, as yet, unsuccessful proposal by the artist to reinstate the wall in the new Library of Birmingham as a counterbalance to the Shakespeare Memorial Room, a room of decorative wood carvings that was built in the nineteenth century and has been taken apart and reinstated on two occasions. It now sits on the roof of the new Library of Birmingham. These issues of legacy and value of materials are central to Stuart Whipps’ practice. A Fragment of Birmingham Central Library comes on the back of a solo exhibition at Ikon Gallery in 2012 in which the central work examined the legacy of the library’s architect, John Madin, through the discovery of an uncatalogued archive in the basement of the building. In 2013 Whipps made new work in response to John Latham’s treatment of the shale bings of West Lothian whilst in residence at Flat Time House. A questioning of the relationship between photographic materials and processes and physical ones is central to these and other works. Text courtesy of the artist.
A Fragment of Birmingham Central Library, 2013 Digital Chromogenic print 25.4 × 20.3 cm
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Graphic Design by Catherine Nippe, www.cnippe.com
The Arts Council Collection is based at Southbank Centre, London and at Longside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Collection, please visit artscouncilcollection.org.uk
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