NEWS
David Medalla: In Conversation with the Cosmos
9 June – 15 September 2024
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
The portrait of David Medalla taken by Clay Perry in 1964 greets visitors to the exhibition In Conversation with the Cosmos at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
The curators write that it is ‘the first comprehensive survey in the United States dedicated to the late Filipino artist David Medalla (1938–2020). The exhibition contextualizes the elusive and experimental practice of an artist whose pioneering work spanned kinetic, performance, and participatory art movements… Beginning with paintings and drawings from the late 1950s and concluding with the works he produced before his death, In Conversation with the Cosmos presents the accumulations of a creative life imbued with an anti-institutional ethos and a commitment to impermanence and change.’ England & Co were pleased to assist the project with exhibition loans and images for the accompanying publication.
Christine Khondji: Beyond the Thread
Bin Matar House, Muharraq, Bahrain
22 April – 30 May 2024
Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction 1950-1970
Turner Contemporary, Margate
3 February – 6 May 2024
Paule Vézelay and Anthea Alley are included in Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction 1950-1970, a group exhibition at Turner Contemporary presenting abstraction as a radical global language shared by women artists in the twenty years following the Second World War. Guest curated by Dr Flavia Frigeri, the exhibition brings together the works of more than 50 artists to examine how, through abstract forms, materials and modes, women pushed the boundaries of artmaking while tackling seismic cultural, social and political shifts. Comprising more than 80 artworks, predominantly sculpture, the exhibition traces how the language of abstraction developed on a global scale. Paule Vézelay is represented by two constructions from her ‘Lines in Space’ series; and Anthea Alley by Resting Circles, an architectural, polished metal sculpture from 1970, and an earlier work from the Arts Council Collection.
The Participation Art Event 1973: Provocation or Prophecy?
Edinburgh College of Art, 13 February 2024
‘The Participation Art Event 1973: Provocation or Prophecy?’ was the title of Lynn MacRitchie‘s public lecture on 13 February at Edinburgh College of Art – the site of the Scottish avant-garde art happening she instigated as a student there more than half a century ago.
The intention of ‘The Participation Art Event’ (PAE) was to explore the idea of art being a collective action rather than an individual, studio-bound pursuit. So, over five days in December 1973, PAE took over ECA’s Sculpture Court, where a series of participatory actions took place. At the centre of this were David Medalla (1942-2020) and John Dugger (1948-2023).
PAE itself saw Medalla present A Stitch in Time, in which visitors sewed en masse either side of a long sheet of cotton. Medalla also produced his first iteration of Porcelain Wedding prior to a London show the following year. This event involved participants covering a naked couple in clay, effectively transforming them into statues while becoming ‘witnesses’ at their wedding. Dugger presented the self-explanatory People Weave a House!, which he had instigated in London the year before.
“I think it was both [provocation and prophecy],” recalls MacRitchie. “Within the institution, it was seen as a huge provocation, and for some people, what they saw was the provocation rather than the art. Coming back to PAE fifty years later, the things we were exploring and experimenting with have now become kind of the norm in the art world, which one could not have predicted at all. So at the time, PAE was a provocative event, but in terms of the changes that have worked their way through the art world since then, it was prophecy.”
Monica Ross and ‘The Time of Our Lives’
The Drawing Room, London SE1
25 January – 21 April 2024
Monica Ross (1950-2013) is one of the artists featured in the exhibition The Time of Our Lives that focuses on pioneering drawing practices of women artists and their impact on feminist activism from the 1980s until today. And, in fact, the exhibition title is taken from Monica Ross’s own writings: ‘… and we’ll make art out of the time of our lives that is always between one job, one role and another’.
Anne Bean featured in Tate Etc magazine
8 January 2024
Anne Bean is interviewed by Figgy Guyver for the In the Picture feature in Issue 60: Winter 2023 of Tate Etc magazine. In this interview, Bean recalls the perilous process behind her iconic series of photographs, Elemental (Heat) from the late 1970s, saying that ‘danger concentrates the mind’.
Gèneviève Seillé to Birkenhead
December 2023
Geneviève Seillé’s Analogue Word Processor from 1992 is now in the collection of the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum in Birkenhead, UK. The work was acquired from an exhibition of Seillé’s at England & Co in 1995 and has recently been gifted to the Museum from the collection of Richard Sykes and Penny Mason through the Contemporary Art Society. Seillé is particularly known for her mixed media drawings, collages and bookworks. Her series of constructions from the 1980s and ’90s emerge from her private ‘cosmology’ and reflect her fascination with writing and numbers. For Seille, ‘words are magic’, and from childhood she has been fascinated by graffiti and what she describes as ‘the beauty of lines called letters’.
Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990
Tate Britain, London SW1
8 November 2023 – 7 April 2024
Anne Bean, Hannah O’Shea, Monica Ross and Tina Keane are among the artists included in Women in Revolt! Art and Activisim in the UK 1970–1990, Tate Britain’s landmark exhibition of feminist art in the UK from 1970 to 1990. The exhibition explores interconnected networks of women who used radical ideas and rebellious methods to make an invaluable contribution to British culture. Showcasing work by more than 100 women artists and collectives living and working in the UK, and arranged chronologically, the exhibition addresses the social and political contexts that influenced the art women were making in the 1970s and 1980s, mapping a landscape of creative practice forged against a backdrop of extreme social, economic and political change.
Exhibition guide >
Susan Hiller’s 1973 Street Ceremonies
RE/SISTERS Talks: Joyful Militancy and Protest
Frobisher Auditorium 1, Barbican, London EC2
26 October 2023, 5.30pm
To complement the Barbican Art Gallery’s current RE/SISTERS exhibition exploring the role of women in protesting ecological destruction, a public programme of RE/SISTERS Talks includes Joyful Militancy and Protest, an event bringing together artists, photographers and academics for an afternoon and evening of talks and presentations ‘digging into the past and present of creative feminist dissent’.
The co-operative women’s photography agency Format, founded 40 years ago, documented creative acts of civil disobedience at Greenham Common and core members Maggie Murray, Melanie Friend and Joanne O’Brien will discuss their practice with Dr Noni Stacey.
Gallerist and curator Jane England then explores the film, audio and photographic archive of Susan Hiller’s 1973 work Street Ceremonies, where Hiller and over 120 participants used mirrors reflecting sunlight to ‘draw’ a continuous circle across the urban landscape of West London. Her presentation will include screening the previously unseen film footage of the event.
The event will end with a discussion between artists and thinkers Poulomi Basu, Nina Wakeford, Anna Feigenbaum and the RE/SISTERS Curator, Alona Pardo. The exhibition continues until 14 January 2024.
‘Women’s Works’ private view + book launch
Thursday 19 October 2023, 6–8pm
Women’s Works: Artists working in 1970s & ’80s London
England & Co’s Project Space at the Sotheran’s Building,
2a Sackville Street, Piccadilly, London W1S 3DP
England & Co are pleased to combine the private view of our forthcoming exhibition, Women’s Works: Artists working in the 1970s & ’80s London, with a London book launch for Dr Amy Tobin’s book, Women Artists Together: Art in the Age ot Women’s Liberation published by Yale University Press. Dr Tobin came to England & Co’s exhibition Cecilia Vicuña in 2013 – the artist’s first solo exhibition in London since 1974 – and the title page of Tobin’s new book features Vicuña’s painting Janis Jo.
Tobin’s book is a thought-provoking galvanized a generation of women artists. She looks at the work of UK and USA-based artists, and offers a fresh perspective on the history of the women’s art movement and how it was shaped by collaboration and togetherness, providing examples or inspirational feminist activism while retracing 1970s liberation politics. Tobin emphasizes how artworks emerged from, and contested, feminist paradigms and contexts, with class, gender, race, and sexuality as central concerns.
Women’s Works exhibition Press Release