Thursday, 21 November 2013

pietro manzo

Pietro Manzo’s work focuses on the relationship between a place and the artist’s opportunity to reshape a path through the traces of past events, developing a balance between objective perception and the ideas that we may infer from a given space. His creative process is developed first through the accumulation of information gathered from on-site inspection, after which the residual memories of a place become the material in which he may intervene. By generating a mental repetition of the events, Manzo establishes a psychic movement between inside and outside where painting and drawing are used as a form of writing, recalling and reshaping an experience. The result is a sort of continuous archive, a sum of suggestions, which are echoes of a personal experience.

Born in Sant’Arsenio

aida rubio gonzalez

euan uglow

English painter. He trained in London at Camberwell School of Art from 1948 to 1951 and from 1951 to 1954 at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he came under the influence of William Coldstream. His early figurative style adapted a form of planar drawing derived from Alberto Giacometti's work of the 1920s and applied it to a Classical structure, derived from Paul Cézanne, with an intensity of colour unrivalled by his teachers of the Euston Road School. Musicians (1953; London, Tate) reinterpreted the Impressionist theme of figures in a landscape by combining directly observed elements with a deliberately contrived backdrop painted on the studio wall.

Uglow was consistently concerned with formal relationships within a self-sufficient system, whatever the subject. He graduated colour according to a tonal scale and used drawing to define three-dimensional form and tactile surfaces. The proportions of the images and of the canvas itself are often mathematically derived, as in the Nude from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions from the Eye (1967; U. Liverpool). There is a strong conceptual element in Uglow's work, with each picture regarded as a specific project with clearly defined aims. The end product unambiguously reveals the history of its making by a prolonged and entirely conscious process of analysis and synthesis, combining objectivity with a private and often quirky passion.

Richard Hamilton 1922–2011

Hamilton was born in London. He was educated at the Royal Academy Schools from 1938 to 1940, then studied engineering draughtsmanship at a Government Training Centre in 1940, then worked as a 'jig and tool' designer. He returned in 1946 to the Royal Academy Schools, from which he was expelled for 'not profiting from the instruction being given in the painting school' (Hamilton, p.10), then attended the Slade School of Art from 1948 to 1951.

An exhibition of his engravings was held at Gimpel Fils, London, in 1950. These were inspired by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's 1913 text On Growth and Form which had been republished in 1942 and was a seminal influence on Hamilton's early work. Hamilton devised and designed the exhibitions Growth and Form at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951, and Man, Machine and Motion at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1955. He exhibited at the Hanover Gallery in 1955, and participated in This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, for which he produced a collage entitled Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? for the poster and catalogue. With Victor Pasmore in 1957 he devised and organised an Exhibit, at the Hatton Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Hamilton was a member of the Independent Group, formed in the 1950s by a group of artists and writers at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, whose symposiums contributed to the development of Pop art in Britain. He was one of the prime practitioners of the critic Lawrence Alloway's theory of a 'fine/pop art continuum'. Hamilton interpreted this as meaning that 'all art is equal - there was no hierarchy of value. Elvis was to one side of a long line while Picasso was strung out on the other side ... TV is neither less nor more legitimate an influence than, for example, is New York Abstract Expressionism' (Hamilton, p.31).

Hamilton taught at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts and University of Newcastle upon Tyne; he gave up teaching full-time in 1966. He designed a typographic version of Duchamp's Green Box, published in 1960, and in 1965-6, with Duchamp's guidance, reconstructed Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (Tate GalleryT02011">T02011). Keen to embrace certain types of technology within his art, Hamilton began creating computer-generated works in the 1980s. He has had a long career as a print-maker, and in 1983 won the World Print Council Award. In 1991 he married the artist Rita Donagh. Retrospective exhibitions of Hamilton's work have been held at the Hanover Gallery, 1964, the Tate Gallery, 1970 and 1992, and abroad. He was Britain's representative at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

david hockney

English painter, printmaker, photographer and stage designer. Perhaps the most popular and versatile British artist of the 20th century, Hockney made apparent his facility as a draughtsman while studying at Bradford School of Art between 1953 and 1957.

Hockney soon sought ways of reintegrating a personal subject-matter into his art. He began tentatively by copying fragments of poems on to his paintings, encouraging a close scrutiny of the surface and creating a specific identity for the painted marks through the alliance of word and image. These cryptic messages soon gave way to open declarations in a series of paintings produced in 1960–61 on the theme of homosexual love.

Hockney's subsequent development was a continuation of his student work, although a significant change in his approach occurred after his move to California at the end of 1963. It is clear that when he moved to that city it was, at least in part, in search of the fantasy that he had formed of a sensual and uninhibited life of athletic young men, swimming pools, palm trees and perpetual sunshine.

On his arrival in California, Hockney changed from oil to acrylic paints, applying them as a smooth surface of flat and brilliant colour that helped to emphasise the pre-eminence of the image. By the end of the decade Hockney's anxieties about appearing modern had abated to the extent that he was able to pare away the devices and to allow his naturalistic rendering of the world to speak for itself.

This is one of a series of large double portraits which Hockney began in 1968. He had painted imaginary couples in such earlier paintings as The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles) 1963 (Tate T00596). In the later paintings, the subjects are real couples who were Hockney’s friends. They are portrayed in their home environment in a style which is both realistic and highly simplified. Hockney worked from photographs and life observation, making drawings to resolve composition. Usually one character looks at the other, who looks out of the painting at the viewer, thus creating a cyclical movement of looking. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is unusual in that both subjects, Mr and Mrs Clark, look out at the artist and viewer from either side of a large open window which is in the centre of the painting. The viewer, who looks at the painting from a central perspective, will be at the apex of the couple’s gaze out of the painting, a third in the relationship. Percy is the name of one of the Clarks’ cats and refers to the cat sitting statue-like on Mr Clark’s knee, looking out of the window. ‘Mr and Mrs Clark’ are the dress designer Ozzie Clark and the fabric designer Celia Birtwell. Like Hockney, the two came from the north of England and met the artist in 1961 in Manchester, where Ozzie was studying at Manchester College of Art. Both men went on to study at the Royal College of Art in London. When Ozzie and Celia married in 1969, Hockney was their best man. He painted them in their flat in Notting Hill Gate, west London, an area where the artist and a number of his friends then lived. Hockney chose to paint them in their bedroom because he liked the light there. An etching from his earlier series A Rake’s Progress 1961-3 (Tate P07029-44) is portrayed on the left side of the painting. He began to make drawings and take photographs for the painting in 1969 and began working on the canvas in the spring of 1970, completing the painting in early 1971. In 1976 he described the painting as one of two works of his to come close to naturalism (Kinley 1992), although many areas of the image have been flattened and emptied of detail.

Hockney has commented that his aim in this painting was to ‘achieve ... the presence of two people in this room. All the technical problems were caused because my main aim was to paint the relationship of these two people.’ (Quoted in Kinley 1992, [p.6].) One technical problem was to paint the figures contre jour, or against the light, something he had been experimenting with in earlier pictures of single figures in interiors. As in a photograph, it was difficult to achieve a balance between the bright daylight outside the window and the relative shade indoors. Because the canvas was so big, Hockney worked on it in his studio, where he set up light conditions that approximated those in the Clarks’ bedroom. He painted the lilies, sitting in a vase on a small table in the foreground of the painting, from life at the studio. He found the nearly life-size scale of the figures difficult to realise and both Clarks posed for him many times. In the event, Hockney painted Ozzie Clark’s head as many as twelve times before he was satisfied. He is depicted lounging on a chair, his bare feet buried in the long pile of a fur rug. His pose is relaxed but his expression is watchful. Celia stands with one hand on her waist wearing a long, flowing dress and a rather wistful expression. Close to her and therefore, perhaps, associated with her are the lilies, traditionally a symbol of the Annunciation and feminine purity. Likewise, the cat on Ozzie’s lap carries symbolic resonances of the libertine and somebody who disregards rules and does as they please. Viewed in this way, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy recalls the famous portrait of a married couple, The Arnolfini Marriage 1434 (National Gallery, London) by Flemish renaissance painter Jan van Eyck (approximately 1395-1441), in which a small dog at the couple’s feet represents fidelity. Hockney has pointed out that his painting reversed one of the conventions of wedding portraiture, by seating the man while the woman stands. The gulf between the couple represented by the open window and the gaze of the third party (artist or viewer) turned out to be prophetic: the marriage did not last.

alex katz

American painter, sculptor and printmaker. He studied (1946–50) in New York and in Skowhegan, ME. In the early 1950s he was influenced by the work of Abstract Expressionists and produced swiftly executed pictures of trees as well as various works based on photographs. In the mid 1950s he painted spare, brightly coloured works of landscape, interiors and figures and produced simplified images in collage. These early works emphasised the flatness of the picture plane while remaining representational, and this insistence on figuration placed him outside the contemporary avant-garde mainstream, in which abstraction and chance were key qualities. He developed his style in the portrait works of ordinary people from the late 1950s. This resolution of the demands of formalism and representation looked forward to the Pop art of the following decade. In the 1960s Katz's works became more realistic and were executed in a smoother, more impersonal style. Though concentrating on figures in interiors and in urban environments, he also painted a number of landscape and flower pieces. After experimenting with the technique in the late 1950s, from the mid 1960s he made a number of free-standing cut-out figure works painted on wood or aluminium. Similarly, after early forays in the 1950s, Katz concentrated more on printmaking in the 1960s, making very simplified lithographs and screenprints. After the 1960s he continued producing similar figure paintings as well as prints. He achieved great public prominence in the 1980s, and among the works of that decade were a number of multi-panel paintings.

anna teresa de keersmaeker

One of the most important choreographers of the late 20th century, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker will adapt her widely acclaimed 1982 performance, Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, for The Tanks.

Fase, an hour-long minimalist dance performed by De Keersmaeker and a partner, is considered to be the starting point of the contemporary dance movement that developed in Flanders during the 1980s. In her choreography, De Keersmaeker explores the relationship between music and dance and aims to articulate the basic principles of the musical composition rather than allowing the dance to simply illustrate the music.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Tale Dolven will perform each part of the Fase throughout the day from Wednesday to Friday. On Thursday and Friday evenings all four parts will be performed in one hour-long performance

On 20 July, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker will be in-conversation with performance theorist and musicologist Bojana Cvejić to mark the launch of a new publication A Choreographer’s Score: Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena’s Aria, Bartók. The event will be introduced by Chris Dercon, Director of Tate Modern, and renowned choreographer Jonathan Burrows. The presentation includes a special performance of Rosas danst Rosas, danced by Tale Dolven, Cynthia Loemij, Fumiyo Ikeda and Elizaveta Penkóva. The publication, A Choreographer’s Score, offers an insight into de Keersmaeker’s choreography and into the making of four of her early works through interviews, drawings, schemes, photos, working notes, post-performance documents and four DVDs.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
Fase: Four movements to the Music of Steve Reich 1982

Photo: Herman Sorgeloos

frank auerbach

Artist biography

Auerbach was born in Berlin of Jewish parents; his father was a lawyer and his mother a former art student. In 1939 he was sent to England to escape Nazism. His parents, who remained behind, died in concentration camps. He spent his childhood at a progressive boarding school, Bunce Court, at Lenham near Faversham, Kent, a school for Jewish refugee children. During the war years the school was evacuated to Shropshire. He attended St Martin's School of Art, London, from 1948 to 1952, and studied with David Bomberg in night classes at Borough Polytechnic. It was during this period that he developed a friendship with fellow student Leon Kossoff. Auerbach studied at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. He has used three principal models throughout his career: his wife Julia, who first posed for him in 1959; Juliet Yardley Mills ('J.Y.M.'), a professional model whom he met in 1957; and his close friend Estella (Stella) West ('E.O.W.'), the model for most of his nudes and female heads prior to 1973. Rarely leaving Britain, he lives and works in London and has had the same studio since the 1950s.

The dealer Helen Lessore at the Beaux-Arts Gallery, London, gave Auerbach his first solo show in 1956. He was criticised for his thick application of paint, but found support from the critic David Sylvester, who wrote of 'the most exciting and impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon in 1949'. Sylvester countered remarks by various critics that the artist's work was closer to sculpture than to painting: 'in spite of the heaped-up paint, these are painterly images, not sculptural ones, have to be read as paintings, not as polychrome reliefs, and make their point just because their physical structure is virtually that of sculpture but their psychological impact is that of painting' (Sylvester, 'Young English Painting', The Listener, 12 January 1956). Kossoff later echoed these sentiments: 'in spite of the excessive piling on of paint, the effect of these works on the mind is of images recovered and reconceived in the barest and most particular light, the same light that seems to glow through the late, great, thin Turners ... an unpremeditated manifestation arising from the constant application of true draughtsmanship' (in Frank Auerbach, exhibition catalogue, Arts Council, Hayward Gallery, London 1978, p.9).

Auerbach exhibited regularly at the Beaux-Arts Gallery until 1963. From 1965 he exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery. He was given an Arts Council retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1978, and had solo exhibitions at the British Pavilion in the 1986 Venice Biennale, and at the Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh, Amsterdam, 1989. Group shows in which he has participated include Tooth and Sons, London, in 1958, Pittsburgh International Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in 1958 and 1961, '54/64 Painting and Sculpture of a Decade at the Tate Gallery, 1964, British Painting in the Sixties organised by the Contemporary Arts Society in 1964, and The Human Clay, selected by R.B. Kitaj, held at the Hayward, 1976.

fiona rae

Life and career[edit]

Rae was born in Hong Kong and also lived in Indonesia before moving to England in 1970. She attended Croydon College of Art to study a Foundation Course (1983–1984) and Goldsmiths College (1984–1987), where she completed a BA (Hons) Fine Art.

Young British Artist[edit]

In 1988 she participated in Freeze an exhibition of art organised by Damien Hirst in London Docklands; the exhibition helped launch a generation of artists who became known as Young British Artists or YBAs.^[1]

In 1991, Rae was shortlisted for the Turner Prize, and in 1993 she was nominated for the Austrian Eliette Von Karajan Prize for Young Painters.^[2]

She was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2002 and is referred to as a Royal Academician^[3] allowing the use of RA after her name. In 2002 she was appointed a Tate Artist Trustee between 2005 and 2009.^[4] She was commissioned by Tate Modern to create a 10-metre triptych Shadowland for the restaurant there in 2002.

In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768.^[5]

Rae is represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; Buchmann Galerie, Berlin; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and The Pace Gallery, New York. Rae has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries internationally and her work is held in public and private collections worldwide. Of her work, William Corwin summarizes, "Rae’s paintings are very much objects to be admired; windows into worlds in which she is mistress, giving the viewer over to a semi-recognizable, occasionally comforting, but mostly alien dreamscape."^[6]

British painter. She completed a foundation course at Croydon College of Art (1983–4), and a BFA at Goldsmiths College, London (1984–7). Her reputation was quickly established; a year after her inclusion in the exhibition Freeze (curated by fellow artist Damien Hirst in 1988), she showed at the Waddington Galleries in London. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1991. Rae makes highly coloured, vivid abstract paintings that draw on and develop a variety of formal, painterly motifs. Common to all her work is the self-conscious juxtaposition of flat areas of colour with dragged, daubed or scumbled paint marks. Although her compositions can appear accidental, almost arbitrary, close inspection reveals a highly controlled handling of paint and style and a tight underlying structure. As her work developed throughout the 1990s it became still more structured, and focused in a more condensed manner on certain motifs. Untitled (Parliament) (oil and acrylic on canvas, 2.74×2.44 m, 1996; London, Saatchi Gal.) presents varied target motifs, perhaps referring to paintings made in the early 1960s by Kenneth Noland, floating in a furious field of black and white. The stillness and formal calm of the circles plays off the chaos of their surround, an instance of the strongly antithetical juxtapositions that Rae often employs. Her approach to painting is based on a playful engagement with her predecessors, using both quotation and a repertoire of surface effects to suggest both the superficiality and self-absorption of the act of painting.