Month: December 2021

The exhibition “Body Body” by Nina Childress looks back on 40 years of uninterrupted creation. It is the first retrospective of the paintings of the artist in France.

Its title refers to the American expression “body of work”, but also to the importance of the representation of the body in her works, as well as the phenomenon of repetition or double.

From this exhibition of a hundred paintings, out of the 1081 paintings produced between August 1980 and the end of 2020, several lines of force and recurring subjects emerge: series and its variations (Tupperware boxes, candies, soaps, toys…), question of portrait (icons, statues, effigies, self-portraits…) or conversely an absence of bodies (the Hair Pieces, interiors, empty seats…). Everywhere, the norm and the subversion are questioned.

Further information

Installation view Ulla von Brandenburg, Eine Landschaft ohne Blau, wie ungefähr, Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst. Photo Tobias Hübel. Courtesy de l’artiste, Art : Concept (Paris); Meyer Riegger (Berlin/Karlsruhe); Pilar Corrias Gallery (Londres) et Produzentengalerie Hamburg

The exhibition ‘A landscape without blue, what would you say’ (a quotation from Goethe’s panels on colour theory and their explanation) has been specially designed for the rooms of the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art. This is the first exhibition of the artist’s work on this scale in Germany and the first museum exhibition of her work in Northern Germany.

Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst
Teerhof 20, 28199 Bremen, Germany

Jeremy Deller, Welcome to the ShitShow!, sticker, 2021
© Jeremy Deller, Courtesy the artist, Art : Concept, Paris & The Modern Insitute, Glasgow

Produit par The Modern Institute pour l’exposition ‘Warning Graphic Content’

Jeremy Deller – Printed Matters

Matthew Higgs

Perhaps the most salient thing you need to know about the artist Jeremy Deller is that he neither trained nor studied to be an artist. This is important, as it inducts Deller within a history of so-called “self-taught” artists: a canon of individuals who arrived at making art, or something that resembles art, via other means, via other routes. Eschewing art school, Deller instead studied art history, initially within the formal environs of London’s Courtauld Institute, where he specialized in the southern-European Baroque; and then later at the University of Sussex, where he studied with David Mellor (Mellor’s Wikipedia entry notably identifies only Deller as being a former student of his).

At Sussex, Deller’s interests expanded to embrace a broader and more porous understanding of the role that both art and the artist might play within society. Informed and influenced by the prescient thinking of the pioneers of what came to be known as Cultural Studies – Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, et al – Deller’s subsequent work, over the next three decades both mirrors and amplifies their desire to understand culture “in all its complex forms”, whilst simultaneously analyzing “the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.”

Deller’s emergence as an artist was organic. He has described his 1986 encounter with Andy Warhol in London as being a watershed moment, “Meeting Andy Warhol was the most important thing that had happened to me in my life up to that point.” The two weeks that he subsequently spent in New York in Warhol’s orbit at The Factory “would prove to be the art education that I’d never had – the equivalent of taking a foundation course and BFA and MFA degrees in a fortnight.” From Warhol, Deller determined that “an artist can do whatever he or she wants. There are no limits.”

From the outset, the subject of Deller’s work has been a consideration of the recent past: an examination of how our shared social, cultural and political histories inform and shape both the present and the future – an approach that is evident in Deller’s key works such as: The History of The World and Acid Brass (both 1997); The Battle of Orgreave (2001); It Is What It Is (2009); and Everybody In The Place (2018), among others.

Many of Deller’s early works took the form of t-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, carrier bags, classified ads, business cards, public signage, and other forms of printed matter: quotidian, commonplace mediums that he continues to employ to this day. Circulating freely and outside of the established channels of the art world, Deller’s earliest interventions sought out instead a different public – passersby – and could, in the words of curator Ralph Rugoff, “be appreciated without any specialized knowledge.”

This fundamentally democratic impulse remains a defining characteristic of Deller’s work of the past thirty years, and is central to his public identity as an artist: since winning the Turner Prize in 2004 – which he dedicated to “… everyone who cycles, everyone who looks after wildlife, and the Quaker Movement …” – Deller has gradually become a public figure himself.

Throughout Deller’s work, which over the years has become increasingly collaborative, there is a palpable sense of generosity: a desire to frame often complex ideas in a manner that is at once legible and accessible, yet in a way that never condescends to nor patronizes the audience.

‘Warning Graphic Content’ is the first exhibition to survey Deller’s poster and print works produced between 1993 and 2021, an era of often unprecedented social, cultural, political, ecological and technological upheaval. Despite the exhibition’s focus on printed matter, the exhibition also serves as a retrospective and chronological account of Deller’s thinking, a visual manifestation of his ongoing – and shifting – interests and advocacy. Aligning the poetic with the polemical, Deller’s poster and billboard works have increasingly taken on a more urgent even political dimension: evident in his recent post-Brexit broadsides Thank God For Immigrants (2020), Welcome To The Shitshow (2019), Tax Avoidance Kills (2020) and the new classic: Cronyism Is English For Corruption (2021). Writing in 2012 on the occasion of Deller’s mid-career survey at London’s Hayward Gallery, curator Ralph Rugoff succinctly outlined Deller’s unique position:

“… Deller has worked to illuminate the underlying knots that tie us together – often in ways that defy our conventional understanding of society and our place within it. Ingeniously exploring the ways that culture is woven from webs of activity that cut across all social spheres and categories, his work has provided an indispensable alternative to contemporary art’s status quo, and an invaluable tonic for our capacity to re-imagine the ways we make sense of the world.” ¹

¹ Rugoff, R. ‘Middle Class Hero’, in Hall, Stuart ; Higgs, Matthew ; Rugoff, Ralph ; Young, Rob (ed.) ‘Jeremy Deller : Joy in People’, (Londres : Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2012), p. 20

List of available individual posters

Click on each image for more information

Jeremy Deller, A Range Rover crushed and made into a bench, 2012. Silkscreen on paper, 9 parts, max.: 15 × 71 cm (5 ⅞ × 28 inches). Edition of 10 plus IV AP. Courtesy of the artist, Art : Concept, Paris, The Modern Institute, Glasgow.
Inquire

Listen to the interview of Jeremy Deller by DUUU Radio.

The artist presents the exhibition and the poster co-produced for the occasion by Art : Concept and *DUUU.

Kate Newby, I like the way I am, 2023. Bronze, corde artisanale / Bronze, Handmade rope. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Art : Concept, Paris. Photo by Jorge Davalos Palma

Biography

Kate Newby was born in Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand in 1979 and works in the United States where she resides. In 2015 she graduated with a PhD from the Elam School of Fine Art at the University of Auckland.

Working with a variety of media including installation, textile, ceramics, casting and glass, Newby is a sculptor who is committed to exploring and putting pressure on the limits and nature of sculpture. As such, she is interested in not only space, volume, texture and materials, but where and how sculpture happens. The handmade plays a very important role in her work ; it is not merely romantic or even retrograde, but rather the aesthetic byproduct of a position that shamelessly embraces direct experience over the mediated.

Her work has been shown at the 21st Biennale of Sydney in 2018, as well as in various institutions and galleries around the world: Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand, Wellington, Nouvelle-Zélande (2023); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022); Musée de Rochechouart (2021); Institut d’Art Contemporain Villeurbane (2019); Lumber room, Portland, Oregon (2019); Kunsthalle Vienna (2018); Kunsthaus Hamburg (2018); Index, Contemporary Swedish Art Foundation (2017); and the SculptureCenter, NY (2017).

Kate has completed residencies at: The Joan Mitchell Foundation (2019), The Chinati Foundation (2017), Artpace (2017), Fogo Island (2013), and the International Studio & Curatorial Program ISCP (2012).

She won the Walters Prize, New Zealand’s largest contemporary art prize, in 2012 and the Ettore Fico Prize (Turin, IT) in 2022.

At the gallery

Try doing anything without it, solo show, 2022
Indus 2, Group show, 2019

Downloads

CV (pdf)Download

Press (pdf)Download

Vue d’exposition / Installation view Tania Pérez Córdova. Generalization, Museo Tamayo, 2022.
Photography by Gerardo Landa and Eduardo López (GLR Estudio). Courtesy of Museo Tamayo.