October Gallery

This year October Gallery celebrates its 40th Anniversary with an exhibition Dream No Small Dream of works from artists from 1979 to date. Space only allows dwelling on one or two artists on show. The exhibition ran in April and May. It included works by El Anatsui, William S. Burroughs, Paul Friedlander, Brion Gysin, Jukhee Kwon, Laila Shawa, Romuald Hazoumè, Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, LR Vandy, Gerald Wilde, Aubrey Williams and Kenji Yoshida.

October Gallery is a remarkable and unique venture located in a 3-storey Victorian school building on Old Gloucester Street by Queen Square in the heart of Bloomsbury. It opened, in 1979, with an exhibition of the British artist Gerald Wilde (1905 – 1986). A contemporary of Bacon, Moore and Sutherland, he was considered a genius by John Berger, and admired by Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach. October Gallery has devoted six exhibitions to Wilde since 1979.

From the beginning, the Gallery’s aim was to discover a new visual sensibility, the Transvangarde, the crosscultural avant-garde, exhibiting artists from around the planet.

The October Gallery wished to create a meeting place for artists and their public, a caravanserai and generator of creative endeavour in the centre of London. From the outset the Gallery produced a series of talks, events, theatre and dance performances, musical concerts.

Since the early days the Gallery has exhibited artists from over

Right: Alexis Peskine

80 countries and a wide range of different cultures to open London to the appreciation of artistic work from around the world. It became a registered charity in 1986 and runs a dynamic and active education department, reaching out to schools across all of London.

In the early 1990’s the Gallery began working with El Anatsui, represented here by a sumptuous metal wall sculpture of the type that hung over the front of the Royal Academy in 2014.

Laila Shawa was given a solo exhibition, ‘The Other Side of Paradise,’ in 2012, (fig. 2). Born in Gaza in 1940, she graduated summa cum laude in Fine Arts from the Italian Accademia di Belle Arti in 1964 and received a diploma in plastic arts from the Accademia San Giacomo in Rome. From 1965 to 1967, she returned to Gaza to teach arts and crafts to underprivileged children. She now lives and works in London. Her work is in public collections worldwide, including in the UK – the British Museum, the Ashmolean, and the Burrell Collection. Two works by Laila Shawa were part of the exhibition.

The Gallery has held over 400 exhibitions since 1979. A publication to mark the 40th Anniversary will be published in October this year. I strongly recommend visiting the Gallery’s website artists’ page at http:// www.octobergallery.co.uk/artists/ to discover more about the many artists supported by the gallery and see their work.

In addition to the above, I recall with particular pleasure solo exhibitions by Alexis Peskine; Govinda Sah ‘Azad;’ Sokari Douglas Camp CBE; Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga; Wang Huanghseng Tian Wei; and Hassan Massoudy.

Just to take one, of so many, Alexis Peskine was born in Paris in 1979. Early on in his life, Peskine was exposed to questions of identity: his grandfathers, Boris, a Jewish engineer survived a concentration camp, and Antonio, an Afro Brazilian carpenter raised his family in the inner city of Salvador, Bahia.

Peskine’s work is thematically linked to the Black Experience and has been featured in many publications from books, to prestigious newspapers such as the New York Times, Le Monde, O Correio da Bahia or Libération. His powerful portraits literally nailed into wooden planks pay tribute to the many individuals undertaking the dangerous boat journeys from North Africa to Europe. Using several sizes of nails, he uses the nail as brushstroke. He drives in the nails at different depths to create a sense of relief and to introduce a third dimension. The nail for Alexis represents transcendence. It expresses pain as well as the force of resistance.

His work is visually stunning, and conceptually and technically astonishing.

The Gallery arranges talks and events relating to most exhibitions. It is open from 12.30 to 17.30 Tuesday to Saturday; lunches are served 12.30 to 2.30 Tuesday to Friday.

Elisabeth Lalouschek, Artistic Director, was born in Vienna and holds an MA in Fine Art from the Royal

College of Art. She joined October Gallery in 1987. She has furthered the careers of a range of outstanding artists. She has organised and curated the majority of exhibitions at October Gallery, as well as collaborating on numerous projects nationally and internationally, most notably those promoting contemporary African art. Chili Hawes, FRGS, is one of the Founders of October Gallery and has been Director since its opening in 1979. A native of the Rocky Mountains, she obtained a BA in French Literature from Colorado College, followed by a year at the Sorbonne and post-graduate work in Linguistics at Claremont Graduate School and has taught at all levels of the educational system both in the USA and Australia. A founder and director of Institute of Ecotechnics www.ecotechnics.edu, she has managed various ecological projects in the high desert of New Mexico, the Outback of Australia and the south of France. She has travelled widely including major research trips for the October Gallery to India, Melanesia, Peru, Southern Africa and Fiji.

I know of no-one who has visited the gallery without returning and wondering why they had not been to October Gallery before.

Below: Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga Untitled (2018) Acrylic and oil on canvas 198.5 x 187.5cm