Make Room2: Interventions into the Garman Ryan Collection

Floor 2 Ron Mueck

Andrew Tift

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It’s a Girl (Momart Christmas Card), 2006 Plastic and metal

Mueck was commissioned by Momart to create this miniature version of a vast 2006 sculpture as a limited edition Christmas ‘card’. It explores themes such as sexism, birth, reproduction and the patriarchal nature of Christianity. In some cultures a baby girl is considered less desirable and of less value than a male child. Mueck quotes his own father’s response of ‘better luck next time’ when told of the birth of his grand-daughters.

Anna Barriball

This drawing of a cassette is unusual for Tift who specialises in realistic portraiture but it was made as a birthday card for The New Art Gallery’s 10th anniversary in 2010. The cassette is full of party music and suggests a scene where people gather to celebrate.

Tift portrays this subject as a still life, while implying movement, dance, music and all the energy of a party.

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Yoshihiro Suda

The New Art Gallery Walsall Tenth Birthday Card, 2009 Wax, string and card

Tulip (Fleming Parrot), 2002 Wood and paint

This is one of the tenth birthday cards made for New Art Gallery Walsall in 2010. The work reminds us of the happy time lighting candles on a birthday cake. Barriball is interested in evocation of the process of time attaching both the beginning and end of the happy event in one work. She also represents the transformation of childhood through time from infancy to adulthood, leaving each stage behind us year by year and birthday by birthday.

Ming De Nasty

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Birthday Card, 2009 Ink

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Suda tries to make each new work more lifelike than the last and uses traditional Japanese tools to carve the wood before painting it. This realistic and fragile sculpture of a deteriorating tulip is carved from magnolia wood and shows the flower in a frozen moment in time, which has a poetic and almost untouchable presence. With his work, Suda invites the viewer to reflect on the human, the natural and the artificial in the environment.

Dennis Doherty, Boardmaker, 1999 Photograph

Flowers & Still Life

This portrait is a part of a series where De Nasty photographed the workers who built The New Art Gallery Walsall in the late 1990’s. A worker’s contribution is often forgotten on a project’s completion and both Peter Jenkinson, the Gallery’s director at the time, and De Nasty wanted to acknowledge, in a democratic way, the builders roles in the construction of the gallery as well as the architects and designers.

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Religious Art

Illustration & Symbolism

Work & Leisure

Susan Krejzl Poppy, 1999 Silkscreen print

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Susan Krejzl’s work takes a pressed flower revealing the delicate veins and details of the plant. The life of the flower is frozen in time. The work follows the traditional rules of the ‘still life’, organising a simple object into a formal composition and arrangement of shapes creating a permanent decorative motif. Still lives have often been created as ‘momento mori’ meaning ‘remember you must die’. They are symbols of the transitory nature of life.

Vidya Gastaldon Birthday Card, 2009 Digital print and watercolour

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A print of the artist Albrecht Durer’s self portrait from around 1500 AD is used and manipulated by Gastaldon to make a birthday card for The New Art Gallery. Durer faces forward in a position that was in that time often associated with images of Jesus.

Gastaldon draws a form on Durer’s chest that resembles an anatomical heart, almost if she is trying to bring him to life or to reflect on the idea of birth and resurrection.

Paula Rego

Make Room²

Interventions into the Garman Ryan Collection

October 2011 — October 2012

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Ring-A-Ring o’Roses, 1989 Etching Main Hall

Stuart Whipps

Children

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Longbridge Body in White 0196, 2005 Photograph

Whipps originally set out to explore the relationship between the factory of MG Rover plant in Longbridge, the workers and the town. After he began his project the employees were informed that the factory was to move to China in order to make the production process more economically viable. Whipps’ study shows the frozen moment when production ceased, reflecting the sad emptiness of the once busy factory and its transition across the world.

Tim Mara

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Handgrip, 1979 Photo etching and screen-print

Mara works mostly as a print maker.

In this piece, hands, tools and the gestures of using tools are shown together, highlighting the unique manipulative talent of human beings. Humans can make and use tools because we have thumbs which can bend in an opposite direction from other fingers. This ability defines humanity and our ability to create and use tools and machines but also to create art.

LIFTS

Melanie Carvalho

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Rhodroponicum, 2005 Mixed media

Carvalho went on an expedition to Scotland to see plants that were not indeginous to this country, such as palm trees and rhododendrons. This collage shows exotic plants in a fantasy green house setting with a more familiar traditional Scottish landscape seen through the window. The work comments on the constant changes and transformation of our global society both culturally and environmentally, while also hinting at the possible affects of climate change and our biodiversity.

Paula Rego’s artworks are often full of story’s both personal and traditional. This print is from the Nursery Rhymes portfolio made for the artist’s granddaughter for her second birthday. Rego’s reinterpretation of the nursery rhymes reminds us of their original often fearful and moral origins. This work relates to the medieval plagues and the many people who died during them. Goyas related print ‘Grotesque Dance’ c. 1820 – 24, associated with plague and the insanities of war, is also displayed here.

David Shrigley All the Arrows Missed Thank God 2009-2010 Felt pen

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Shrigley is best known for his mordantly humorous cartoons usually released in softcover books or on postcards. He says ‘a good drawing should be that it has to surprise myself in some ways’. He uses the simplest and the most direct way that he can to communicate his often surreal ideas, creating in this case an amusing and festive drawing commissioned by the gallery for the tenth anniversary of The New Art Gallery in 2010.

Exhibition guide

Floor 1 James Pyman

Michel Groisman

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On the Sound, 2000 Lithograph

Make Room² is the sixth of

a series of year long displays which uses contemporary works from The New Art Gallery Walsall’s Permanent Collections to make interventions within the Garman Ryan Collection’s themed rooms. Enabling us to view the contemporary works alongside similarly themed historic artworks and allowing us to make connections between old art and new art.

Octopus, 2002, Print

James Pyman’s work represents moments and glimpses of landscapes through time. The originally hand drawn images have been photographed and portrayed as a ‘contact print’ (a series of photographs directly printed from a negative film), representing a consecutive series of photographs which also imitate a cartoon strip. Each of the small images stands for a still glimpse of landscape, whereas all the images show the change of the landscape in a period of time.

Richard Long

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Groisman considers his work to be living art and he feels that it only begins to make sense when it is brought to life by either him or his spectators. Octopus is a card game that people play by interacting with each other but its goal is to enable the participants to discover new ways of relating their bodies to the bodies of others. The game was played by visitors in The New Art Gallery in 2002.

Martin Creed Work No.264, Two Protrusions from a Wall, 2001 Aluminium, plaster and paint

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Kicking Stones, 1998 Print

Long has an international reputation for his contribution to the Land Art movement, where nature and art were twined together. Since then Long has kept nature as his subject. This text piece summarises a six day walk he made in Ireland. The adjectives and short sentences give an idea of his environment and the weather at the time. Folded together the memory of the walk resembles a map, which makes this work conceptual in many ways.

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Trees

Bob and Roberta Smith’s Epstein Archive Room

Portraits

For more information about the collections visit the Art Library or our website artatwalsall.org.uk The New Art Gallery Walsall Gallery Square Walsall WS2 8LG 01922 654400 thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk

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Paul McCarthy

Dog, 2000 Polaroid photograph

Dog is a part of a series of 120 Polaroid photographs where McCarthy documented the illness and subsequent death of his pet dog. McCarthy is better known for large inflatable sculptures but this series is more private and reflects compassion and empathy with an animal at the end of its life. The series reveals a strong bond between owner and animal as well as emotional departure with the animal’s death, which has offered its companionship in their time together.

Landscape & Townscape

LIFTS

ENTRANCE

This photograph, from the People’s Show 2, displays Liza’s treasured collection of wooden animals. Placed in the context of the ‘trees’ room they demonstrate that trees are not only motifs and symbols but also materials. Mo Wilson is a documentary photographer. She records interesting, historical and quirky aspects of the society involving people and their environments. The People’s Show 2 was a project in 1992 that shows people’s private collections relating to personal choice and popular culture.

Hannah Maybank

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Maybank makes quiet spaces, often in monochrome like this one. Her subjects are commonly motifs taken from nature such as trees, mountains and skies – things so ordinary that we often pass them by. These trees appear feather light and the brush strokes look fast and effortless, resulting in a still, quiet scenery that reminds us of oriental landscapes.

Simon Periton

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Untitled, 10 SupaStore SupaStars, 1998 Lithograph

Phil Brooks

Gary Hume

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Noddy Holder, 2010 Photograph

STAIRS TO 3rd FLOOR

Ovals are a continuous motif for Simon Bill, he uses them to create a coherence and visual equality in all of his work. This abstract print uses ovals which gradually emerge as a rabbit but could also represent eggs or animal droppings. It bears a relationship to a Rorschach test, which is a psychology test that lets people use their imaginations and unconscious minds to express figurative associations from ink blots or other abstract images.

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Main Hall

STAIRS

Untitled, 10 SupaStore SupaStars, 1998 Lithograph

STAIRS

Simon Bill

Liza Ridge with her Collection of Wooden Animals, from The People’s Show 2, 1992 Photograph

Portraiture usually involves revealing the personality of the sitter through the artistic portrayal. This image denies us the possibility of identifying the individual. It portrays a masked person reflected in a mirror with striped clothing reminiscent of pyjamas or prison clothes. We cannot work out whether he is a criminal interrogated or an interrogator or a victim abused. The mirror may be used to reflect this dual possibility and dual personality; two sides and opposites of the equation.

Animals & Birds

The Garman Ryan Collection was given to Walsall in 1972 by Kathleen Garman and is on display in the gallery in a series of themed rooms. The Permanent Collection is kept mostly in storage and was started

by Walsall Council in 1892 as part of their vision to give the town access to culture.

This collection continues to develop today.

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Birthday Card, 2009 Ink

Martin Creed’s work is often called ‘conceptual’ and has been regarded as complex and notoriously difficult to pin down. He takes ordinary materials and presents them in the simplest possible way. He has said ‘meanings are made in people’s head’. In this case the placing of the work in ‘Figure Studies’ enhances its humorous potential. His work seems to grow out of the wall, becoming a seamless part of it, blurring the lines between architecture, sculpture and painting.

Figure Studies

Mo Wilson

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Untitled, 10 SupaStore SupaStars, 1998 Lithograph

Gary Hume traced the multiple overlapping outlines of women from photographs and magazines transforming the human bodies into a repeat motif with a decorative aesthetic value. The faces, breasts and limbs are confused giving us little indication of which body they belong to, though compositional elements are maintained. Hume uses simple forms in his work, transforming objects from the natural world into repeat visual motifs which express fundamental emotions such as melancholy and loneliness.

In 2010, Brooks worked with Art & Design students at Walsall College on a project that set out to capture the diversity and the richness of Walsall. The results were published in a limited edition book where Noddy Holder, lead singer in the rock band Slade and originally a Walsall local, wrote the introduction.

Brooks and the students created this portrait of Holder where he casually points at the viewer with a warm but witty smile.

Hew Locke Jungle Queen II, 2003 Mixed media

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In relation to the Queens Diamond Jubilee in 2012 we get to explore Locke’s Jungle Queen II. The work is a part of an on-going series where he reflects on the royal family in relations to power, culture, wealth, colonialism and identity. The Queens portrait is familiar to us from stamps and coins but here she is portrayed with mass produced and inexpensive materials that connect the work to mass consumption while also suggesting a figure of worship.