The
Material
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Editor Alice Lewin-Smith St. Peter's College Sub-editors Evelyn Hicklin, Joshua Hill, Beatrice Cooke, Tori-May McKenna
The
Edgar for
the
Wind history
of
Society art
The Material The Edgar Wind Society is changing. As part of this process, the journal has also developed – into ‘Oculus’. The intention has never been to fix that which was not broken, but instead to cultivate a unique identity for a publication that has been so successful to date. The name, Oculus, is relevant to the journal in a number of ways. Firstly, the word is Latin for ‘eye’ and thus the association with vision is made. It is essential to keep in mind the visual nature of the history of art, not to lose sight of sight in a wave of isms. Secondly, an oculus is an architectural feature – a circular opening, such as that in the dome of the Parthenon. Taking the floor plan of this building as inspiration for the newly designed logo, it is hoped that the journals will serve as an opening into art history, accessible from any intellectual position – regardless of what you already know about the discipline and where your primary interests might lie. The first journal of the year is entitled ‘The Material’ and is focused upon the resources from which we draw upon to enable artistic expression. From the truly graspable to the barely conceivable, our contributors expand the conventional boundaries of what might be deemed art’s materials to include: our own preconceptions, time, the effects of artificial ageing processes on photographs and bread. What is particularly exciting is the range of submissions, which has led to a more varied publication containing poetry, artwork and photography alongside the consistently insightful academic articles on a range of subjects. The Michaelmas journal also serves as a record of the ‘Material’ exhibition held at Freud, which opened with an electrifying night on the twelfth of November. With work from students at the Ruskin School of Drawing, the society is thrilled to offer a platform for emerging talent and the opportunity for members of the University (and beyond) to see what these young, contemporary artists have to offer. Miriam Stoney Culture Editor
Contents
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The Dollhouse as Kunstkammer Dr Hanneke Grootenboer
10
The Weave A Poem Melita Cameron-Wood
15
Bread Sculpture Emily Motto
25
Review: Frieze Art Fair Maryanne Saunders
7
Skin Fran Barry
11
Material Girl: Pauline Boty Elizabeth Brown
17 #nofilter: The Materiality of Instagram Nathan Stazicker
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The Material: Exhibtion
Tori-May McKenna 3
The
Dollhouse
In the 1680s, Petronella Oortman started an ambitious twenty-five-year building project: a rather monumental three-story dollhouse (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), probably a fairly accurate copy or at least a version of Oortman’s residence on the Warmoessstraat in Amsterdam, at that time one of the city’s most prominent streets, graced with shops selling the most sumptuous silks and laken (wool). 1 Oortman started her building project in the year of her second marriage in 1686, and it was said that it had cost between 20,000 and 30,000 guilders, an amount equal or exceeding the price of a house along one of the city’s major canals. This was clearly not a mere hobby project undertaken by a dynamic and imaginative housewife, but the couple’s serious means to assemble an art collection. The carefully crafted pieces of miniature furniture, tiny silverware, and miniscule paintings, often made by known artists and craftsmen that we find in Oortman’s dollhouse, were not just amusing, small-sized duplicates or “toys” (in the eighteenth-century sense of the term). They were regarded as rare treasures and genuine curiosities in their own right. Indeed, Oortman’s dollhouse is placed in a highly wrought cabinet that stands on legs, equipped with doors that could be closed.
as
Kunstkammer This cabinet-house serves as a kind of kunstkammer or art cabinet that houses a collection of curiosities. What does it mean to build a house within a house that is not only a close copy of your own residence, but also almost as valuable? The dollhouse and its contents were on display not just to entertain, but also to stimulate the intellect and provoke curiosity about the virtuosity of the artists (the delicacy of the tiny paintings, the miniscule needlework, and the woven baskets are breathtaking), the technology of building (some dollhouses had operational fountains or pumps), and the skills of the carpenters who carved the furniture. ……….…………… 1 Though barely studied in twentiethcentury art history, the dollhouse has increasingly enjoyed the attention of scholars in recent years because of the rise of material-culture studies.
4
Friends and visitors of Oortman and her husband must have marvelled at the accuracy of the contents of the house, all made of the finest silver, shining walnut, and heavy textiles. Peeping in, we see that virtually every surface had been worked over, from the upholstering of chairs and the leather or silk patterned wallpaper and marble floors, to the wooded inlay cover of a tiny sewing box (4x1 cm) with a working bottom drawer, to the engraved silver pitcher with a small tap in the laying-in room, to the illustrated pages of the miniscule, leather-bound books in the library. Every surface, thus, offered something exciting to a visitor to gaze at and to marvel at how it was made on such a small scale. Close observation of the small wonders in this exquisite model household surely satisfied a desire for visual complexity and the keen interest in the various materials that had their origins in various places all over the world. Oortman selected, in addition to typically Dutch household assets such as tin pitchers and finely braided baskets, numerous items made from imported materials. She even commissioned objects to be made overseas: for instance, the blue-andwhite plates were especially ordered in the East Indies to decorate the kitchen, where we also find Chinese-style painted silk window-covers. Peering into the various rooms one gets completely absorbed in this miniature spac e without ever having the chance to get in. This house hides an ingenious surprise: in the tapestry room, named for its rather modernist-looking zigzag wall decoration, stands a small Japanese-
style cabinet, in black-and-gold lacquer, placed against its back wall, standing on legs, very much like the dollhouse itself. The Russian-doll effect reaches its pinnacle in this tiny piece of furniture, labelled in a late-eighteenth-century description of the dollhouse as an “East-Indian art cabinet” (Oost-Indisch Konst-Cabinettje): The cabinet-house within a house houses a cabinet. But this spiralling downward towards a further interiority exceeds all expectations when the doors of this mini cabinet open to show an impressive collections of shells, nicely laid out on three shelves. It was common for seventeenth century art enthusiasts to collect shells from the four corners of the world. In this minicabinet, we see baby-species of mostly West-Indian shells. It is tempting to push the Russian-dolls effect even further, and to imagine what Oortman’s thoughts must have been when she put the baby shells—houses of dead sea creatures!—in their final resting place, on the shelves of a mini cabinet that was placed in a mini cabinet-house, that, in its turn, was placed in the house she called her home. ……….…………… 1 My discussion here draws mainly on Susan Broomhall and Jennifer Spinks, “Imagining Domesticity in Early Modern Dutch Dolls’ Houses,” in Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 99–122, and Jet Pijzel-Dommisse’s excellent Het Hollandse Pronkpoppenhuis: Interieur en Huishouden in de 17e en 18e eeuw (Amsterdam & Zwolle: Waanders, 2000).
Dr. Hanneke Grootenboer Lecturer in History of Art
6
What do a car, a cake, and a coat have in common?
SKIN
The answer is a material that we are all intimately familiar with; it heats and cools independently, stretches, wrinkles, tears, secretes, and even heals. The organic membrane that protects and wraps all members of the animal kingdom: skin. BMW’s concept car, GINA, is made up of an aluminium and carbon rod frame, covered by a tightly stretched layer of polyurethane coated Spandex - it's a car in tights, and just like tights, the silvery skin stretches and creases in a somewhat disarming way. As the butterfly doors open, the disturbingly organic material wrinkles at the corners, and in order to reveal the headlights the frame splits, pulling back the ‘skin’ like an eyelid. Observing the long, narrow fissure in the bonnet that opens to reveal the engine, it is immediately clear why the name GINA is rumoured to be a shortened moniker for a certain part of the female anatomy.
aa
Why does this silken chassis fascinate us so? Once we remember that one of the primary functions of the carbon-fibre shell of most cars is to help protect the passengers in the event of a crash, the very idea of a soft ‘skinned’ car becomes ridiculous. The entire project is experimental: blurring the lines, through material choice, between the mechanic and the organic. In this light the folds and creases created in GINA’s skin when she moves seem almost obscene, and certainly possess an element of the grotesque. This mis-appropriation of a material so unique to living creatures is also utilised in Gillian Bell’s “SLICE” skin cake. The icing is a peachy patchwork of alarmingly realistic fondant skin, with the joins airbrushed purple and red and ‘sutured’ together to create a violently unappetizing dessert that Victor Frankenstein could have created, had he gone into patesserie instead of science. The wedding cake shape refers to the joining of two souls, here through the somewhat botched amalgamation of two physical bodies.
so SLICE’s bruised, peeling, raw appearance is too reminiscent of surgery scars to be edible, as delicious as it may taste. GINA goes in the other direction; her membrane is too human, tapping into the deepseated uncertainty that advances in artificial intelligence create - how ‘human’ a robot can we create? And what ethical issues will be raised when we reach that stage?
GINA and SLICE perhaps make us uneasy as their use of skin seems inappropriate, but if offered a cloak of real skin to wear, the majority of us would not bat an eyelid. Givenchy’s Bordeaux Leather Cape allows us to parade around in cured lambskin, and charges us £5,970 for the privilege. This time the ‘skin’ is not Spandex or sugar, but the real deal, and as such the leather garment keeps us warm in the winter and cool in the summer, it’s waterproof, it lets our own skin ‘breathe’. The perfectly evolved qualities of skin are still present even when the organ is removed from the organism.
Skin is a substance we are all intimately familiar with, and as such its use as an artistic material is unsettling. Leather is physically and aesthetically dissimilar enough to our own membranes that it no longer troubles the majority, but when we consider the very humanised SLICE, or anthropomorphised GINA, a disquieting question is raised –
if we cut them will they bleed? Fran Barry St. Peter’s College
Hundreds of years of cultural and societal conditioning has normalised the use of sheets of skin as apparel, and even as a salty pub snack. However, once skin becomes as recognisable as that used in SLICE, or as unrecognisable and alien as GINA’s engineered membrane, its use as a material is questioned. We don’t want to be reminded of the similarity between our own skin and the skin we really eat, 8
'Shroud' oil on canvas Ryan Johnson
HE WEAVE Interlocking, entwining and pining their loss, but all lies forgotten deep under the gloss. Dancing and twinkling, the dastardly weave spreads before you so bright you scarcely believe that there was a time when it did not exist, when the fibres were joined by a wearisome wrist and each prick of her thumb reddened the blush, but surely you'd rather keep it hush-hush. Draped over chaise-longue for elaborate effect or emblazoned and glowing for all due respect, what are we beneath our swathes and our shawls? Naked and real, but quite naturally, nature appals. So we push and we scramble for the best fit, lie looking angelic and disremember the grit, Sparkling and glistening you think you're a jewel, but when threads are torn bare, you are but a fool.
Melita Cameron-Wood St. Catherine's College
10
aterial GirlA: Pauline Boty
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The oeuvre of Pauline Boty (19381966 is an exercise in cerebral fucking. Her paintings are compelling in their sexual charge, but they are also critically intelligent. A peer of more widely-known ‘pop artists’, including Sir Peter Blake, at the Royal College of Art, Boty struggled to be taken seriously as an intellectuallyassured woman during her brief painting career, dying at the age of 28 of cancer. A woozy combination of popular and art-world misogyny in the 1960s, and tragedy, accounts for the opacity concerning the full extent of Boty’s contribution to the genesis of British pop art. As well as identifying the causes of Boty’s absence from art history, it is important to look at what is specifically interesting about the work itself: as far as I am concerned, the interest lies in Boty’s sophisticated approach to the materials she wields. Boty refers to collage in her painted works by fusing its thoughtful, constructive associations with a dreamy, sensual painting technique. In her hybrid works, it is always apparent exactly who is in charge of both the thinking and the fucking – it’s Pauline Boty. In Boty’s paintings we can trace the ingenuity with which media are rendered iconographical. Early collages give way to large painted works, which wield a material instability as the mechanism for indicating both thought and desire. Colour Her Gone (1962), a large oil
painting of Marilyn Monroe smiling beatifically, sees the star presented between two rectangular planes on top of a red, floral, tapestry-like background. There is a sense of ‘placed-ness’ to the rectangles either side of Monroe; the hot, scarlet background edges its way around these grey-indigo geometric totems, making them appear to float in front of it. This ‘placed-ness’ allows the painted image to retain the ‘thoughtfulness’ of collage; we are aware of a mind at work here. At the same time, as Germaine Greer once said, “a painter cannot be a painter without libidinous desire”; painting is not placing, but doing. In Colour Her Gone, the erotic warmth of the colour scheme and the luxurious, velvety oil paint transforms Monroe from beheld object to agent of desire.
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“When I first saw that these, I couldnʼt help thinking, should they really be here?”
In the latter years of her short career, Boty’s choice of subjects became increasingly fearless and the political concern of her works ever-more overt. It’s a Man’s World II (1964-1965) is a painted montage of soft-porn images of women – sans pubes – bar the central, headless, hair-endowed figure. Hers is the one ‘true’ painted body, unconfined by the borders of a still or photograph containing the other subjects of the montage; once again, critical thought and libido converse by means of the suggested interplay of collage and paint. The central panel intersects a heady, blue, Arcadian landscape, erotic and also suffocating in the fullness of its colour. The painting is disturbing, and yet a wasted beauty pervades it; there is an ambiguous, yearning sorrow to the porny images. The anonymity wank-fodder, of the hairless already photographed once and then re-reproduced in paint, echoes a theme of thwarted sexuality that is also found in David Hockney’s paintings of the same period concerning male homosexuality, with their whispered but subversive, dare-not-speak-itsname desire. In the first solo retrospective of Boty’s work, ‘Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman’, held at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery over the summer, photographs of Boty herself (from the National Portrait Gallery) were prominently displayed, most intriguingly of Boty
posing in front of her paintings in imitation of them, dressed as whomever is in the painting. When I first saw that these, I couldn’t help thinking: should they really be here? Known as ‘the Wimbledon Bardot’, Boty’s reputation as being beautiful has often hampered the serious analysis of her work. However, with Boty’s materially experimental tendencies in mind, in these photographs, Boty becomes a literal extension of her own work. In line with her engagement with surrealism, the painted becomes the real. Boty was also an actor, appearing in several plays and television shows as well as Ken Russell’s Pop Goes the Easel (1962). Her interest in performance has continuity with her fine art practice; Boty performing her own paintings is akin to acting out ideas, doing thought. The unstable material boundaries of Boty’s paintings, and the associations that she attaches to certain media, become clear to observers of the artist’s work even before we attempt to untangle the history of Boty’s histories. In materially mashing up the profane with thought, Boty redefines the notion of a ‘mind-fuck’. Elizabeth Brown Christ Church College
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Sculpture by Ruskin artist Emily Motto “My work is material-led and guided by curious experimentation. I really enjoy exploring how materials behave in the surrounding environment and react and change over time. I've recently been making a series of works with bread dough and netted structures. I am interested in the way the materials ‘feed off’ each other’s properties: the net, dough and string structurally support one another and create new forms. I am keen to establish symbiotic relationships between the materials I use when creating my sculptures.”
#nofilter: The 17
Materiality of
“Photographs
have
inextricably linked meanings as
images
and meanings as objects” This is according to Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, editors of Photographs Objects Histories, who assert that photographs cannot be seen merely as images without considering their materiality. Having just celebrated its third birthday, Instagram is a toddler in the world of photography, and yet an ancient and venerated elder in the ever-changing world of social media. How is it that something as paradoxical as a digital image, with the appearance of a grainy Polaroid, has captured the imagination of more than 100 million people worldwide?
Instagram’s trick is to make us feel as if we are living in a world where material culture and tactility are still important characteristics of everyday life. The reality is that printed photographs, paper calendars, diaries, letters, and even books, are gradually becoming obsolete, according to the tech giants of Silicone Valley. Even Apple’s new iOS 7 has dispensed with its loveable skeuomorphic app design (you can no longer write your notes on yellow lined paper in dodgy ‘handwriting’.) But then again, perhaps this is an acknowledgement that technology and analogue methods can coexist, albeit with different functions. This is where Instagram blurs the boundaries of what is real and what is not. Does an Instagram snap, with a vintage filter, correspond in material terms with a ‘real’ vintage photograph? Are Instagram pictures photographs at all, or are they merely images? According to Edwards & Hart, materiality transforms abstract ‘photography’ into tangible ‘photographs’, which exist as objects in space and time. Instagram subverts this process, ensuring that our images retain the permanence once sought through physical albums, while divorcing any kind of tangible materiality from the pictures, trapped perpetually in the vast web of the internet. 18
Photography by Sarah Matthews St. Catherine始s College
This idea is so conflicting because of the form in which Instagram captures our images. The once transient and ephemeral Polaroid, a product of chance, has been transformed into a lasting and permanent form, subjected to many purposefully deliberated alterations, intended to create the very sense of transience which has been forgotten about. This is accentuated by the square shape of Instagram pictures, forcibly creating a nostalgic image with none of the values of such a form, except its instantaneity. According to German essayist Walter Benjamin, mechanical repro-duction had the beneficial effect of democratising art; Instagram could be said to have done the same for photography. No longer do you need a studio, or an expensive SLR, or knowledge of the dark room. Anybody with a smartphone (that’s more than a billion people worldwide), can download Instagram’s free app and create ‘arty’ images to their heart’s content.
Does this mean that all these people’s pictures have the qualities of great photographs? As I’m writing this, Instagram boasts 27,562,909 images that proclaim to be #art. In the top five are a ‘selfie’, a goat, a shed, a bed, and a painting of a hand. None of these themes would be out of place in a contemporary gallery. While Instagram ensures that our pictures will last forever, it revokes the primary objective of the photograph as an object to be handled, stored, and shared. No longer will we take down dusty albums from a shelf and smile at days gone by. No longer will we hear the satisfying click of a shutter. No longer will we run our hands over a printed image, rather a touchscreen. While Instagram makes everybody a photographer, letting us interesting images and create experiment with them, it also defines material photographs as more precious than ever before.
As it continues to grow , we have more images than ever before and yet strikingly fewer photographs. Nathan Stazicker Christ Church College
“My photos seek to explore the material categorization of the 'natural' and the 'unnatural' as repressed, automatic, and constructed.“
'Wealthy St.' Photograph by Kyle Luck
'Paper and Iron' Photograph by Ryan Johnson
“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time� - John Berger 22
驶Earth Cocoon始 Silicon sculpture Emily Motto
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Berliner Dom from the Schlossplatz. Berlin. October 2012.
Although the Berliner Dom is a structure that has been imposed upon the landscape it has become, for many, integral to the skyline of the city - so much so that it appears a permanent fixture in a rapidly changing environment. This photograph explores the interplay between the temporary presence of the multi-colored spheres, the relative permanence of the Cathedral, the continuous motion of the clouds above and the flow of the people in the Schlossplatz below. The extent to which the spheres appear incongruous in the scene is dependent upon the viewer;
The spheres are a feature of a collaborative installation on the Schlossplatz, opposite the Cathedral; a 1:775 Scale Map of the city each ‘sphere’ intended to pinpoint “contributions to the city from immigrant populations” in different areas of Berlin. The extent to which the significance of the ‘spheres’ is known may adapt potential interpretations of the image: do they conjure up memories of fairground balloons or bring the presence of the installation to the forefront of the viewer’s perception?
The image plays upon the ease with which materials can become assimilated into our environments, so much so that they fade into the background as we go about our everyday lives.
Sarah Matthews St. Catherine’s College
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Review:
Frieze Art Fair
It seems fitting that this review of the Frieze Art Fair should be included in a journal centred around the material. The annual fair, now in its tenth year, is one of the best known international art market events; attracting buyers, dealers and collectors from all over the world to Regents Park, London to view contemporary art from over a hundred leading commercial galleries. Frieze is also popular amongst the viewing public with roughly 80% of attendees each year being spectators. The material here, the art in its commercial context, takes priority. The tickets for this year’s weekend were sold out by the second day and the crowds were immense throughout the site, which consisted of a large marquee complete with restaurants and a bookshop as well as a sprawling sculpture garden. The strange allure of paying a small fortune (tickets were £35 per person) to view art works the majority of the visitors could never afford was evident. It became apparent that Frieze was selling itself as an ‘experience’, an opportunity not to be missed. In the same way one might go on holiday, see the sites and take a few pictures, Frieze is a destination for those wishing to expose themselves to ‘culture’ and high art. (Sensible really, considering most of it will be lost to private collections after the event and never seen again in the public domain.)
The main spectacles of the fair included Jennifer Rubell’s Portrait of the Artist in which the viewer could climb into the ‘womb’ of a huge female nude sculpture. This certainly attracted the most attention of the day with a permanent long line of spectators wishing to get involved (i.e. photographed) in the somewhat novel position. Dan Graham’s Groovy spiral - a walk-in sculpture made of two way mirror glass also benefitted from the
publicity that surrounded it, with a vast stage devoted to viewers walking in and out of its sweeping form. This work was interesting in the context of the Frieze in the way it created a sort of cage or case for the viewers to be ‘displayed’ in to the public outside of it. Frieze is very much centred on the art it displays but it also carries the notion of a different kind of viewing. The selfconscious and vaguely suspicious viewing of one’s fellow spectators.A place to see and be seen- and be scrutinised. The obvious economic investment in these works and the publicity surrounding them makes it extremely difficult for the everyday viewer to form an unbiased opinion. The smartly attired gallery representatives sitting around tables in the middle of every gallery exhibit space remind us of these works’ commercial endorsement and apparent critical acclaim. They also remind us that we cannot afford this. We need only witness the numerous security guards surrounding multi-millionaire artist Jeff Koons’ works to establish this fact. The lack of context or attached to the works, display the artist’s name, title, also add to this air of exclusivity.
description which only gallery, and mystery and
Presumably the buyers, the superrich, will ‘get it’: no explanation needed. Their money and cultural connections filling in the blanks unapproachable to the layman, or perhaps the piece goes really well with their sofa. The hurried atmosphere of the marquee softens when you make it out to the sculpture garden wherein Yinka Shonibare’s beautiful Wind Sculpture I resides. The magnitude and grace of the piece flowed with its natural surroundings, creating a viewing experience approaching the sublime, brought strikingly into sight by its garish, seemingly endless, geometric pattern. Another stand out, if not slightly provocative piece, was Video Bag by Georgia Sagri. A generic backpack with a video screen asking simply – Do you think I am human? Located in a corner of the Antony Reynolds stall, on the floor. The piece used simple rhetoric in conjunction with a now disturbingly common symbol of terror and suspicion to sensitively convey a complex topic and provoke discussion and reflection.
The sheer variety and size of the fair can ensure that any viewer will come away satisfied in having seen a piece they engaged with and maybe some others that they did not. However, this is just one venue in which we can have these debates and personal discourses. With public museums and galleries struggling nationwide, desperately trying to keep up with the new digitally immersed demographics, should we feel comfortable with the Frieze – its endorsements, attendance and media attention in some sense ‘representing’ not just the art markets but the art world itself?
If half the spectators this year are only being exposed to art through this bias and stylised, highly materialistic lens then perhaps it is time to take a step back and spectate the spectacle. Maryanne Saunders St. Catherine’s College
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The Edgar Wind Society presents
Exhibition This term saw the opening of The Edgar Wind Society's first exhibition, in collaboration with Freud and the Ruskin School artists. Running from 5th Week to 8th Week, with a highly successful opening night which drew a crowd of around 200 people, both students and Oxford locals. All the works were centred around the termly theme of The Material. Of the six exhibiting artists, there was a mixture of video, sound and sculpture installations as well as, at the pinnacle of the night, a performance piece from Mateo Revillo Imbernon and Juluan Pierre Mignot. Their piece, Circus, was inspired by the work of Alexander Calder, working with what they call the 'scrap economy'. Their anthropomorphic sculptures interacted with one another on Revillo's masked command, whilst Mignot's music cast the scene. The pieces will be left in the grounds of Freud to decay, just as they arose from the streets, they will return to their origins.
Photographs by Beatrice Cooke St Catherine’s College
29
Sonia Bernaciak's collection of pieces On the Revolutions of Things, with her wonderfully intricate central netted sculpture which synthesised with the interior of Freud, focused on the notion of the impossible in the world of science. Irina Iordache, questioning individualistic values and social morals, and Lili Pickett-Palmer's video installations were simultaneously unsettling but nonetheless beautiful pieces.
Louisa Siem's chocolate and mirror pieces engaged with the theme of the Material, developing a strong critique on what we argue to be artistic authenticity and autonomy. The exhibition has been an incredible success and we intend to continue the exhibition partnership throughout the year. Tori-May Mckenna Curator and President of The Edgar Wind Society
Next
Term‌
The
Psychological 31
Submissions due by 5th week
Greetings from The Aidan Meller Galleries The Aidan Meller Galleries specialise in modernism and fine paintings. Aidan Meller’s original exhibition space on Oxford High Street is currently showing works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Henry Moore, Joan Miró and other modernist greats. It now has a sister gallery on Broad Street which is dedicated to Pre-Raphaelite art and is currently exhibiting works by Edward Burne Jones, John Everett Millais and historical decorative arts companies such as James Powell & Sons. The galleries are directed by Aidan Meller, who is regarded as an expert in the fields of modernism and Pre-Raphaelitism. He and his colleagues look forward to welcoming you to view their collections.
David Freud and Debbi Mason Opens 28th November 2013
Aidan Meller Galleries are delighted to announce a striking new exhibition of artworks by David Freud, son of the famous Lucian, and his partner Debbi Mason, co-founder of Elle Magazine and former Fashion Editor of US Vogue. The exhibition draws on Freud’s practice as a painter and Mason’s as a stylist to examine - with disarming emotional frankness - Freud’s harrowing experience of estrangement from one of his daughters, soon to turn ten. It brings together new figurative paintings by Freud with a sequence of delicate dresses made by him and Mason. These are adorned with feathers, locks of hair, embroidered messages and flashes of painting, including a portrait of Lucian.
P R I Z E F O R A RT C R I T I C I S M Call for submissions The Aidan Meller Galleries are pleased to invite submissions to its 2013 Prize for Art Criticism. Open to undergraduate and postgraduate members of Oxford University, the Aidan Meller Prize for Art Criticism celebrates excellence in new critical writing. Entries must be original articles of 500 to 800 words, reviewing a currently running (or soon to open) exhibition of work by a twentieth century or contemporary artist or artists. Outstanding entries may also be selected for publication in The Art Collector magazine, which is produced by The Aidan Meller Galleries and sent out to thousands of homes both domestically and internationally. The overall winner will be announced during Hilary Term 2014 (date tbc.) and will receive a prize of £500. The deadline for entries is 31st December 2013. The judges are especially keen to reward work which demonstrates some or all of the following characteristics: creative thinking, originality of argument, understanding of the cultural and historical contexts of artistic trends;͞ imaginative use of critical theory. They are eager to recognise critics who write with clear and distinctive voices and who exhibit a persuasive, uent writing style.
Submissions should be made electronically in MS Word format and sent to curator@mellermerceux.com
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“There can be no doubt but that he who has the most materials has the greatest means of invention...� Sir Joshua Reynolds