KRIKEY!
KENTEMPORARY PRINTS Kent Print Collection 4th Exhibition 2010
KRIKEY!
KENTEMPORARY PRINTS Acknowledgements This exhibition would not have been possible without the extraordinary generosity and support of artists, art dealers and curators. We are very grateful to: Ruth Barry, of Counter Editions, London; Julia Beaumont-Jones, Tate Britain; Keinton Butler and Robyn Katkhuda, Other Criteria, London; John Brandler, Brandler Galleries, Essex; Fred Cuming; Matthew De Kersaint Giraudeau, The Whitechapel Gallery; Tamara Dial, Marlborough Fine Art, London; Tracey Emin; Lucy Emslie, Anna Hugo, and Paul Stolper, of Paul Stolper, London; Susan Faulkner, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery; Lisa Gee, Harley Gallery, Nottinghamshire; Jean Hawkswell, Hawkswell Framers; Ruth Hogan, Sara Macdonald, and Yves Blais, White Cube, London; Dominic Kemp, Modern British Prints; David Lilford, Castle Arts; Humphrey Ocean; Chris Orr; Julian Page, London; Susan Pratt and Mark Hayward, Pratt Contemporary, Kent; Ken Reedie, Canterbury Museums; Vivien Starr, Lancaster Art; Helen Waters, Alan Cristea Gallery, London; Shane Wheatcroft (GSG); Oliver Winconek; Angela Yarwood, of Brook Gallery, Devon.
Kent Print Collection 4th Exhibition 2010 Studio 3 Gallery, Jarman Building, Canterbury: 10 May – 4 June 2010
At the University of Kent thanks are due to: Miles Berkley, Ian Bride; Posie Bogan; John Buckingham; Jonathan Friday; Gary Hughes; Mike Keeling-Smith; Chris Lancaster; Louise Naylor; Michael Newall; Jo Pennock; Angela Whiffen.
Photographic Credits All Frank Auerbach images courtesy Marlborough Fine Art, London. “The Krays” © David Bailey. All Sir Peter Blake images except Sideshow, courtesy Paul Stolper, London. Jake and Dinos Chapman, Unhappy Meal, © the artist, photo: Stephen Whit, courtesy White Cube; Jake and Dinos Chapman, The Birth of Ideas, © Counter Editions & the artist. Michael CraigMartin, Pride, 2008, (From the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’), courtesy the artist and The Alan Cristea Gallery, London, © Michael Craig-Martin, 2010. Both Fred Cuming images courtesy the artist. Ian Davenport, Etched Lines 34, 2009, image courtesy the artist and Alan Cristea Gallery, London. © Ian Davenport, 2010; Ian Davenport, Oval: turquoise, green, turquoise, 2002, image courtesy the artist and Alan Cristea Gallery, London. © Ian Davenport, 2010. Tracey Emin, Dog Brains, and Hades, Hades, Hades, ©Counter Editions & the artist; Tracey Emin, But Yea, © the artist, Photo: Antonia Reeve, Courtesy White Cube; Tracey Emin, More Margate – More Past, © the artist, photo: Stephen White, courtesy White Cube. Angus Fairhurst, Unprinted I, II, and III, copyright The Estate of Angus Fairhurst; courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. Gary Hume, Grey Leaves, © Counter Editions & the artist; Hermaphrodite Polar Bear, © the artist, photo: Stephen White, courtesy White Cube. Humphrey Ocean, Black Love Chair, Stripey Love Chair, and Fat Check Chair, courtesy the artist. Chris Orr, City of Holy Dreams, and Ghosts of Chelsea Reach, courtesy the artist and Brook Gallery, Devon. Ana Maria Pacheco, Comedia, and Dark Event, courtesy the artist and Pratt Contemporary, Kent. Shane Wheatcroft, Callface, and Royal Kraze, courtesy the artist. Oliver Winconek, Playtime’s Over, courtesy the artist. The authors and publisher have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright holders for permission, and apologize for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given.
Catalogue written by: Carrie-Anne Armes; Abigail Bousfield; Christina Coombes; Kate Davey; Emma Ferguson; Natasha Gibson; Emma Griffiths; Siti Haji Othmann; Michael Healey; Martyn-John Hill; Angharad Hillier; Nanaco Kawai-Pelletier; Rosie Leech; Katarína Lichvárová; Primrose Matambo; Alexandra Meincke; Emma Mills; Sinead O’Halloran; Charlotte Peer; Alan J. Powderly; Alicia Simpson; and Stacey Wright. Edited by Patricia Chan
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Contents
An introduction by the students who devised Krikey! Kentemporary Prints A pulsating, provocative, and very positive hotchpotch...
An introduction by the students who devised Krikey! Kentemporary Prints
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In search of the Kentemporary: a brief essay in Kentish art history
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Catalogue Frank Auerbach
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Sir Peter Blake
15
Jake and Dinos Chapman
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Michael Craig-Martin
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Fred Cuming
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Ian Davenport
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Tracey Emin
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Angus Fairhurst
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Gary Hume
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Humphrey Ocean
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Chris Orr
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Ana Maria Pacheco
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Shane Wheatcroft (GSG)
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Oliver Winconek
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A Roller-Coastal Ride: The Creative Campus initiative
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Endnotes:
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Bibliography:
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Notes
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As curators, our task was to devise some sort of theme, a framework in which to contain the artists on show. Which of course, was far easier said than done; just how could one stitch together such disparate threads? Just what relationship could credibly be forged between images of hermaphroditic polar bears and wing chairs, between black and white portraits etched intensely onto tiny sheets of paper, and huge, colourful abstract lines? And just who decided upon these artworks being housed under one roof in the first place? The eyes of our fellow curatorial team would naturally come to rest on us, as it was we who had formulated this exhibition concept. We duly went silent, and came over decidedly all embarrassed and gormless. Thus, writing this essay represents the shovel, for which we can use to try digging ourselves out of this rather deep hole. It is worth taking you back to the start of the project, where each student – either working independently or in a team – had to devise their own exhibition bid that would not only be financially viable, but also enhance the Kent Print Collection. The winning bid would be adopted by the group, who then had just six weeks to make it a reality. Initially, we found ourselves fishing around for ideas in surveying the Kent Print Collection. Being particularly enthusiastic about contemporary art, we searched specifically for work by contemporary artists. This did not take us long. Of the 47 prints in the Collection, only four were contemporary.1 These included: a portfolio of five wood
engravings depicting ‘circus freaks’, entitled Sideshow by Sir Peter Blake; Unhappy Meal, an etching by Jake and Dinos Chapman; Ana Maria Pacheco’s Comedia, in which amalgamations of humanistic and animalistic beings march on a surreal and sinister procession; and a Gilbert & George screenprint, with a mock Evening Standard board, carrying the headline ‘Perv Duo Desecrate Tate Modern’. Something along the lines of nightmares seemed an obvious choice. However, we soon learned that Dreams and Nightmares had been the exhibition concept devised by students only two years ago, who apparently had even interviewed Pacheco, since she lives and works locally in Sevenoaks. And then, eureka! We knew that Sir Peter Blake was born in Dartford, and studied at Gravesend School of Art. If Pacheco lives in Sevenoaks, we have two artists here with connections to Kent! A quick researching of the Chapman brothers further fuelled our excitement, as we discovered that Dinos had graduated from Ravensbourne College of Art, in Chislehurst, Kent, in 1981. Gilbert & George have no ties to Kent, but we were not overly upset about this. For we soon found ourselves reeling in catch after glorious catch: Frank Auerbach, Michael Craig-Martin, Fred Cuming, Ian Davenport, Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst, Gary Hume, Humphrey Ocean, Chris Orr, Shane Wheatcroft, and Oliver Winconek were all welcomed aboard.2 This was all very exciting but also very informative; for though we were familiar with
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these artists, we did not know that Auerbach, for example, attended a refugee boarding school in Faversham, having been sent to England by his parents, who had been detained in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. It was during his eight years at Bunce Court that Auerbach discovered his love of painting. The idea of celebrating contemporary printmakers who have connections to Kent was like a fire that engulfed a forest. Every aspect had been set alight. Contemporary art was the right path to explore, since the new School of Arts Jarman building was modernist in design, and the gallery space akin to the ‘white cubes’ which typically display modern art (such as White Cube and The Saatchi Gallery). Let us not forget, too, that the building is named after Derek Jarman, in recognition not only of his influence and versatility as an artist, but more importantly of his connections to Kent, having lived in Dungeness for the last twelve years of his life; indeed, Jarman is now buried in Old Romney. Furthermore, there is at present, a genuine interest in the contemporary print, with the Chapman brothers’ reworked etchings of original Goya prints achieving much media attention, most of which has been highly favourable. In addition, past shows curated by students for this module have been predominated by 16th – 19th century prints, and so, contemporary art provides a radical, refreshing change to proceedings. Finally, the abovementioned artists are all prominent and popular, and thus would make for significant additions to a Kent Print Collection that was bereft of contemporary work.3 Approaching dealers with a paltry budget of £2,500 that must account for everything –
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less than half the sum last year’s students were given – was never going to be easy. However, this worked in our favour, with dealers instantly taking pity on our seemingly hopeless predicament. Indeed, when informed of our concept, the artist Humphrey Ocean admitted that it was simply impossible with the present budget, and so wished us luck and agreed to loan some of his own ‘chair’ prints to the show, should our bid win. We were also given a huge helping hand by the extraordinary kindness of dealers, most of whom were very supportive of our exhibition bid. To name but a few, Tamara Dial, of Marlborough Fine Art, offered us many Frank Auerbach etchings; Paul Stolper was happy to loan Sir Peter Blake’s entire ‘Love’ portfolio; Susan Pratt, of Pratt Contemporary, agreed to lend us a set of seven Ana Maria Pacheco prints; and John Brandler, of Brandler Galleries, loaned to us prints by Fred Cuming and Tracey Emin. When we did have to buy some prints, we had developed an utterly audacious habit of ensuring we always asked for a ‘buy one get at least one on loan’, which amazingly, failed only once. Our exhibition bid was chosen as the winner, and now we are up to speed: the problem of finding a theme for the show. With so much diversity, and so many prints being on sale, there was a very real danger that the exhibition would become nothing more than a print fair. The team of eight curators spent a fortnight devising possible themes, something – anything – that would justify why these artists are all included in the same show, other than their connections to Kent. Despite much head-scratching and some sleepless nights, nothing arrived. It was Humphrey Ocean who came to our rescue once more. In an online article, he was discussing the curation of the 2008
Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in which photographs, abstract and figurative paintings, all of different sizes, and by famous and unknown artists, had to be hung in a single room (Gallery 4). However, Ocean was not worried about this extreme eclecticism – in fact, on the contrary, he welcomed it; “some of the works, like people in a village, get on very well. Others rub up against each other. But it doesn’t matter, because conflict is the essence of this world. Nothing exists without it”.4 It was this sentiment that we adopted for our own exhibition, a sentiment that in turn inspired the rather confrontational name Krikey! Kentemporary Prints. The title is an obvious nod to Matthew Collings, author of Blimey! – From Bohemia to Britpop. It was Collings who championed the Young British Artists (YBAs), a phenomenon in the 1990s, wherein big, bold, and brash was the order of the day (five YBAs are included in the show).5 Therefore, Krikey! pounces upon Ocean’s idea of ‘conflict’, and like Collings and the YBAs, it is an exuberant, rebellious, and celebratory break from the fusty, restrained conventions and pretensions of the establishment. It is a celebration of the print as a contemporary art form. It is a celebration of Kent, as a hotbed of creativity. It is a celebration of a pulsating, provocative and very positive mishmash of artists. It is, as Gilbert & George would say, ‘Art for All’. For where else can one find Tracey Emin prints that have taken her all of “90 seconds” to complete, rubbing shoulders alongside a meticulous etching of London by Chris Orr?6 Where else can one find prints of popular icons such as Frank Sinatra covered in diamond dust hanging in the same room as an image
depicting the sexual organs of a polar bear? Where else can one find discussion flicking freely from global warming to bearded women, and from the Royal Family to The Clash? Krikey! plays by its own rules. It sticks out its chest and says: ‘Yes, I’m a hotchpotch ... so what?’ However, for all this excessive diversity, it is in fact possible to weave – albeit very small but intriguing – webs that tie some of the artists in Krikey! together. For example, Sir Peter Blake and Humphrey Ocean are united by their connections to The Beatles, in particular Sir Paul McCartney. Sir Peter is responsible for creating the iconic album sleeve for the 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Ocean was an artist-on-tour with Sir Paul’s next band Wings in the 1970s. Ocean’s Black Love Chair was handpicked by the singer to adorn the cover of his most recent solo album, Memory Almost Full, of 2007. Both artists have produced portraits of Sir Paul; a painting by Ocean is part of the permanent National Portrait Gallery collection, while Sir Peter’s colourful diamond dust print of The Beatles can be seen in Krikey! In addition, the association between Sir Peter and Ocean is strengthened through the late rock star Ian Dury. Depicted by Sir Peter in Mr Love Pants, Dury was Ocean’s art tutor at Canterbury College of Art, during which time they formed the pub rock band Kilburn and the Highroads, with Dury singing and Ocean on bass guitar. Also, while Dury was tutor to Ocean, Sir Peter taught Dury, at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s. Ocean’s ‘chair’ prints remind us of the early work of Tracey Emin, who toured America in 1994, taking with her a copy of her autobiography entitled Exploration of the Soul – from which she gave readings – and a chair not dissimilar to Ocean’s Fat Check Chair, that she embroidered along the way.
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Yet despite having decorated the chair, Emin has used it more for practicality, as opposed to Ocean, who has elevated it to an aesthetic object, and so perhaps the slick, simplified studies of modernist chairs often found in the work of Michael Craig-Martin is a more appropriate comparison. On the subject of Craig-Martin, having left his teaching post at Canterbury College of Art, he went on to lecture most of the YBAs at Goldsmiths in the 1980s, some of whom are included in the show, such as Ian Davenport, Angus Fairhurst, and Gary Hume. Krikey! also contains quite a few ‘hallucinatory’ images. The faces depicted by Frank Auerbach have something quite haunting about them, as does Tracey Emin’s Dog Brains, wherein the ephemeral, ghostly figure so tentatively drawn does indeed seem like a figment of one’s imagination, about to disappear any moment, to be swallowed up by the huge, enveloping white expanse. In a recent article in The Guardian, an elderly woman who loathes modern art agreed to have Dog Brains hung on her living-room wall for a week. She too saw the figure as being somewhat hallucinatory; “you look at it and see different things ... sometimes the face looks different: you look at it one time and the next time it doesn’t seem the same ... sometimes you see the figure’s eyes very clearly, and the next time you can’t see them at all”.7 This theme is continued by Sir Peter Blake in Love Hurts, wherein the young Everly Brothers hover like glittery grey ghosts, while Sir Peter’s sinister, spectral portrait of Andy Warhol is in sharp contrast to the subject’s luminous screenprints of the 1960s. Also, in Angus Fairhurst’s set of Unprinted images, a warm Pop-like flamboyance that recalls Tom Wesselman’s Great American Nudes is
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juxtaposed against an eerie, ethereal air – an idea which is particularly potent given that Fairhurst committed suicide two years ago.
and thought-provoking. Moreover, he seems to spell words that should begin with the letter ‘c’, with a ‘k’.
On this note, juxtapositions are another possible correlation. As with much of his work, Gary Hume achieves a marriage of abstraction and figuration, and of beauty and ugliness. In Hermaphrodite Polar Bear, for example, a cute image is masking a thoroughly unpleasant comment on the tragic results of global warming. That we are able to display work produced by Sir Peter Blake in the 1970s alongside his present day output also provides fascinating juxtaposition; not simply between old and new, but between his subjects and media, which have both changed considerably. For, the Sideshow prints are meant to be interpreted as musty, mysterious, discoloured old cuttings that have recently resurfaced, harking back to a bygone era. The ‘Love’ portfolio, on the other hand, consists of huge prints of the many different musical heroes Sir Peter has had throughout his life, from Chuck Berry to Ian Curtis of Joy Division, which the artist – like a devoted, obsessed young fan – has lovingly spent much time sprinkling with lots of glitter and diamond dust. One can see here that there is a distinct shift from the iconoclastic to the iconic, and so a shift from the infamy, poverty and alienation of the bearded woman, for instance, to the fame, fortune and instant acceptance of someone like Elvis. In the screenprint entitled Royal Kraze by Shane Wheatcroft, two supposedly dissimilar elements such as Royalty and organized crime are juxtaposed, which has the effect of arguably promoting the similarities between the two. Though lesser known, the inclusion of Wheatcroft is most relevant here, for very much like Krikey! his work is brazen, bold, but also accessible
Indeed, Royal Kraze is not the only print in Krikey! to pack a powerful political punch. Aside from Wheatcroft’s cutting indictment of the Royal Family, we have Hermaphrodite Polar Bear, which is arguably employed by Gary Hume as a metaphor for our typical response to global warming, in that just as we tend to laugh at the image, so we tend to snigger and scoff at talk of global warming. In their sexually explicit reworking of a McDonald’s ‘Happy Meal’ box, Jake and Dinos Chapman appear to be making a comment on the negative effects of cultural and economic globalisation,8 while Angus Fairhurst’s Unprinted I, II and III “refer to the language of advertising and fashion photography while seeking to undermine it”.9 Finally, with its stark black and white depictions of blindfolded and handcuffed nude prisoners being led away by soldiers, Ana Maria Pacheco’s Dark Event is arguably inspired by the recent abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at the hands of the American Army at Abu Ghraib. What cannot be debated, however, is the fact that Krikey! is a bottomless pit of very diverse images and interpretations. Ultimately, then, there is no point in trying to dig your way out. Michael Healey and Martyn-John Hill
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In search of the Kentemporary: a brief essay in Kentish art history On the 27th May 1732 a group of five friends set out from the Bedford Arms Tavern in Covent Garden on a ‘five days peregrination’ to Kent. Travelling partly by boat and partly on foot, they wandered from Gravesend to Rochester to Upnor, around the Hoo Peninsula and through the Isle of Grain, and then across the mouth of the Medway to the Isle of Sheppey, before making their way back to London down the Thames. En route they visited a cathedral, ancient castles, and busy dockyards, while also observing natural phenomena like the porpoises swimming alongside their boat. They made topographical studies of the landscape, transcribed inscriptions in churchyards, and analysed local history and customs. They also drank a great deal, ate a lot, played hopscotch, caricatured a porter, got lost, gossiped with a gravedigger, threw mud-pies at each other, mislaid their possessions, were charitable to sailors, flirted with pretty girls and widowed landladies, had boozy sing-songs in pubs, fell over, and got dirty and drenched. Among the party was the artist and printmaker William Hogarth. We learn from the narrative written by the chronicler of the trip, Ebenezer Forrest, that Hogarth regularly made drawings of the Kentish scene – an activity that in Queenborough on Sheppey attracted an admiring crowd – but that he also talked frequently about his dreams, cut his toenails in public and even defecated against the church door in Hoo (for which sacrilegious act his friends ‘administred penance to ye part offending with a Bunch of Nettles’).10
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Hogarth’s journey around north Kent owed as much, therefore, to the picaresque as to the picturesque. The manuscript of the ‘five days peregrination’ gently parodies the topographical and historical concerns of earlier antiquaries as documented in such books as William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent (1576) or Thomas Philipot’s Villare Cantianum or Kent Surveyed and Illustrated (1659). For example, at the site of Queen Philippa’s castle in Queenborough – a building demolished in 1650 whose appearance is preserved in a drawing by the Bohemian printmaker Wenceslaus Hollar in the British Museum – Hogarth’s companions found only a well of clear water and some hungry and penniless sailors abandoned by their officer. In Minster, Hogarth drew the tomb monument of Lord Shorland: this medieval nobleman was the subject of an involved and improbable local legend, recorded by the antiquaries, that ends with a witch’s prophecy that he would be killed by his own horse coming true when he accidentally but mortally wounded himself, while walking on Sheppey’s shore, by idly kicking what turned out to be the skull of his former mount. Ironically, Shorland had earlier taken the precaution of killing the horse himself to prevent this fate from occurring. Forrest states that the locals were so convinced of this that ‘wee did not Dare to Declare our Disbeleif of one Tittle of the Story’. The pursuit of the historical identity of Kent on this trip turned out to be as irrational as the headless figure of ‘Somebody’ that Hogarth drew – with Rochester Castle in the
background – as the frontispiece of Forrest’s manuscript; and the ‘peregrination’ through Kent’s landscape was as grotesque and shapeless as the bodiless figure of ‘Nobody’ that he supplied as an end-piece. The similarity of Hogarth’s directionless ramble to the episodic and random narratives of quixotic literature was confirmed by its translation into ‘Hudibrastick’ verse (in emulation of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras) by the antiquary William Gostling – a Canterbury resident with whom Hogarth stayed on his return from a later trip to France. The element of chance, and the playful quality, that characterized the encounter between one of Britain’s greatest printmakers and the county of Kent, can be taken as ‘emblematical’ for the purpose of introducing this exhibition of prints by contemporary artists with some connection to Kent. For when an attempt is made to place these ‘kentemporary prints’ into some sort of historical context, it becomes clear that the accidental and opportune (or even the inopportune in the case of Lord Shorland’s encounter with his horse’s skull), the unexpected and the strange, are recurring features in Kent’s history, and certainly in its relationship with the visual arts. This is not to deny the role played by the deliberate patronage of the arts within Kent that has resulted in masterpieces from the medieval stained glass of Canterbury Cathedral to the Marc Chagall windows at Tudeley. Nor is it to diminish the extent to which defining events in Kent’s history have been the subject of art, from illuminated manuscripts depicting the martyrdom of Thomas Beckett to Paul Nash’s painting of the Battle of Britain (1941). Nevertheless, there is a strong element of the accidental in Kentish art history. For instance, standing by a grave side in Birchington on Sea, hearing
the rumbling of the waves against the North Sea coast, Hall Caine, the friend and biographer of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, reflected that ‘though we had little dreamed that we should lay Rossetti in his last sleep here, no other place could be quite so fit. It was indeed the resting-place for a poet’.11 At the other end of life’s trajectory, Kent was the birthplace – Chatham to be precise – of the painter Richard Dadd in 1817. Dadd’s masterpiece, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64), was painted in Bedlam hospital after the criminally insane artist had murdered his own father. Lying as it does between the continent and the capital, Kent is a county criss-crossed by innumerable journeys, both real and fictional (most obviously by Chaucer’s pilgrims), along well-worn paths like Watling Street and the Pilgrim’s Way. Whether their destination is Heaven or London, travellers have had to enjoy or endure Kent. From Julius Caesar to St. Augustine, Erasmus to Pocahontas, there have been many notable visitors to the ‘garden of England’. The same can be said for artists, for until the time of air travel, every notable artist visiting London would have had to travel across Kent, from Holbein and Rubens to Picasso. Van Dyck left his mark on the map of Kent – his drawing of Rye (now in Sussex) was etched by Hollar into the border of Charles Whitwell’s map A New Description of Kent of 1664 – and he included landscape motifs studied from the Kentish countryside in the backgrounds of his portraits. Another notable visitor from the Netherlands was Vincent van Gogh who in April 1876 described the four-and-a-half hour train journey from London to Ramsgate in a letter to his parents: ‘we also passed Canterbury, a city with many medieval buildings, especially a beautiful cathedral, surrounded by old elm 9
tress. I had often seen pictures representing it’. In Ramsgate, Van Gogh taught languages at the small school of Mr Stokes, and reported to his brother Theo that ‘these are really very happy days I spend here day by day but still it is a happiness and quiet which I do not quite trust…’ He sketched the view of the town and coast through the school room window – ‘none of us will ever forget the view from the window’ – and vividly described a storm – ‘the sea was yellowish especially near the shore; at the horizon a streak of light and above it immense dark grey clouds from which the rain poured down in slanting streaks’. When in June 1876, Mr Stokes moved his school to Isleworth, Van Gogh walked back to London from Ramsgate via Canterbury and Chatham.12 The drawing of the Ramsgate view that Van Gogh sent to his brother is unpopulated and slight, although clearly the result of deep feeling, and it contrasts interestingly in this respect with one of the great set-pieces of Victorian painting, Ramsgate Sands – Life at the Seaside (1854) by William Powell Frith (the Kent coast was also to give rise to another popular Victorian classic, William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay of 1858). Similarly, it is interesting to compare Van Gogh’s description of a storm with the water-colour study of Ramsgate with a tempestuous sea in the Tate’s collection by J. M. W. Turner, a frequent visitor to Kent, particularly to Margate where he had been a school boy. Turner’s sketch was engraved by Robert Wallis in 1824 for a series of Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast. The search for the picturesque had attracted many artists before Turner to Kent: Paul Sandby, Thomas Girtin, Samuel Prout and George Cumberland to name a few. Turner, however, was particularly persistent in his attachment to Kentish scenes and the skies above them, to the extent that his critical champion John 10
Ruskin became quite disapproving: ‘it seems very notably capricious in a painter eminently capable of rendering scenes of sublimity and mystery, to devote himself to the delineation of one of the most prosaic of English watering places [Margate]’. Ruskin saw Turner’s repeated choice to represent Ramsgate, Deal, Dover and Margate as ‘a very mournful one, considered with respect to the future interests of art’.13 Ruskin’s objection was to the seaside towns of East Kent, as opposed to Kent per se. According to his autobiography Praeterita, his own first drawings from nature were made at Sevenoaks, Tonbridge, Canterbury and Dover. Later in life, he noted how at Dover ‘I saw to my amazement, that the skies of Turner were still bright above the foulness of smoke’ and that ‘in the pure air of Kent’ the clouds formed shapes ‘infinite, lovely and marvellous beyond any that I had ever seen’.14 Ruskin believed in the formative power of landscape on an artist’s vision, and even attributed some influence to ‘glimpses… of chalk cliffs in Kent’ to the development of Shakespeare’s genius.15 Prominent among the artists who have sought inspiration in the Kentish countryside is Samuel Palmer, and the group of ‘Shoreham Ancients’ that gathered around him in the village of Shoreham near Sevenoaks from 1826 to 1835. The poet, artist and visionary William Blake was a regular visitor, and his insistence on seeing through not with the eye to obtain to the infinite, certainly influenced the pastoral idylls that Palmer and his friends created both as paintings and prints. The Canterbury-born painter (and lithographer) Thomas Sidney Cooper produced a very different landscape vision, although according to his autobiography it was also one founded on a mystical experience of the natural beauty of Kent. ‘Cows’ Cooper had tramped around the county in his impoverished youth with a
theatrical troupe and was able to make quite precise recommendations on the merits of its landscape: ‘if any young aspirant to the profession of landscape painting wishes to know of a perfect district for study, let him investigate the region from Hastings to Ashford, through Tenterden, where he will find the most lovely valleys stretching through a highly cultivated country, studded with picturesque homesteads and other objects, providing innumerable studies for pastoral pictures. I know no place like it’.16 Cooper aspired, literally, to be the father of a Kentish school of painting when he founded in 1882, the Canterbury Sidney Cooper School of Art – a foundation that continues to exert its influence on art education throughout Kent to this day. A more defining and widespread influence on modern art, and a more peculiar instance of Kentish inspiration, is provided by the case of the French artist Marcel Duchamp. In August 1913, Duchamp accompanied his sister Yvonne on a holiday to Herne Bay, where she attended Lynton College to take an English course and he played tennis. While in Herne Bay, the artist made four drawings towards the elaborate mechanisms of desire that formed his major artistic project The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) also known as The Large Glass. Duchamp was so impressed with Herne Bay’s Grand Pier Pavilion that he included a photograph of it in his Green Box (1934), an album of notes and sketches intended as a companion to The Large Glass. Shortly after his trip to Herne Bay, Duchamp also created the work 3 Standard Stoppages, where three metrelength pieces of string were dropped from a height of one metre onto canvas strips to form by chance ‘a new image of the unit of length’. Wooden rulers were cut to the random curving shapes formed by this
experiment, and placed with the string in a box of ‘canned chance’. The arbitrariness of units of measure explored in this ‘joke about the metre’ might have been prompted by Duchamp’s experience of the imperial system of measurement while in England.17 Taking the arbitrary constraints of geography – ‘a connection with Kent’ – and the temporal – ‘contemporary art’ – the student curators have devised the ‘kentemporary’ as the defining feature of this exhibition. Krikey! Kentemporary Prints involves a controlled experiment with chance like that of Duchamp. The artists included were born in, educated in, or resident in Kent for some time, and this provides an objective connection between the works displayed, but no claim is being made for a Kentish style or school or tradition of printmaking (Kent, the birthplace of William Caxton, has made its contribution to the history of print – but how did this cause the works exhibited here?). The approach taken is rather like the curatorial equivalent of the surrealist game of the ‘exquisite corpse’ – and the curators studied some fine examples of this technique by the Chapman brothers in the British Museum while preparing this catalogue. If some of the juxtapositions created by this method appear quixotic and prompt a response of ‘Krikey!’ then this at least is a salutary reminder of the tendency of art history towards narrative tidiness. The presiding spirit here is Hogarth’s ‘Nobody’ and the goal is utopian inclusiveness. As it happens, another curious Kentish connection can be discovered here as the severed head of Thomas More resides nearby in St. Dunstan’s, Canterbury – this ‘nobody’ is the head that conceived of Utopia. If ‘nobody’ is everybody, and ‘no place’ potentially everywhere, then this is an exhibition for everyone! Ben Thomas Curator of the Studio 3 Gallery 11
Frank Auerbach R.B. Kitaj 1980 Etching 39 x 33 cm Edition of 30 Signed Kindly on loan from Marlborough Fine Art, London Lucian Freud 1980 Etching 39.7 x 34.3 cm Edition of 30 Signed Kindly on loan from Marlborough Fine Art, London Michael 1990 Etching 26 x 21.5 cm Edition of 20 Signed Kindly on loan from Marlborough Fine Art, London
Sleep 2001 Etching 23 x 25.5 cm Edition of 35 Signed Kindly on loan from Marlborough Fine Art, London
Frank Auerbach was born in 1931 in Berlin and was, shortly before his eighth birthday, transported to England as a part of the Kindertransport program to escape the rising antiSemitism of Nazi Germany. His first years in England were spent at Bunce Court, a boarding school for refugees located in the Kent countryside between Lenham and Faversham. During this period, he developed interests in acting and poetry, but already his chief focus was painting and at the age of sixteen he decided to become a painter. Auerbach moved to London in 1947 to pursue his painting career and took painting classes at Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute. A year later, he was accepted to Borough Polytechnic where he studied under David Bomberg, who urged his students to avoid their primal impression or the literal depiction of the subject’s appearance in order to capture its ‘genuine essence’. Following his lead, Auerbach soon gained the reputation of a laborious and dedicated student who kept on reworking his paintings by the reduction of aspects that he found redundant. After two terms at Borough Polytechnic, he went on to St. Martin’s School of Art and then the Royal College of Art. Besides his painting career, Auerbach also taught at various art schools. He currently resides in London and has used the same studio in Camden Town since the 1950s, which previously belonged to the artist Leon Kossoff.
Geoffrey 1990 Etching 26 x 21.5 cm Edition of 50 Signed Kindly on loan from Marlborough Fine Art, London
Auerbach is often associated with the ‘School of London’, a term used by R. B. Kitaj to describe the new generation of young painters living and working in London in the 1970s – 80s. Artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Kossoff and Kitaj made predominantly figurative paintings with expressionistic elements. These works highly contrasted with the existing avant-garde forms of minimalism and conceptual art. Auerbach’s paintings often depict his close friends, family members and the cityscapes of North London. Frequent sitters, such as his wife Julia, Ruth Bromberg or Estella West, have appeared in his paintings and prints numerous times.
The Reclining Head of Julia 1998 Etching with engraving 27 x 23.1 cm Second state, edition of 35 Signed Kindly on loan from Marlborough Fine Art, London
The medium of paint prevails in Auerbach’s oeuvre. Indeed, he has produced comparatively few prints during his career. The vast majority of these are the portraits of friends and relatives that have already sat for his paintings. Although he uses the same sitters for these prints, he explores different techniques and experiments with plates or engraving tools (for some prints he would use a screwdriver or a dart), but the print medium attracts Auerbach for another reason: The graphic mark which was made spontaneously, quickly, and then by some magic turns into a form of permanence that can be stamped down – no other medium has
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got that. And to me it is a tremendous magic that something that could have been done in 20 minutes is preserved not as a sketch, but as something of more permanence and authority.18 When working on the prints included in the exhibition, Auerbach made sketches of the sitter upon several pieces of tracing paper, sometimes collating them together. The final result was drawn directly onto the etching plate with the intention to condense the previous drawings, yet still observing from life. Before the execution of these prints, he takes advice from the printers. Whilst working upon the Six Etchings of Heads (1980-2), his printer Terry Wilson from Palm Tree Studios suggested several printing options. The Seven Portraits (1989-90) series were printed by Mark Balakjian, printer of Studio Prints. They discussed different options for executing the prints; either by prolonging or shortening the biting time of the acid or the usage of multiple plates, which resulted in almost each print being made in the unique way. R.B.Kitaj and Lucian Freud (both 1980) are from the series Six Etchings of Heads. This series also include the portraits of the artists Joe Tilson and Leon Kossoff; and Auerbach’s cousin Gerda Boehm and wife Julia. The R.B.Kitaj print was executed using two stages of biting process, each with a different type of acid to achieve tonally different black and grey lines. For Lucian Freud (1981) he used four different plates to achieve the tonal contrast of lines. Similarly with the prints Geoffrey (1990) and Michael (1990), which are part of the series Seven Portraits, he etched his close friends Geoffrey Parton, director of Marlborough Fine Art; and art historian Michael Podro. Auerbach used two plates for printing Geoffrey which led to the contrast of grey and black lines. For Michael, on the other hand, he used very low biting time, leaving the plate in acid for less than four hours achieving very thin lines and an effect similar to the initial drawing. The prints portraying his wife Julia, Sleep (2001) and The Reclining Head of Julia (1998), contrast with his male portraits. He often portrays her in a reclining position, which is Julia’s preference, for it is less tiring. Nevertheless, the femininity of the thinner and less anxious delineation suggests the cherished relationship with the sitter. Moreover, for Sleep he used a different type of paper than the usual Somerset white. The Saunders paper, a warmer watercolour paper, allowed subtle modifications of colours from two different plates to strengthen the overall effect. Auerbach’s reductionist linear style may do little to assist the viewer in recognising the actual person’s appearance. By neglecting the recognisable features, his prints retain their strongly idiosyncratic character, which perhaps enables him to narrate the unique experience or impression without being decorative or literal. Despite the fact that Auerbach’s work is often contrasted with the works of Pop or the Young British Artists, his rigorous approach to the subject matter and continuous experimentation with the print medium similarly parallel their artistic endeavours.
Sir Peter Blake Sideshow (Portfolio of 5) 1974 – 78 Wood engravings 15.2 x 12.7 cm (each) Edition of 15 Signed Kent Print Collection I Love Paris 2004 Silkscreen on colorplan, diamond dust 75 x 57.8 cm Edition of 75 Signed Kindly on loan from Paul Stolper, London Love Hurts 2004 Silkscreen on colorplan, diamond dust 75 x 57.8 cm Edition of 75 Signed Kindly on loan from Paul Stolper, London Love Will Tear Us Apart 2004 Silkscreen on colorplan, diamond dust 75 x 57.8 cm Edition of 75 Signed Kindly on loan from Paul Stolper, London Mr Love Pants 2005 Silkscreen on colorplan, diamond dust 75 x 57.8 cm Edition of 75 Signed Kindly on loan from Paul Stolper, London
Katarína Lichvárová and Alicia Simpson
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Love Me Do 2005 Silkscreen on colorplan, diamond dust 75 x 57.8 cm Edition of 75 Signed Kindly on loan from Paul Stolper, London Lover’s Rock 2005 Silkscreen on colorplan, diamond dust 75 x 57.8 cm Edition of 75 Signed Kindly on loan from Paul Stolper, London Diamond Dust Warhol 2009 Inkjet on Somerset Satin, diamond dust 52 x 50 cm Edition of 75 Signed Kindly on loan from Paul Stolper, London
Sir Peter Blake was born in Dartford, Kent in 1932 and attended Gravesend School of Art from 1946 until 1951. He was able to develop his own personal style at the Royal College of Art between 1953-6, where he received a first class diploma. Blake claims that the experience at the Royal College marked a new beginning where ‘all this information from my life became valid.’19 In 1969, Blake left Kent with his family to pursue work in Avon as well as touring in Europe. In 1979, he decided to permanently settle in London. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1981 and received a CBE in 1983. Blake’s first solo show was at the National Portal Gallery in London, 1962, and he has exhibited widely around the world since. The different paths Blake was encouraged to take between home and school led to a conflict of interests. At school, Blake was encouraged to appreciate the classical arts. At home, however, his interests lay in other pursuits like jazz, football, and wrestling. Fortunately, he was able to find a middle ground between the two at the Dartford rhythm club where ‘one life didn’t suppress the other... that contrast between art-school life and home life is how I explain my later part in pop art.’20 It is clear to see that Blake’s time growing up in Kent and the interests he pursued there, such as visiting jazz clubs, as well as his education, enabled him to understand and evaluate popular culture from a different perspective. Being able to appreciate mass culture in this way set him aside from his contemporaries in the development of pop art and led to a personal style that is still relevant today.
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Although sentimentality and nostalgia are key themes in Blake’s oeuvre, as seen in famous works such as On the Balcony (1975-7) which combine popular and fine art imagery, he also finds inspiration from reproductive media such as magazines and photographs. Throughout his career, comparisons have often been drawn between Blake and Andy Warhol, who is often credited as the figurehead of Pop Art. However, it is known that Blake was making ‘pop’ imagery as early as the 1950’s. In a recent newspaper interview with Lynn Barber, Blake insists that he ‘invented pop art, if one is being arrogant’.21 Speaking to Martin Gayford of The Daily Telegraph he says he wanted to make art as accessible as pop music and make art appeal to younger generations who were not regular gallery visitors: ‘I wanted to make art that would communicate to the people who liked pop music. But it didn’t work because it wasn’t understandable to a person listening to pop music.’22 What clearly comes across in both instances is Blake’s preoccupation with the term ‘popular’ and what it means to be famous. The majority of his prints in Krikey! Kentemporary exhibition come from the ‘Love’ portfolio which was produced in 2005. The ‘Love’ portfolio consists of devotional images of music icons, which seem to be a recollection of them at the height of their fame. Blake has represented Chuck Berry, The Beatles, The Clash, Ian Dury, Elvis Pressley, and Frank Sinatra, to name just a few. Some of these Blake knew personally, such as Ian Dury, whom he taught, and The Beatles, whom he had worked with, famously in designing the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover. Others he only encountered via the reproductive media he took inspiration from. Those with whom he was less acquainted with caught his attention because of the renowned status that surrounded them. Blake has said that although he did not particularly respond to Presley’s music: ‘I’m a fan of the legend rather than the person.’23 Diamond Dust Warhol (2009) clearly reflects this way of thinking as Blake selectively removes many of the features that would make the subject identifiable; the key feature of the print is not Warhol’s face but his iconic silver-white wig. Also included in Krikey! is an earlier series of wood engravings called Sideshow (1974 – 78). These portraits depict a ‘Bearded Lady’, a ‘Tattooed Man’, a ‘Giant’, a ‘Midget’ and a ‘Fatman’. Though somewhat different to Blake’s more recent work, Sideshow, especially when viewed through the lens of the ‘Love’ series, reveals a sense of how Blake might interpret the cultural fascination with celebrity and fame in contemporary society. Emma Ferguson, Natasha Gibson, Siti Nurul Jannah, Charlotte Peer, Sinead O’Halloran, and Haji Othman
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Jake and Dinos Chapman Unhappy Meal 2002 Etching 56 x 76 cm Edition of 150 Signed Kent Print Collection The Birth of Ideas 2003 Etching 52 x 64 cm Edition of 200 Signed Kindly on loan from Canterbury Museums
Jake Chapman and Dinos Chapman were born in London, in 1966 and 1962 respectively. Dinos studied at Ravensbourne College of Art in Chislehurst, Kent, and Jake studied at North East London Polytechnic. They began working together in 1992 and are well known for making controversial art work which often centres on the themes of politics and religion, as well as philosophy and society. They continued their studies at the Royal Academy College of Art and gained experience working as assistants to Gilbert & George. Working together, the brothers have produced etchings, as well as sculptures and installations. They were nominated for the Tuner prize in 2003, and were part of the Young British Artists (YBA’s). They have exhibited extensively throughout the world, with solo shows at Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (2008), Tate Britain and Liverpool (2007), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2005), and Modern Art Oxford (2003).
They often use traditional themes within a modern setting as metaphors for contemporary society. The themes of life and death, and growth and degeneration are treated in a surreal, fantastical scenario in The Birth of Ideas (2003). The etching shows what appears to be levitating lands and within them, dreamlike creatures. Located in the top left corner of this scene is a yellow sun, which seems to be on the verge of being overshadowed by the chaos below. Commenting on the dominating, and perhaps, oppressive presence of globalisation throughout the world, Unhappy Meal (2002) shows a McDonald’s ‘Happy Meal’ box laden with images which contradict the usual conditions in which it appears. Unhappy Meal is part of The Chapman Family Collection (2002), which is predominantly made up of tribal inspired sculptures of figures and masks embedded the McDonald’s logo, products and merchandise.25 The incorporation of McDonald’s in this work, the Chapman brothers explain, highlights the fact that corporate companies are subtly present in all aspect of everyday life, like ‘so many corporate snakes in the grass’.26 Unhappy Meal appears to ask us to consider whether the corporate world has created a population that is happy and empowered or one that is demoralized and exploited.27 These works reflect the Chapman brothers’ characteristic focus on bringing age-old social predicaments into the present by adding elements of humour. However, behind the humour in their work, the Chapman brothers aim, not only, to critique the social circumstances in which we live today, but also, in their own words, to produce a ‘moral panic.’28 Indeed, much of the Chapman brothers’ creative production seems to interrogate this complex question of morality through the relationship between contemporary society and its images. They explain: ‘That’s what we do. We present the viewer with a puzzle. We put an injunction on speedy consumption, by refusing to offer a straightforward aesthetic experience. And to defend the integrity of the work, we produce a bit of turbulence that makes it more than a simple sip – of art.’29 Kate Davey and Rosie Leech
The Chapman brothers came to the publics’ attention with their sculpture Disasters of War (1993), a three-dimensional interpretation of the original plates by Francisco Goya’s work bearing the same name; Los Desastres de la Guerra, or, Disasters of War. The brothers have a continuing fascination with the prints of Goya, particularly with a series of etchings titled Los Caprichos (1797 – 98), and Jake not Dinos (2006) is a reworking of one of these etchings. Writing for the Guardian newspaper about Chapman’s Insult to Injury (2003), another piece based on Goya, Richard Dorment, claims that ‘The Chapman Brothers have not just defaced Goya, they’ve enhanced him.’24
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Michael Craig-Martin
shelf, which is attached to the gallery wall. On an accompanying text card, the artist asserts that the artwork is in fact an oak tree, and in doing so marked a turning point in the development of conceptual art.
Pride 2008 Screenprint (from a series of 7) 83 x 150.7 cm Edition of 30 Signed Kindly on loan from The Alan Cristea Gallery, London
During the 1990’s, the focus of Craig-Martin’s work shifted decisively to painting, making particular reference to the American artists that he most admired, such as Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, and Robert Morris. The work produced during this time had the same recognisable range of boldly outlined motifs and luridly vivid colour schemes. Paint was applied, in unexpected (and at times apparently arbitrary) combinations, to works on canvas, and also to increasingly complex installations of wall paintings.
Michael Craig-Martin was born in 1941 in Dublin, Ireland. His family moved to the United States in 1945, where he was given a religious education under the Roman Catholic Church. At the Benedictine Priory School, he was encouraged to look at religious imagery in illuminated glass panels and stained-glass windows. He studied Fine Art at Yale University under, amongst others, Josef Albers, and soon after moved to the United Kingdom. CraigMartin’s career is renowned not only for his artistic output, but also for his achievements as a teacher. One of Craig-Martin’s earliest posts was as an art teacher in Canterbury College of Art from 1968-70. In 1974, he moved on to teach at Goldsmiths College School of Art. He stayed there until 2000, where, along with his colleagues, such as Jon Thompson, was responsible for creating an environment where the Young British Artists (YBA’s) could thrive. Craig-Martin explains that: Until the early ‘90s there was virtually no art world for young artists in Britain. That’s why Frieze was so important. The only real key to success as an artist is making good work, and at Goldsmiths we tried to help students make good work.30
Pride (2008) is one of a series of billboard size images using the names of the seven deadly sins. Each print is saturated with a palette of ultra modern and mass produced tones. Odd arrays of objects are included in each print. For example, in Gluttony (2008), a fire extinguisher and a cello are visible. In Envy (2008), an electric fan and safety pin can be seen. In Pride, the objects are a PVC plastic ‘jelly’ shoe, a metronome, a beer can, a drawer, and a pair of handcuffs. There is no clear relationship between each object or between the objects and the title of the piece. Or so it would seem. For example, the drawer is typical of a piece of flat-pack furniture synonymous with Ikea. Perhaps the artist is alluding to pride in the home. The wearing of a set of handcuffs can usually mean the immediate loss of ones pride, whether they are placed there by an officer of the law or a sexual partner. Whatever the artist’s intention might be, Pride, which at first may seem simplistic and trivial, is in fact, quite challenging and provocative. It is monumental, playful, brash and a highly graphic piece in the print medium. A.J. Powderly
Craig-Martin’s first solo exhibition was at the Rowan Gallery London in 1969. Since then he has exhibited internationally in a number of solo and group exhibitions. His work is on permanent display at: Tate Liverpool; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Regents Place, London; The Laban Centre, Greenwich and at Woolwich Docklands Light Railway Station. He was awarded a CBE in 2001 and was elected Royal Academician in 2006. Throughout his career Michael Craig-Martin has explored the aesthetic and linguistic character of everyday, designer and iconic ‘art-historical’ objects, all of which were realized through a variety of media including, paintings, sculpture, prints, and more recently, computer animations.31 In 1973, he exhibited, what is arguably, one of his most famous and controversial works An Oak Tree. This work consists of a glass of water placed on a glass
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Fred Cuming Hythe 1978 Etching 16 x 10.5 cm Edition of 2 Signed Kindly on loan from Brandler Galleries, Essex Standing Figure 1978 Drypoint and aquatint 22.4 x 20 cm Edition of 65 Signed Kindly on loan from Brandler Galleries, Essex
Fred Cuming was born in London in 1930 and studied at the Sidcup Art School from 1945 to 1949 where he was taught traditional and figurative art. After completing his national service for the army, he went to the Royal College of Art in 1951 until 1955. He has taught at Rochester, Maidstone, Walthamstow, Hornsey College of Art and the Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone. Some of his pupils include Ian Dury, Zandra Rhodes, the fashion designer and filmmaker Peter Greenaway. He has lived in Romney Marsh in Kent, where he met his wife Audrey. The couple lived in Hythe for 21 years and then moved to their own house on the edge of Romney Marsh in Rye in 1967. During his time in Hythe, Cuming taught art classes at the Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone where he was able to use their printmaking facilities to experiment with the medium.
chosen subject of landscapes in his paintings. Another inspiration closer to Cuming’s home in South London was the River Thames. Living in such close proximity to the Kent countryside must have been an inspiration to choose the subject of landscape in his future paintings. He is currently experimenting with watercolours in his studio in Rye in East Sussex.32 Cuming works with figurative elements though he is predominantly known as a landscape painter. The two Cuming prints displayed in Krikey! are Hythe (1978) and Standing Figure (1978), both made with drypoint and etching. Hythe is an etching made during Cuming’s experimental period in the late 1970s and shows the landscape of Hythe beach. This print was created while Cuming lived by the coast where he was able to capture the surface of the sea and its changing light. Along with Hythe, he has also painted landscapes of Dungeness and Folkestone on the Kent coast. From Standing Nude we are able to see that etching is a similar technique to drawing. Cuming states that the drypoint aquatint process allowed for real experimentation, which is made using the steel needle to scratch the surface of the plate.33 In both pieces, the medium and subject are fairly unusual for Cuming, who often prefers depicting the atmospheric mood of the coastline, a garden, or the British countryside through paint. However, on close inspection of these two pieces, we can see the trademark atmosphere Cuming creates in his pieces. Cuming tells us his work is not about ‘pure representation’, but ‘responses to mood and atmosphere generated by landscapes still life of interior’.34 In his book A Figure in the Landscape, he praises that the greatest works of art, are often on a small scale like the works of Rembrandt or Vermeer’,35 and that the ‘true artist is most apparent in his smallest works’.36 When we look at Cuming’s work we see that he has created a ‘dream world’. He has observed nature closely, and using its natural light and tone he creates a hazy dreamy effect, producing a moment of calming beauty in his creation.37 Cuming tells us his philosophy is, ‘the more I work the more I discover’, which means that he uses his art to keep his mind open and learn about the world around him. Angharad Hillier and Nanaco Kawai-Pelletier
Cuming is known for his landscape paintings of the Kent and Sussex coastlines. He was one of the youngest painters to be elected to the Royal Academy, as Associate Royal Academician at the age of 39 and was elected Royal Academician in 1974. He had his first one-man show in 1978 at the Thackeray Gallery in London and has since had solo shows in Britain and America. In 2004 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate from the University of Kent at Canterbury. Before attending Sidcup College of Art at the age of 15, Cuming had four years away from school education because of the Second World War. His family lived in South London, however because of the increasingly heavy air raids occurring in the city, they finally evacuated to Cornwall and later to Yorkshire. Moving from blitzed South London meant that he was able to see a different way of life in the countryside, which might have influenced the
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Ian Davenport
might be endless variations.41 Damien Hirst’s ‘dot paintings’ are a good example of this, and in terms of screen prints, Andy Warhol’s variations on his famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe are no doubt an arch and knowing antecedent.
Oval: turquoise, green, turquoise 2002 Screenprint 75.5 x 70.5 cm Edition of 25 Kindly on loan from The Alan Cristea Gallery, London
Along with such artists as Gary Hume and Damien Hirst, Davenport shares an interest in exploring the potential and process of painting letting it ‘do its own thing’. This philosophy is evident in his prints, which have a very spontaneous, random element.
Etched Lines 34 2009 Etching 92 x 70.5 cm Edition of 25 School of Arts, University of Kent
Ian Davenport was born in Sidcup, Kent in 1966. He studied at Northwich College of Art and Design in Cheshire from 1984 to 1985. He then studied at Goldsmiths College of Art in London, graduating in 1988. In that year, he participated in Freeze, an exhibition curated by fellow student Damien Hirst. Davenport had his first solo show in 1990 before being nominated for the Turner Prize in 1991. In 1999, he was a prize winner in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition. Davenport was shortlisted for the Turner Prize as an established painter, but began making prints because he likes the ‘versatility’ that he is able to bring to the medium.38 He maintains a strong link between his printmaking and his painting. He says, ‘the prints deconstruct every way that I make a painting, so in a way you can deal with colour separately to gesture’.39 Davenport works with the print techniques of etching, mono-prints and screen prints and, interestingly, sometimes uses one technique to explore the other. Working in tandem with the printmakers, he chooses the colour palette and scheme to be used, while the printers incise the image onto the matrix. Davenport often uses simple shapes in his work, such as ovals, arches and lines to interrogate the effects of colour. Indeed, he specifically chose the very difficult technique of etching because of its richness and ‘luminosity’ of colour.40 More importantly, complete variations in colour enable Davenport to render a starkly different visual experience, emotional affect and conceptual reading between works. The screenprint in Krikey! Kentemporary, Oval: turquoise, green, turquoise (2002), for example, gives the impression of one of Davenport’s poured paintings, which is realised via a method akin to stencilling. With reference to contemporary art and painting, Julian Stallabrass talks of an ‘end game’, in that there are only so many elements left to explore, though within this walled garden there
Davenport usually uses straight vertical lines, though in Etched Lines 34 (2009), they become skewed towards the lower half of the image. This effect is created using a technique Davenport calls ‘puddling’. This courting of chance, however, writes Stallabrass, is a ‘deliberate process, and not at all to do with the artist’s hand’.42 Davenport points to the ‘paradoxical’ as an influence in his work. He relates the shared genesis of his prints and paintings, and like a surfboarder upon the crest of a wave, negotiates their inherent inconsistencies: ‘the paintings and prints start off with me pouring liquid using a syringe. I can control the liquid incredibly accurately, the amount and the velocity ... and so I can take control of the uncontrollable’. The prints of vertical lines in Davenport’s oeuvre are comparatively neat and ordered, but the ‘puddling’ brings disorder, as the artist exerts less control. Davenport drips paint directly onto a tilted canvas, which is a technique used by Helen Frankenthaler, the American abstract expressionist painter, and later used by Robert Morris. The etched lines prints within Davenport’s work resonate with each other, somewhat like the works of pop Artist Bridget Riley, whose chief concern was perhaps the optical effect of the work. However, it is evident that Davenport displays an interest in the material qualities of paint. Though they are taken from the same copper plate, each of Davenport’s monoprint’s are produced to be uniquely different from the other, each displays exclusive combinations of foreground and background colour. His investigation of colour is equally diverse: Lots of different things inform my choice of colour. Sometimes it’s purely intuitive, putting colours together and seeing how they look. At other times I might lift a palette from an old painting, or as I recently did, from the opening sequence of The Simpsons.43 Davenport’s work is included in many great public collections across Europe and America, and Etched Lines 34 in particular is a recent acquisition by the School of Arts, which will hang in the newly built Jarman building situated on the University of Kent’s campus. Dr Jonathan Friday, director of the building, tells of his personal inclination towards buying the piece: ‘One is always wary of forcing an unintended reading upon an artist’s work; however, an attraction of this piece [...] could be in the straight lines having some comparison to the range of disciplines taught within the school, and the diversity inherent within the student body and teaching staff, perhaps then the ‘puddling’ could be seen as the communication and interaction between the disciplines, and the new possibilities and research that this meeting of minds and understanding will continue to bring forth.’ Carrie-Anne Armes and Martyn-John Hill
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Tracey Emin More Margate – More Past 1998 Monoprint 30 x 42 cm Edition of 50 Kindly on loan from Brandler Galleries, Essex
Dog Brains 2006 Screenprint 76 x 102 cm Edition of 300 Signed Kent Print Collection But Yea 2008 Polymer gravure etching 44.2 x 33 cm Edition of 300 Signed Kindly on loan from Dominic Kemp, Modern British Prints Hade Hades Hades 2009 Screenprint on cotton, hand stitched onto floral fabric 41 x 52 cm Edition of 200 Signed Kindly on loan from Julian Page, London
Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963. Emin spent three years at Maidstone College of Art, which she refers to as the one of the happiest periods of her life.44 She is, however, in her own words, a daughter of Margate where she spent most of her childhood. Emin also spent time in Whitstable with the artist Billy Childish, who was her boyfriend at the time. One of the Whitstable beach huts, which has subsequently been uprooted, was turned into an installation titled The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don’t Leave Me Here (The Hut) (1999). She is a Royal Academician, a Doctor of Letters at the University of Kent (2007), and is the first woman to be honoured with a permanent room dedicated to her work at Tate Britain. In 2007, Emin represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. 26
Emin is an artist whose notoriety, often connected with works such as her Turner exhibit My Bed (1999), causes such a furore that she is often overlooked as an artist that uses a wide range of media and who is firmly placed in the feminist camp. Other feminist artists, such as, Judy Chicago, have been cited as her influence, but unlike Chicago, Emin’s great strength lies in her ability to use her own life as a source for her work. Dog Brains (2006) depicts an image of a figure standing naked with the derogatory term “dog brains” set next to the figure. Her work often reflects personal battles she has experienced. This particular etching seems to engage with personal battles both with feelings about herself and with how others see her. Emin’s art lays bare her soul to the viewer and this can sometimes be uncomfortable to consider. She is a great believer in revisiting and realising these memories, which for her appears to be therapeutic, and helps her in construction of her art. With reference to the process of confession she says, ‘Every time I do it for myself, I’m left with a lot more freedom afterwards’.45 From delicate hand drawing to light-based installation, Emin employs different creative work processes and media in the production of her art work. However, it is embroidery that Emin returns to time and again. One of the most well known pieces, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95 (1995), is a small tent made using traditional techniques of patchwork quilting. Textile is again utilized in the recent work Hades Hades Hades (2009) with great effect. This work is comprised of two screenprints on cotton which have been hand stitched onto a floral fabric background. It is a pattern that is evocative of a period that still enforced a code of conduct in which sexual promiscuity was considered a taboo. Nevertheless, the chosen floral print also strongly alludes to notions of innocence and home. The word ‘Hades’ evokes the underworld in Greek mythology, a word which became synonymous with hell for the Christian faith. For Emin though, this word had a completely different meaning, one which was deeply personal. Hades was a nightclub in Margate, one which she frequented during her teenage years. She left school at an early age, and as she reflects in her book Strangelands, this was a time that she spent going to the disco, eating fish and chips and hanging out. In light of this, ‘Hades’ is significant not only as the name of the nightclub, but also in its allusions to the loss of innocence and the awakening of teenage sexuality. But Yea (2008) is an etching created for her retrospective, Tracey Emin 20 Years, which was held at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Scotland in 2008. In the exhibition catalogue, Emin cites Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and other German Expressionist painters as influences, and this can be seen clearly in But Yea.46 With one fluid gesture, in the depiction of hips and legs, the sinuous line becomes the prime transmitter of emotion. More Margate – More Past (2006) is a self-portrait of the artist lying naked on her back under what seems to be a beacon on the beach. The beach was the scene of many of her sexual encounters.47 However, it could also be construed as a devil’s pitch fork, representing a life of sin or, perhaps, the perpetrators of sins against her. The positioning of the body, naked with one leg raised, seems to reinforce the artist’s allusion to her sexual past. The title of the print also alludes to this continuous cycle of self-analysis, particularly with reference to the place where she grew up, Margate, a location to which she frequently returns. Abi Bousfield and Kiki Coombes 27
Angus Fairhurst Unprinted I, II, and III 2005 Etching with drypoint 40.5 x 50.5 cm Edition of 30 Signed School of Arts, University of Kent
Angus Fairhurst was born in 1966 in Pembury, Kent. He studied at Canterbury Art College from 1985-86, which is now known as UCA Canterbury. Fairhurst then went on to study Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. Fairhurst’s organisation of a show of student work in 1988 is said to have led to the now infamous Freeze exhibition. This exhibition, where 16 of the Goldsmiths students showed their work, was a significant event in the development of the YBA’s, and Fairhurst exhibited in their subsequent exhibitions such as Some Went Mad … Some Ran Away in 1994 at the Serpentine Gallery; the name for the collective show appropriated by Hirst from Fairhurst’s earlier solo show at Karsten Schubert.
models also brings to mind another filmic reference in the form of the infamous and alluring silhouettes from the opening sequences of James Bond films. The titles for Fairhurst’s works are often an ironic play on their process of creation. The use of the word ‘unprinted’ in the title refers to the blank spaces where the figures have been cut out; that are represented only by their inked surroundings on the etching plate. Their negative image enables us to look through to the intricate printed sub-layers which are resonant of his other cut-out and collage works such as Posters/ Screen Body and Text Removed (2004). His work was most recently the subject of a large retrospective exhibition at the Arnolfini centre in Bristol. Fairhurst’s Underdone/Overdone Wallpaper transformed the entrance into a psychedelic forest. From the outset, visitors were presented with an interplay of domestic and natural outdoor space; his layered screen-prints brought the trees of Fairhurst’s beloved Epping Forest indoors, where he often enjoyed walking.49 Unprinted II is a mesmerising work encapsulating some of core themes in Fairhurst’s work, and it is regrettable that the production of such works in the future has been cut short by such a fascinating artist. Stacey Wright
The following year Fairhurst was also represented at the significant trans-Atlantic show Brilliant! Art from London, at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis. It was during the 1990s that he also spent some time working with Paragon Prints, London, as many of the other YBA’s did during this period. Fairhurst was close friends with Hirst and also a long-term partner of Sarah Lucas who frequently collaborated with the pair, most notably in 2004 within the In-DaGadda-Da-Vida exhibition of the three artists at the Tate Britain. Fairhurst also exhibited at three solo shows at Sadie Coles HQ in London, but sadly, on the last day of the third show in 2008, he took his life in the Scottish Highlands. Fairhurst’s work is witty and engaging, taking form in a diverse range of mediums from painting to sculpture, video to print-making. Most famously, he erased the controversially airbrushed figure of the model Sophie Dahl from Gucci’s Opium perfume advertisement in Billboard: Everything but the Outline Blacked-In (2003).48 From Fairhurst’s layering of images emerges, Unprinted II (2005), which is part of a series of three colour etchings. These prints resemble the artists’ other collage works where text and figures are cut from magazine pages leaving behind only the empty shadow of their form. The use of primary colour tones, appropriation and eradication of popular imagery in Unprinted II resembles that of a vintage movie poster. The blocked colour figurines appear like the paper-doll style cut-outs of a Saul Bass advertisement, or opening credit sequence famed in such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Fairhurst’s particular use of female
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Gary Hume Hermaphrodite Polar Bear 2003 Screenprint 64 x 82 cm Edition of 250 Signed School of Arts, University of Kent Grey Leaves 2004 Screenprint 71 x 59 cm Edition of 250 Signed Kindly on loan from Canterbury Museums
Gary Hume was born in Tenterden, Kent in 1962. As a young adult, he attended Homewood School, a specialist Arts College. In the early 1980s, he worked briefly as an assistant film editor before deciding he wanted to become an artist. Hume then spent two years attending Day Tech art classes at Chelsea School of Art before studying a degree course at Goldsmiths College in London.50 Hume first received critical acclaim in 1988 with his ‘Door’ paintings, a series of highly reflective works depicting hospital doors. These works were shown in the 1988 Freeze exhibition. In 1996, he was nominated for the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize. He has since represented Britain, won prestigious prizes worldwide and has been collected by major international museums. In 2001, Hume was elected a Royal Academician. Today, he divides his time between his studios in London and New York. The subjects in Gary Hume’s work are arguably diverse, yet all of them have a visible presence in everyday experience. Representations have ranged from flowers, celebrities, and nudes to snowmen, children’s toys, and polar bears. Some motifs are developed over time and produced in various media. The ‘bear’ has been used in several paintings such as The Polar Bear (1994) and Bear (1994).51 Indeed, the bear motif in Hermaphrodite Polar Bear (2003) which is shown in Krikey! Kentemporary, can be seen as the evolution of the three-leaf clover pattern used in The Polar Bear (1994).52
animation and rendered in sugary pastel colours, this curious hybrid animal is not a product of Hume’s imagination. It is reported that entire populations of polar bears in Norway are mutating into infertile hermaphrodites as a result of environmental pollution. On such an account, the piece becomes both tragic and comic, since the pure and childlike depiction belies actual circumstances. The topic of climate change is recurrent in Hume’s work. The Industrialist (2008) is a recent sculpture which depicts a lead tracing of a factory chimney billowing smoke. He emphatically calls it an epitaph for industrialists. Hume’s involvement in raising awareness of global warming and pollution, however, is not unchallenging. He finds the portrayal of global warming difficult, and questions his contribution as an artist. In conversation with Madeleine Bunting he says, ‘How do you depict global catastrophe? I’m too selfish to describe the world’s dilemma, so I describe my own paltry dilemma of what it’s like to be alive’.53 Hume has been influenced by the autonomy and clarity in the works of Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, as well as the works of American artist Julian Schnabel.54 Yet he never saw himself as a simple consumer of art, he explains, ‘artists were simply supplying tools that I could then borrow and make my own’.55 In addition to the influence of other artists, Hume openly draws inspiration, especially for his floral prints, from images created outside the art world. Speaking about his working process, Hume explains that he often looks for suitable images during trips to second-hand bookshops.56 Grey Leaves (2004) is one such work inspired by old books on flowers. The sharp lines of the branches in Grey Leaves stand out against the colourful surroundings which divide the painting into sections, allowing depth and dimension. However, like much of Hume’s work, another dimension is at play here. Similar to the strategy used in Hermaphrodite Polar Bear, the somewhat whimsical imagery is again gently subverted. By removing the central flower blossom whilst retaining its outline, Hume creates a break with naive and innocence associations common to floral imagery. When asked how he justifies this entitlement to all image sources, his own and those of others, he explains how he sees it not as an entitlement but that ‘all things are nature and therefore mine’.57 Ultimately, he claims the paintings find their own identity and imagery, ‘the paintings have to define themselves because I’m incapable of defining them. The point at which they get rid of me and stand up for themselves, that’s a hell of a relief’.58 Finally, as can be seen reflected in the Hermaphrodite Polar Bear and Grey Leaves, Hume reveals his artistic philosophy in an interview with Ulrich Loock: ‘I’m trying to make truthful things that are not slaves to our experience, but are depictions of it. To not have something hurtful in the painting can’t be truthful to it’.59 Alexandra Meincke
Aside from this, however, one might wonder about the significance of a hermaphroditic polar bear? Hermaphrodite Polar Bear shows an animal that appears to be standing awkwardly on a piece of transparent glass. Its four brown paws are spread out to reveal both male and female genitalia. Although the polar bear is drawn in a style reminiscent of children’s
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Humphrey Ocean Black Love Chair 2003 – 2006 Aquatint 94.6 x 77.4 cm Edition of 15 Signed Kindly on loan from Humphrey Ocean Stripey Love Chair 2003 – 2006 Aquatint 94.6 x 77.4 cm Edition of 15 Signed Kindly on loan from Humphrey Ocean Fat Check Chair 2003 – 2006 Aquatint 94.6 x 77.4 cm Edition of 30 Signed Kindly on loan from Humphrey Ocean
Humphrey Ocean was born in 1951 in Sussex and studied at Canterbury College of Art from 1970 to 1973. It was during his time at Canterbury that Ocean came to play bass guitar for the pub rockers Kilburn and the High Roads, of which his art tutor Ian Dury was the lead singer. As Dury went on to achieve much success fronting the punk band Ian Dury and The Blockheads in the late 70s, Ocean rose to prominence shortly after as an artist, through winning the Imperial Tobacco (now BP) Portrait Award in 1983. Subsequently, he was commissioned to paint the portrait of poet Philip Larkin for the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), a portrait recently described as ‘unanswerable’ by the writer Nick Hornby.60 Eight other paintings by Ocean are included in the permanent collection of the NPG, with sitters including Sir Paul McCartney and Tony Benn. Ocean has exhibited at a number of prestigious venues, such as Dulwich Picture Gallery and Tate Liverpool, and has works included in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the British Council Collection. Elected a Royal Academician in 2004, Ocean has recently been an Artist-In-Residence at Dulwich Picture Gallery, which resulted in a solo exhibition of the work he had completed during this period, entitled ‘How’s My Driving?’ Ocean’s most recent solo show was held at the Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury, in 2009.
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The subject matter of Ocean’s prints may seem initially somewhat prosaic, yet one should not forget or underestimate the importance of the chair in art-history. Rummaging through the archives, one learns that the chair has often been present at the births of several innovative and important art movements. Picasso’s Still Life with Chair-caning (1911), for instance, was the first example of what the art historian Douglas Cooper terms ‘Synthetic Cubism’, while One and Three Chairs (1965) by Joseph Kosuth, heralded the dawn of Conceptual Art.61 In the early 1990s, Franz West installed chairs either inside or outside the gallery for visitors to sit on, and thus the collaboration of artist and audience created a new type of ‘interactive art’, as well as questioning the very nature of sculpture.62 Indeed, there are countless occasions of 20th century artists being particularly creative, if not revolutionary, with chairs. Allen Jones, for instance, uses the chair to examine forniphilia; Pieter Engels has represented a copulating couple through his manipulation of chairs; while Joseph Beuys, Christo, Robert Rauschenberg, and Doris Salcedo can also be added to this list. Certainly, such interest in chairs doubtless stems from Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the ‘readymade’, in which mundane, often manufactured objects are elevated to works of art. According to the architect Anthony C. Romeo, the chair, in particular, appeals to artists since ‘it eludes aesthetic criteria simply by being what it is ... this undemanding object has a friendly appeal but does not impinge on our consciousness by being explicitly beautiful’.63 The notion of the ‘readymade’ was pre-empted by Vincent van Gogh back in 1888, when he transformed the chair into an aesthetic object simply through depiction, as opposed to the installation works mentioned above. Van Gogh painted two chairs, a ‘self-portrait’ and the other a ‘portrait’ of his friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin, which represented their deteriorating relationship. However, unlike van Gogh, Ocean has not left the viewer any clues as to the content of his work, though this is not to say that it prevents interpretation.64 For example, an empty chair often symbolizes death65; indeed, as early as 1870, a Victorian magazine used an illustration of the desk and vacant chair of the novelist Charles Dickens, to accompany his obituary.66 These are the first prints that Ocean has made in over thirty years as a professional artist, and the refined and tidy execution of the aquatints marks a very pronounced shift from the style of his recent paintings, in which thick, gooey brushstrokes are hastily applied to the canvas. In terms of the artist’s oeuvre, the chairs also seem somewhat incongruous. For, his paintings of teenagers refer arguably to the clumsy angst of his sitters, while his landscapes focus upon the dullness of south London suburbia. Another print produced by Ocean in 2007 depicts a haunting, spectral outline of a house in the dead of night.67 Thus, that there are possibly sinister undercurrents present in all of these works suggests there is an equally sinister undercurrent lurking beneath the seemingly simple images of chairs. Indeed, Sir Paul McCartney selected Black Love Chair for the cover of his recent album Memory Almost Full because he was ‘looking forward to how people will interpret it’.68 Michael Healey
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Chris Orr Ghosts of Chelsea Reach 2006 Etching 69 x 48 cm Edition of 30 Signed Kent Print Collection City of Holy Dreams 2007 Etching 86 x 51 cm Edition of 30 Signed Kindly on loan from Brook Gallery, Devon Chris Orr was born in London in 1943 and attended Ravensbourne College of Design in Chislehurst, Kent. Orr developed his passion for printmaking during his three years of study at the Royal College of Art. Graduating in 1967, he was taught by Edwin La Dell, another prominent figure in the Print industry, who lived in nearby Maidstone. As an established printmaker, draughtsman, painter and published writer, Orr has exhibited his work worldwide, from the Print Guild in Melbourne, Australia, to the Galleria Grafica in Toyko, Japan. Orr’s work can be found in public collections such as The British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Science Museum, Tate Gallery, and Victoria & Albert Museum. Orr has published nine books concerning ideas and inspiration behind his work. Some titles include: Many Mansions: a Travelling Circus of the work of Chris Orr (Thumb Gallery, London: 1990), The Disguise Factory (Jill George Gallery, London: 2003), and Cities of Holy Dreams (Jill George Gallery, London: 2007.) Other distinguished achievements include being elected a Royal Academician in 1995, the head Professor of Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 1998, and being awarded an MBE for services to art in 2008. Orr is influenced by the topography of cities. London, being his native city, is a constant source of inspiration. In the press release for the exhibition London-Tokyo-Nagasaki (2009) at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, which exhibited Orr’s topographical landscapes, Orr describes himself as a ‘history painter’ (who) is concerned with the complex social and physical layers that compose the modern city.’ When asked during interview about his obsession with the notion of the ‘city’, the artist explained that:
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... over half the world`s population now live in cities ... the study of what happens is essential. I am not anti-pastoral, but the key to our very future lies in the ideas and dreams we have in cities. Every city is full of ghosts and they are important.69 These ‘ghosts’ can be specifically found in the striking and haunting landscapes of the City of Holy Dreams (2007) and the Ghosts of Chelsea Reach (2006), both of which are exhibited in Krikey! Kentemporary. The ‘ghosts’ are an amalgamation of London’s historic past and bright future. The meticulous etching process involves covering a metal plate in a waxy ‘ground’, upon which the artist draws, by hand, the image that will be printed later. Such a process enables Orr to emphasise the different layers of buildings, people and culture that make London the cosmopolitan city that it is today. Historical monuments, such as the Tower of London and St Paul’s Cathedral, which highlight the heritage of London, can easily be picked out in City of Holy Dreams. One can also spot modern additions to the city’s landscape, such as the Millennium Wheel, and even the various cranes that are continuously adding residential and office blocks. Though instances of ‘movement’, as signalled by a lone aeroplane or river and road traffic, can be discerned from City of Holy Dreams, the overall tone of the work is peaceful and calm. The hustle and bustle of life on the ground remains unseen above the skyline of the city. In City of Holy Dreams, the heritage and modernity of London coexist, and instead of creating an awkward contrast, both elements rub shoulders together in a comfortable manner, reflecting the make-up of London city. In comparison, Ghosts of Chelsea Reach, although using a similar etching process, produces an indistinct and unstable quality. The fragility of this image is haunting, as if a gust of wind and smoke is literally being swept across the page. Historically, the area of Chelsea has been associated with the wealthy, and also with artists, such as Turner and Whistler, both of whom were prominent artistic authorities on city topography. Today, it perhaps also reflects the decline of the bourgeois and wealthy citizens in the ever expanding cosmopolitan city of London. The question of why Chelsea could be considered a ‘City of Holy dreams’ is best explained by Orr himself: ‘The dreams of cities are holy both in the strictly religious sense and also in the dreams of empire, finance, art and industry.’70 Thus the loose and unstable lines of Ghosts of Chelsea Reach can be seen as evocative of not only the clash between history and memory, but also between religion and industry. In the contemporary art world, Orr’s work has been likened to the Hogarthian tradition of social critique but what Orr seems mostly concerned with, however, is the future of our cities, and how the history of any city will define that future. Emma Mills
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Ana Maria Pacheco Comedia 2006 Woodcut 58 x 81 cm Edition of 15 Signed Kent Print Collection Dark Event: Plates 1 – 7 2007 Drypoint 77 x 68.2 cm each Edition of 15 Signed Kindly on loan from Pratt Contemporary, Kent
that ‘it’s a very, very unacademic way that I use, not the traditional way of doing the drawing first.’71 Though she uses a variety of techniques throughout her work, she employs each of them differently. She creates different levels of depth from each line to complement the richness of the imagery in her work. When asked about the motivation for these prints, Pacheco’s says she used the word ‘comedia’ for its specific literary sense: ‘Comedia (comedy) is a work that has a happy ending, as opposed to tragedy – but there is more to my Comedia than a happy ending.’72 This is evident from the piece as it appears to have materialized out of a sinister fairytale, like so many of Pacheco’s other prints. For Francis Carey, Pacheco’s work largely deals with ‘undercurrents of life, fear and superstition, rather than explicit social or political views.’73 The Dark Event Series (2007) is resonant of Pacheco’s Dark Night of the Soul (1999) sculptures, the inspirations for which were the events in Abu Ghraib. The bound, naked and blindfolded figures, and the presence of what could be a soldier in Dark Event – Plate 2, all seem to suggest this, but Pacheco has dealt with it in a seemingly unobvious way. Pacheco remains concerned with the image throughout the whole process, and comments on her use of medium that is about finding ‘a way to translate your concept, ideas, to find a language.’74 In light of this, she often prefers not to give fixed artist statements on her work, saying that ‘if it does not come across in strictly artistic terms, then no amount of verbiage is going to remedy the situation.’75 If we accept this association, it is less likely that the artist is making a directly political statement, but more a statement on the condition of human morality. Emma Griffiths
Ana Maria Pacheco was born in 1943 in Goias, Brazil. She moved to England in 1973 after winning a British council scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Between 1979 and 1985, she lived and worked in Kent, during which time she took part in two significant group exhibitions, and held her first solo show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. In 1985, she was appointed as the Head of Fine Art at the Norwich School of Fine Art and continued to work here until 1996. Pacheco moved to London in 1997 to receive the position of fourth associate artist of the National Gallery, which resulted in a major exhibition of her work. She was the first sculptor and the first non-European to receive such a position. Pacheco currently has a sculpture studio in Kent and her prints continue to be produced and published by Pratt Contemporary. While Pacheco is best known for her large scale wooden sculptures, which were produced for an exhibition at the National Gallery, she has an impressive portfolio of prints produced in a variety of techniques. Pacheco’s interests encompass a wide variety of cultural references including Brazilian folklore, classical myth, mystical Catholicism, and medieval satire. She often plays with the art of storytelling through themes, such as life and death, sexuality, magic and secrets. Comedia (2005) is a woodcut monochrome print, and is an addition to a series of four smaller prints of the same name. Pacheco has said of her woodcut printing technique, 36
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Shane Wheatcroft (GSG) Royal Kraze 2009 3 colour screenprint on 300gsm acid-free paper 50 x 50 cm Edition of 50 Signed Kindly on loan from A.J. Powderly Callface 2009 8 colour screenprint on 300gsm acid-free paper 50 x 70 cm Edition of 50 Signed Kindly on loan from Castle Arts, Canterbury
Shane Wheatcroft was born in 1974 in Colchester, Essex. He graduated from the University of East London and since leaving university he has exhibited in several solo and group shows at London galleries. He has been a painter for most of his career and his work is informed by the media, movies, TV, politics, popular culture and bad puns! He is inspired by the work of Gerald Scarfe, Ron English, and Andy Warhol. For the last two years, screen printing has been the main medium of his output. He lives and works in Sittingbourne, Kent, and now works under the name of GSG (Greasy Spoon Gallery).
‘ordinary’ careers in the military and go about their charity work in as normal a way as possible. This is perhaps the image that some sections of the media and the House of Windsor seek to present. However, there are also some contradictions between this image and the Princes’ private lives. For example, while Prince Harry may have quietened down recently, he has had a number of violent altercations with the paparazzi. He also caused a media frenzy and a political backlash when he wore a swastika to a fancy dress party. Prince William, as heir to the throne, will enjoy considerable political influence merely through an accident of birth, something which does not sit comfortably with modern society. Moreover, if history is anything to go by, he will be aloof as a parent and a serial adulterer! Both Bailey and GSG have glamorised their protagonists, however, Royal Kraze contains a provocative anti-monarchy sentiment that will stir much discussion. The juxtaposition of the Kray’s and the Princes is perhaps one way for GSG to conceptualise the power that media images have on contemporary social imaginary. He explains: ‘A lot of my work is about deconstructing and remixing the messages put out by popular culture and poking fun at the contradictions and inconsistencies we’re constantly bombarded with.’78 Callface (2009) pays homage to the anti-hero Tony Montana, the principle character in the movie Scarface. The film tells the story of a Cuban refugee who builds a powerful cocaine empire through a ruthless reign of ultra violence and business savvy.79 GSG is fascinated by the glorification of ‘gangster culture’ and thought it would be interesting to subvert the gangster persona by re-employing Montana in a sensible office job.80
Royal Kraze (2009) is based on the iconic photograph by David Bailey titled The Kray’s (1965), which depicts the two brothers, Reginald ‘Reggie’ Kray and Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Kray. However, in GSG’s image, the Kray’s have been replaced by the Windsor’s: Prince Harry and Prince William.76 The black and white of the original photograph by Bailey has been retained in the painted portraits of the Princes. However, they have been set against a bright yellow background which gives a bold and modern twist to the image.
While there is an element of glamour associated with gangsters, the same can also be said for the many, often pretentious, job titles that we hear of on a daily basis. Callface demonstrates that while we may be impressed when someone tells us what they do for a living, the reality is that their job is often tedious, monotonous and boring. The daily drudgery of the 9 to 5 where your time, indeed your life belongs to someone or something else is personified in Callface. GSG may be protesting against the adoration of gangster culture. But Callface is also de-glamorising the thousands of mundane jobs responsible for bolstering our economy.
GSG says he is interested in why we view certain people in society as more glamorous and interesting than the rest of us: ‘The Kray’s and the Windsor’s have always been equally controversial in different ways and divide opinion on what they stand for’.77 The Kray’s, who spent time living in London and Whitstable in Kent in the sixties, were gangland leaders with a history of violent crime. Nevertheless, they soon became two of the most talked about celebrities of the time; the attention of the general media and Bailey’s numerous photographs no doubt contributed to their iconic status.
Callface and Royal Kraze demonstrate that things, people and situations are not always as they first appear. Royal Kraze makes an anti-royalist statement, whether intended or not. Callface comments on the tedious, demoralising plight of living in a modern and capitalist society. GSG’s art is as accessible, informative, populist and sometimes as funny as Banksy’s. Perhaps, then, it is fitting to end with Banksy, who said: ‘We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping and console ourselves.’81
The Kray’s were hated and feared; yet worshiped and admired. Like Bailey’s photographs of the Kray’s, GSG’s Royal Kraze reminds us that the Princes are two young men who enjoy their
Alan J. Powderly
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Oliver Winconek Playtime’s Over 2009 Hand stencilled silkscreen with 3 layers of spray paint over a 3 colour hand-pulled screenprint 30.5 x 36 cm Edition of 50 Signed Kindly on loan from Martyn-John Hill
Oliver Winconek was born in 1982 in Bedford, East of England. He produces works on canvas, creates ‘live’ installation art, and hand stencils drawn from a variety of sources. Whether the references come from current social and political affairs, the media or popular culture, Winconek’s work is recognizable for its dynamic use of figurative elements and colour. He has shown his work in galleries in London, Glasgow, Amsterdam, and Paris. More exhibitions of his work will also be shown in Japan, New York and Beijing. He is represented by Urban Angel in London, and Castle Arts in Canterbury. He moved to Ashford, Kent five years ago and has worked as a full-time artist since.
much of Winconeks’ work, it is much more layered than it first appears. Winconek says making his work, involves ‘taking everyday scenes and objects and giving them a disquieting shift.’83 Exactly what this ‘shift’ is cannot be formally stated but when applied to Playtime’s Over, perhaps we might begin to understand what it means. In Playtime’s Over, a shooting looks imminent, though on closer inspection, it is unlikely that such an event will occur. The stance adopted by the woman is more akin to that of a salesperson doing product demonstration than that of someone about to fire a gun. However, it is also possible that the woman will fire the gun, causing injury not only to the robot, but also to her hand. The point is that the sense of uncertainty, tension and ambivalence created by Winconek in this work seems to transcend the fact that this scenario is constructed for the purposes of art. Perhaps, it is because of its aesthetic and formal connection with street art and graffiti, where anonymity and secrecy plays a huge role. Arguably, much of the power in the work of Banksy, for example, is due to the protection of his identity from the wider media. Though Winconek has created an image that denies the viewer any certainty of meaning; for him, this work has a very specific and personal significance. Playtime’s Over signifies the time when he decided to get serious about his art; it cemented, as he says, the ‘real start’ of his career. So, what do the next 10 years hold for Oliver Winconek? Simply, he says, to move forward tirelessly with constant experimentation in order to keep things interesting for himself and his viewer. Primrose Matambo
When Winconek describes art as his ‘whole life’, he is referring to his early childhood where he was ‘totally obsessed and passionately consumed by art.’ Growing up, all that seemed to take up his mind was painting and drawing. When asked about his memories from this time, Winconek says: I can remember being at my first school, never wanting to do anything in the least bit academic, always asking my teacher if I could do a ‘big picture’. I can’t ever remember wanting to do anything but draw and paint.82 For Winconek, art is something that should be enjoyed for its aesthetic value but he also believes that should not be treated solely as a consumable commodity. He has been described as a street and graffiti artist; however, he would rather be seen as an urban contemporary artist who works with the aesthetic traditionally associated with graffiti. He employs techniques from graffiti art as well the more traditional disciplines such as painting and printing. Although Winconek experiments on a wide range of surfaces and techniques, the majority of his work is produced on canvas, principally with acrylics and spray paint. He often adds collage elements to his work using vinyl or printed paper to create hand-cut stencils derived from original photographs. The title Playtime’s Over (2009) alludes to what a person of authority would say to a minor. It depicts a woman in a strappy red dress, pointing a handgun to the head of a retro toy robot. The gun is cocked and ready to be fired. With its arms held up, the robot’s future looks uncertain. All elements of the work are presented with clarity and simplicity. However, as with 40
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A Roller-Coastal Ride It has been a remarkable experience working on a project with such variety of art work at its heart. It has offered many exciting opportunities for History of Art students to speak directly to eminent and vital artists, to liaise with busy galleries at the sharp end of the art market, to secure loans and negotiate acquisitions, to consistently display the requisite agility and control over the project’s finances, with the significant responsibility of not letting arguably the most exciting exhibition in Kent go unnoticed. “As a curatorial team we further developed the concept of this exhibition. Consequently we were immersed into the real art world by talking with the art dealers and institutions to negotiate the loans and purchases. From our initial position of students studying art we became instead business partners who had to obey the rules of loaning, transport and correct storage well before the concerns of exhibiting the chosen prints.” Katarína Lichvárová (Curatorial Team) “The Finance team has faced the tasks of researching possible grants, proposing sponsorship relations, monitoring spending and finally securing financing of this large-scale project. During the course of the module, team members pursued funding opportunities on as well as off campus, including completing grant applications, writing sponsorship proposals for local businesses in Canterbury and finally meeting with prominent figures of the University of Kent, In between the highs and lows of
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fundraising and negotiation processes, the members of the Finance team have gained real-life learning experiences such as the improvement of social skills, as well as the building of self-esteem and character in business situations. Finally, the practical approach of this module has forced all members to take initiative, as we all felt responsible for and in control of the final success of the exhibition.” Alexandra Meinke (Finance Team) “Alongside the mammoth task of promoting the event, making sure that it received the wide coverage it deserved, tasks such as writing press releases for the media and education packs for schools were new challenges that I now feel confident producing to a professional standard.” Stacey Wright (Promotion Team) Academic rigour and a vocational pragmatism have been the watchwords throughout. Though conducting oneself with the necessary vim, vigour and unfaltering pep has not always been easy. The responsibility of handling valuable works of art and interviewing famous artists are very involved learning processes; a new confidence towards which we acquire only after the deed and not before. This catalogue stands as the accumulation of this work experience and as a testament to the investigative research we have carried out, as well as serving as a fully functioning companion to the exhibition. We hope that it will also be a viable contribution to the discipline’s body of knowledge.
By building on strengths and existing resources, the Creative Campus initiative seeks to coordinate and integrate best practice to mark out Kent as a highly creative university. This will take the University forward as a creative place to be, to work, study, play and visit by 2015. To obtain your copy of current and forthcoming initiatives, please email: creative-campus@kent.ac.uk Alternatively to submit an idea, please email: creative-campus@kent.ac.uk with a brief outline of your project, or simply send a link to a source of information about it. Further information about Creative Campus can also be found at: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/creative campus The cost of producing these catalogues was met through kind sponsorship from Creative Campus.
Martyn-John Hill
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Endnotes 1 By ‘contemporary’, we are referring to works of art made after 1945. 2 Of course, there were plenty more artists there to choose from, such as, Billy Childish, Adam Chodzko, Nigel Cooke, Tacita Dean, Stephen Farthing, Derek Jarman, and Alison Wilding, but ultimately these were absent from the final line-up, due to reasons including: financial; the size of the exhibition space; and that some of these artists simply have not produced any prints. 3 Indeed, of the fourteen artists mentioned, seven are Royal Academicians; four have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize; and three have represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. 4 For more information, please see: www.royalacademy.org.uk. 5 These are: Jake and Dinos Chapman, Ian Davenport, Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst, and Gary Hume. 6 Susie Steiner, ‘Dog Brains, Tracey Emin’, Guardian, 21 June, 2003. 7 Ibid. 8 Virginia Button, The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, Tate Publishing, 2003, p. 192. 9 For more information, please see: www.othercriteria.com. 10 Charles Mitchell (ed.), Hogarth’s Peregrination, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. 11 Thomas Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London, 1882, p. 296. 12 The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to his Brother, 2 Vols, London: Constable & Co, 1927, pp. 5867. 13 E. T. Cook & A. Wedderburn (eds), The Works of Ruskin, Library Edition, London: George Allen, Vol. XIII, 1903-12, p. 60. 14 Ibid, Vol. XXXV, p. 467. 15 Ibid, Vol. VI, p. 438. 16 Thomas Sidney Cooper, My Life, London, 1891, p. 62. 17 See, for example, Jeremy Millar, ‘Looking through the Large Glass’, Tate Etc, 7, 2006. Millar has also made a film Zugzwang about this incident. 18 Craig Hartley, Frank Auerbach, Etchings and Drypoints 1954-2006, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, p. 11. 19 Nicholas Wroe, ‘The Bigger Picture’, Guardian, 21 January, 2006.
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20 Nicholas Wroe, ‘The Bigger Picture’, Guardian, 21 January, 2006. 21 Lynn Barber, ‘Blake’s Progress’, The Observer, 17 June, 2007. 22 Martin Gayford, ‘One of the reasons I paint is because I’m a fan. It’s to celebrate’, Telegraph, 23 June, 2007. 23 Marina Vaizey, Peter Blake, Academy Chicago, 1986, p. 24. 24 Richard Dorment, ‘Inspired Vandalism’, Telegraph, 30 April, 2003. 25 Jake and Dinos Chapman. The Chapman Family Collection, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2002, p. 8. 26 Ibid, p. 8. 27 Ibid, p. 8. 28 Holger Liebs, ‘Jake & Dinos Chapman: Explaining Christians to Dinosaurs’, Kunsthaus Bregenz. www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/ehtml/ ewelcome00.htm?aus_chapman.htm [accessed 18 March 2010] 29 Corrine Field, ‘Jake & Dinos Chapman – A Retrospective at The Saatchi Gallery’, Culture 24. www.culture24.org.uk/art/art18306 [accessed 17 March 2010] 30 Alistair Hicks, ‘The Pleasure Principle’, Deutsche Bank Art works: ArtMag. www.db-artmag.com/en/51/feature/michaelcraig-martin---the-pleasure-principle [accessed 14 March 2010] 31 For more information, please see: www.alancristea.com. 32 Fred Cuming in interview with author. 33 Fred Cuming in interview with author. 34 For more information please see: www.royalacademy.org.uk. 35 Fred Cuming and ChristianTyler (ed.) A Figure in the Landscape, London, Unicorn, 2000, p. 18. 36 Ibid, p. 48. 37 New Metropole Arts Centre Folkestone, Fred Cuming ARA: Drawings, Etchings, Paintings, 1971. 38 For more information, please see: www.alancristea.com 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, London, Verso, 2006, p.167. 42 Ibid, p.165.
43 Ian Davenport, ‘Artist Ian Davenport on how he paints’, Guardian, 20 September, 2009. 44 Carl Freedman and Honey Luard (eds) Tracey Emin: 1963-2006, New York, Rizzoli, 2006, p.146. 45 Sarah Kent, ‘Tracey Emin: Flying High’, White Cube. www.whitecube.com/artists/emin/texts/88/ [accessed 18 March 2010] 46 Patrick Elliott and Julian Schnabel, Tracey Emin 20 Years, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2008, p.21. 47 Tracy Emin, Strangelands, Sceptre Press, pp. 34 – 38. 48 Arnolfini Gallery, Angus Fairhurst Retrospective, Bristol, 2010 49 Ibid. 50 David Barrett and Lucy Head, Gary Hume: New Art Up-Close 1, London, Royal Jelly Factory, 2004, p. 1. 51 Ibid, p. 42. 52 Ibid, p. 43. 53 Madeleine Bunting, ‘Art and Climate 4’, RSA, Arts and Ecology Centre. www.artsandecology.org.uk/magazine/features/m adeleine-bunting/pages/bunting4 [accessed 18 March 2010] 54 Ulrich Loock and Iwona Blazwick, Hume, London, Other Criteria, 2009, p.7. 55 Ibid, p.7. 56 David Barrett and Lucy Head, New Art Up-Close 1: Gary Hume. London, Royal Jelly Factory, 2004, p.2. 57 Ulrich Loock and Iwona Blazwick, Hume. London, Other Criteria, 2009, p.11. 58 David Barrett and Lucy Head, New Art Up-Close 1: Gary Hume. London, Royal Jelly Factory, 2004, p. 7. 59 Ulrich Loock and Iwona Blazwick, Hume. London, Other Criteria, 2009, p.7. 60 Nick Hornby, ‘My Mate Humphrey’, The Independent, 12 July, 2003. 61 For more information, please see: Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, Phaidon Press, 2nd Edition, 1995. 62 The 20th Century Art Book, University of Michigan, Phaidon Press, 1996, p. 491. 63 For more information, please see: Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, Phaidon Press, 2nd Edition, 1995. 64 Gauguin’s Armchair is sturdy, ornate and elegant, and sat on it are books and a burning candle, while the carpet is a fierce red. Vincent’s Chair
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80 81 82 83
with his Pipe, on the other hand, is crude and unattractive, with simple straw caning, and the chair stands on broken tiles. Placed on the chair is a screwed-up ball of paper and a pipe. Such an extreme contrast reflects the loss of friendship between the two, and van Gogh’s chair reflects his own melancholy and despair at this time. Indeed, just recently in Arizona, America, as part of National Child Abuse Awareness Month, 51 empty chairs were displayed to symbolize the children who had died as result of abuse. According to the art critic Jonathan Jones, the illustration in question is The Empty Chair – Gad’s Hill, Ninth of June, 1870, by Luke Fildes, and the magazine in which it appeared was The Graphic. Jones refers to this in his discussion of van Gogh’s chair paintings, in ‘Chair, van Gogh (1888)’, www.guardian.co.uk, 2004. This point is made with reference to House (2007). This quote is taken from the booklet accompanying McCartney’s album Memory Almost Full, 2007. Chris Orr in interview with author. Chris Orr in interview with author. Frances Carey, The Prints of Ana Maria Pacheco, Frances Carey in Print Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1988, p.273. Ana Maria Pacheco in interview with author. Frances Carey, The Prints of Ana Maria Pacheco, Frances Carey in Print Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1988, p. 275. Frances Carey, The Prints of Ana Maria Pacheco, Frances Carey in Print Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1988, p.280. Ana Maria Pacheco and John Russell Taylor, Ana Maria Pacheco, University of Texas, Salander-O’Reilly, 2008, p. 12. Windsor is the official surname of the British Royal Family. Shane Wheatcroft in interview with author. Shane Wheatcroft in interview with author. Kashif Ahmed, ‘Rewind: Scarface’, Fast Rewind. www.fast-rewind.com/scarface.html [accessed 14 March 2010] Shane Wheatcroft in interview with author. Banksy, Wall and Piece, London, Century, 2005, p. 204. Oliver Winconek in interview with author. Oliver Winconek in interview with author.
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Bibliography Banksy, Wall and Piece, London, Century, 2005. Bailey, David and Morris, Desmond, Bailey’s Democracy, London, Thames and Hudson, 2005. Bailey, David, Mixed Moments, London, 1970. Bailey, David, Trouble & Strife, London, Thames and Hudson, 1980. Barber, Lynn, ‘Blake’s Progress’, The Observer, 17 June, 2007. Barrett, David and Head, Lucy, Gary Hume: New Art Up-Close 1, London, Royal Jelly Factory, 2004. Boulton-Smith, John, Munch, Phaidon Press Ltd., 1992. Brown, Neil and Kent, Sarah, Collings, Matthew, Tracey Emin, I Need Art Like I Need God, South London Gallery, 1997. Buck, Louisa, Moving targets: a user’s guide to British art now, London, Tate Gallery, 1997. Bunting, Madeleine, ‘Art and Climate 4’, RSA, Arts and Ecology Centre. www.artsand ecology.org.uk. Button, Virginia, The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, Tate Publishing, 2003. Caine, Thomas Hall, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London, 1882. Carey, Frances, ‘The Prints of Ana Maria Pacheco’ In. Print Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1988, pp. 273294. Chapman, Jake and Dinos, The Chapman Family Collection, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2002. Collings, Matthew, Blimey!, 21 Publishing, 1997. Collings, Matthew, This Is Modern Art, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000. Cooper, Douglas, The Cubist Epoch, Phaidon Press, 2nd Edition, 1995. Cook, Edward Tyas and Wedderburn, Alexander (eds) The Works of Ruskin, Library Edition, London: George Allen, 1903-12, Vol. XIII. Cooper, Thomas Sidney, My Life, London, 1891. Craddock, Sacha, Angus Fairhurst, London, Philip Wilson Publishers, 2009. Cuming, Fred and Tyler, Christian (ed.) A Figure in the Landscape, London, Unicorn, 2000. Davenport, Ian, ‘Artist Ian Davenport on how he paints’, Guardian, 20 September, 2009.
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Dorment, Richard, ‘Inspired Vandalism’, Telegraph, 30 April, 2003. Fischer, Wolfgang George, Schiele 1890-1918 Desire and Decay, Taschen, 2004. Elliott, Patrick and Schnabel, Julian, Tracey Emin 20 Years, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2008. Emin, Tracey, This is Another Place, Modern Art Oxford , 2003. Emin, Tracy, Strangelands, Sceptre Press, 2005. Feaver, William, Frank Auerbach, University of Michigan, Rizzoli, 2009. Field, Corrine, ‘Jake & Dinos Chapman – A Retrospective at The Saatchi Gallery’, Culture 24. www.culture24.org.uk. Freedman, Carl and Luard, Honey (eds) Tracey Emin: 1963-2006, University of Michigan, Rizzoli, 2006. Garland, Ken and Associates (ed.) Frank Auerbach, Westerham Press Limited, Great Britain. Gayford, Martin, ‘One of the reasons I paint is because I’m a fan. It’s to celebrate’, Telegraph, 23 June, 2007. Grunenberg, Christoph and Barson, Tanja (eds) Jake and Dinos Chapman: bad art for bad people, University of Michigan, Tate Liverpool, 2006. Hartley, Craig, Frank Auerbach, Etchings and Drypoints 1954-2006, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2007. Hicks, Alistair, ‘The Pleasure Principle’, Deutsche Bank Art works: ArtMag. www.db-artmag.com. Hornby, Nick, ‘My Mate Humphrey’, The Independent, 12 July, 2003. Hughes, Robert, Goya, London, Vintage, 2004. Kent, Sarah, ‘Tracey Emin: Flying High’, White Cube. www.whitecube.com. Jenkins, Allan, ‘Profit and Gloss’, The Observer Magazine, 12 October, 2008. Jenkins, David Frazer, ‘Humphrey Ocean in Dulwich’, The British Art Journal, Vol, 4, No. 3, 2003. Jones, Jonathan, ‘Chair, Vincent van Gogh (1888)’, Guardian, 6 March, 2004.
Lampert, Catherine and Rosenthal, Norman, Isabel Carlisle, Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2001. Larner, Melissa and Price, Matt (eds) In the darkest hour there may be light: works from Damien Hirst’s murderme collection, London, Serpentine Gallery, 2006. Liebs, Holger, ‘Jake & Dinos Chapman: Explaining Christians to Dinosaurs’, Kunsthaus Bregenz. www.kunsthausbregenz.at. Livingstone, Marco and Cameron, Dan (ed.) Pop art: an international perspective, University of Michigan, Rizzoli, 1992. Loock, Ulrich and Blazwick, Iwona, Hume, London, Other Criteria, 2009. Mitchell, Charles (ed.) Hogarth’s Peregrination, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952. New Metropole Arts Centre Folkestone, Fred Cuming ARA: Drawings, Etchings, Paintings, 1971. Pacheco, Ana Maria and Taylor, John Russell, Ana Maria Pacheco, University of Texas, Salander-O’Reilly, 2008. Ryan, David, Talking painting: dialogues with twelve contemporary abstract painters, London, Routledge, 2002. Stallabrass, Julian, High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, London, Verso, 2006. Steiner, Susie, ‘Dog Brains, Tracey Emin’, Guardian, 21 June, 2003. Tallman, Susan, The Contemporary Print: From Pre-pop to Postmodern, Thames and Hudson, 1996. The 20th Century Art Book, University of Michigan, Phaidon Press, 1996. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to his Brother, 2 Vols, London, Constable & Co, 1927. Vaizey, Marina, Peter Blake, Chicago, Academy Chicago, 1986. Winterson, Jeanette and Freedman, Carl, Fuchs, Rudi, Tracey Emin Works 1963 -2006, Italy, 2006. Wroe, Nicholas, ‘The Bigger Picture’, Guardian, 21 January, 2006.
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Design & Print Centre 109339 4/10
ISBN: 978-1-902671-66-6 Canterbury 2010