NEWS
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
England & Co at Frieze Masters 2023
11-15 October 2023
England & Co will present an exhibition of work by Paule Vézelay (1892–1934) at Frieze Masters 2023 in the Modern Women section of the fair.
Rolf Brandt represented in ‘Crossing Borders’
28 September – 1 October 2023
Artists who came to live and work in Britain from all over the world during the 20th century and who contributed significantly to British culture, are the subject of a wide-ranging exhibition, Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art, at British Art Fair 2023, Saatchi Gallery, London. Artworks from immigrants to the UK from India and Pakistan, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and America are included in an exhibition co-curated by Colin Gleadell and art historian and author Monica Bohm-Duchen, founding director of the Insiders/Outsiders project.
The gouache on paper work here was one of the works by Rolf Brandt loaned by the gallery for the occasion.
Vale, John Dugger 1948 – 2023
We are very sad to announce the death of the American artist John Dugger on 31 May in California.
John became part of avant-garde art circles soon after arriving in Europe in 1967. A multi-talented artist, he was an early exponent of Participatory Art and an inventive pioneer of political banner making – his iconic Chile Vencera Banner was first displayed in London’s Trafalgar Square in 1974.
John has exhibited with England & Co since 2007 and a monograph on his career and practice is in preparation. A memorial event will be held in London later in the summer.
- John Dugger’s obiturary in The Guardian.
‘L’Ensemble’ on loan to Néo-Romantics in Paris
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Until 18 June 2023
England & Co has loaned Sir Francis Rose‘s painting L’Ensemble (1938) to the exhibition Néo-Romantics at the Musée Marmottan, Paris.
Curator Patrick Mauriès presents more than a hundred works that highlight one of the first post-modern movements and one that heralded the return of the figure. “First gathered in Paris in the 1920s, those [artists] took part in the American, British and Italian artistic scenes, creating links between Picasso, surrealism, figurative artists from the 20th century and living arts for which they designed memorable shows.”
Sir Francis Rose’s cast of characters in the painting, from left: Madame Wellington Koo, Emmy Sommermann, Russell Hitchcock, Natalie Barney, Diana Varé, Serge Lifar, George Maratier, Francis Rose, Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchev, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Louis Bromfield, Tyrone Power, Virgil Thompson, Francis Picabia, Billy Mayor. The painting (oil on canvas, 79 x 138 ins) was exhibited in 1939 at Le Petit Palais Musée des Beaux Arts, Paris.