PRESS RELEASE
PHOTO LONDON 2024
16-19 May 2024
Room W04 in West Wing of Somerset House, London WC2.
England & Co’s presentation at Photo London reflects our research-based curatorial approach: we work with artists and photographers and their archives, and curate retrospective and collective exhibitions that reappraise artists and photographers from the British and international avant-garde spanning the 1930s through to 1980s.
A recent England & Co exhibition, Women’s Works: Artists working in 1970s & ’80s London, featured works by some of the artists included in the recent acclaimed exhibition at Tate Britain, Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990. Among them were Anne Bean (b. 1950), Susan Hiller (1940-2019) and Hannah O’Shea (b. 1939).
Women’s Works also featured other artists working in London at that time, such as Silvia Ziranek (b. 1952), Roberta M Graham (b. 1954), Sue Barnes (1953-2014), Carolyn Gowdy (b. 1954), Rose Boyt (b. 1958), and Sue Arrowsmith (1950-2014), and our exhibition reflected their varied practices, ideas, and artistic, political and feminist networks.
Our presentation at Photo London includes work by these artists, with Anne Bean’s photo-collage diptych, Shouting Mortality as I Drown (1977) being one of her two works exhibited at Tate Britain in Women in Revolt! These works emerged from Bean’s risk-taking, perilous performances, actions that tested her endurance and courage as she engaged with elements such as water and fire.
We are pleased to announce that Tate has now acquired Anne Bean’s early photographic construction of nine performance-based photographic prints, Heat (1974-77), from the gallery.
This work will be on view again in the second iteration of Women in Revolt! at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, opening later this month. To mark this acquisition, our presentation at Photo London includes a substantial group of works by Anne Bean: vintage prints and more recent photographic editions published in association with England & Co.
Many of these artist/photographers use photography as a medium for documentation and in relation to conceptual practice or performance, using photography to bring material presence to ephemeral, time-based events and concepts. For example: a British artist who experimented with photographic techniques, Sue Arrowsmith, is represented by a large-scale, unique Polaroid print from a series that she produced using the Polaroid Corporation’s large format camera when it was made available to invited artists during the Victoria and Albert Museum’s major exhibition, Photography Now in 1989. Arrowsmith’s photograph used performance gesture and symbolic objects to reference the political situation in Ireland in the 1980s.
David Thorp (b. 1947) and Gerald Ducimetière (1940-2022) each used photography to document their conceptual and performance practices in the 1970s, often creating sequences of images presented in grid formats. Clay Perry (b. 1940) worked as a documentary photographer for London’s avant-garde in the 1960s, and his iconic image of Yoko Ono holding a glass hammer is currently to be seen all over London as the poster image and catalogue cover for Ono’s exhibition at Tate Modern. Hannah O’Shea’s image of a performer she body-painted with animal markings was used for the cover of feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1977 to illustrate their article, ‘Disturbing Images of Women’ – O’Shea says that her image is about female power and ‘is a reclamation of the female body… a revelation of the female gaze’.
• We have a limited number of passes available for Photo London – email the gallery to enquire.