Antony Gormley exhibition just announced...

Antony Gormley - Critical Mass
8 May – August 2010

Critical Mass, one of Gormley’s best known works, is an installation made up of 60 life-size cast iron body forms which will be displayed on the roof of the De La Warr Pavilion.

The artist comments: This is the return of the lost subject to the site of Modernism. It is great to have a chance to test this piece of sculpture against the clarity of Mendelsohn and Chemayeff’s English masterpiece. I am excited to see these dark forms in the elements against the sea and in direct light. It will be like a sky burial. How these masses act in space is very important. The challenge is to make the distance intimate, internal.

Critical Mass is made up of five casts from 12 discrete moulds of Gormley’s body, developing from a low crouching position to squatting, sitting, kneeling and standing - an ascent of man ranging through the complex syntax of the body.

The works will be installed during the week beginning 4th May using cranes and mechanical machinery. The result will be a unique installation – the first ever seen on the De La Warr Pavilion roof space.

Click here to read the full article

Saturday Perspectives 17 April 2010

A fascinating session with the Saturday Perspectives group this weekend followed into a relaxed and wide-ranging discussion in Thinking Aloud, sitting in the rooftop foyer looking out at the sparkling sea on a glorious Spring afternoon. The Pavilion really comes into its own on a day like that, full of light, and everybody spilling out onto the balconies and terraces.

We started our tour by looking for exemplar works of the two broad strands in the exhibition as articulated by Lutz Becker, namely the geometrical work , and the gestural, or more intuitive mark-making. We then went on to look at writing by Edwin Morgan, Alan Ginsberg, and Gertrude Stein, to try and answer the following question: can literature ever truly be gestural, Expressionist, in the way some of the exhibition pieces are?

An interesting point for me was when a member of the group spoke of the playfulness of the more geometrical work (in this instance the Lissitzky pieces). My personal preference is towards the Expressionist, and I never usually think of geometrical work as playful, so it was refreshing to examine it from that perspective. We discussed the potential for play within construction, and thought of it in terms of a child building things out of blocks and shapes, that impulse is definitely playful and highly geometrical.

Saturday Perspectives 3 April 2010

Lutz Becker, the curator of ‘Modern Times’ talks about drawing in terms of time and motion and this of course is the link with film. I am thinking of drawing as a meeting place of intuition and thought. Thinking is intuitive. Intuition involves feeling. Thinking and intuition both involve language, some of which is verbal.

Choose a picture and spend some time with it. Let it speak to you. What does it say? Would you be able to tell in words what it is saying to you? Would you be able to communicate that to others? Or would it be best to make another drawing in order to let it speak through you?

A vital link between the two exhibitions, ‘Modern Times’ and Tony Bevan is F. X. Messerchmidt, the early 19^th century German sculptor whose busts of people with extreme facial expressions look so contemporary and fresh to us still. German Romanticism re-asserted the importance of feeling after the Enlightenment’s mistrust of it.

When I spent an hour or so in ‘Modern Times’ on Saturday looking at the drawings with a group of people we noticed details, gestures, simple devices that created the illusion of depth, marks that looked like writing and words that looked like shapes, movement and vitality . . . barely scratching the surface of all those surface scratchings.

Susan Diab

Exciting new shows opening soon...

The work for our two new exhibitions is just starting to be installed and they're both going to look fantastic!

Modern Times: responding to chaos is selected by film-maker, painter and curator Lutz Becker. His exhibition will comprise drawings, prints and experimental films, and will explore the recurring tension between figuration and abstraction throughout the 20th century and the ways by which ideas and concepts evolve. Presented non-chronologically, it will encompass movements such as Russian Constructivism, Futurism and Vorticism, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, and comprise works by key artists, as well as works of artists who have been sidelined in the mainstream of art history. From Malevich and El Lissitky to Flavin and Judd, from Grosz and Dix to Pollock, Michaux and Kounellis, Becker anticipates two major strands of drawing emerging – the geometric and the gestural. The exhibition will also include films by Hans Richter, Fernand Léger and Viking Eggeling.

Tony Bevan is one of the most important painters working in Britain today. For his new painting installation at the De La Warr Pavilion Bevan has produced three colossal works specifically for Gallery 2. Inspired by his recent travels to China, in particular his experience of the Giant Buddah of Leshan, and his ongoing interest in the 'character heads' of the 18th century German-Austrian sculptor Fraz Xaver Messerschmidt, the new paintings continue Bevan's exploration of self-portraiture.

Both exhibitions open on 3 April until 13 June.

For a full list of talks and events accompanying the season see our website, http://www.dlwp.com/

LAST WEEKEND

A fond farewell to Richard Grayson and thanks for a really thought provoking show. It's impossible to recall the breadth of the discussions we've had both today and over the past weeks. To name but a few: truth, authenticity, belief, disbelief, uncertainty, country and western music, horoscopes, performance, portraiture, boring dinner party conversations, singing, ... and the many guises of the artist... as social commentator, thinker, enquirer, presenter of ideas, documentor, provocateur, someone who picks and probes at sticky problems without the imposition of offering answers...

To the MA group from the Slade who I MISSED meeting today - so sorry to have missed you - it would have been great to have had you at a Thinking Aloud session. Perhaps some other time...

GALLERY WALK AND TALK TODAY AT 2PM

Last chance! Hope you can join me for the last Saturday afternoon walk & talk around the Richard Grayson exhibition today. I'll be in the building all afternoon if you want to chat about the show. You can find me in the gallery between 2 and 3pm, and then upstairs in the 2nd floor foyer from about 3.15 if you want to join me for tea & chat in "Thinking Aloud". Hope to see you there.

Judith

The artist's questions, and a first date

This week the Saturday discussions in the gallery were informed enormously by having Richard Grayson himself in to talk about the exhibition and answer questions. More on that shortly. Informal chats in the gallery beforehand with people viewing the work. As Bern has said in the previous post, it is very interesting how this work seems to open up discussion in some fairly revealing areas of people's lives and beliefs with very little preamble. My favourite anecdote however was from one couple I went up to speak to about the work. I introduced myself and asked how they were finding the exhibition, what they made of the work, and the young man looked at me and said, "We're actually on a first date, so to be honest I'm not really taking much of it in!" I decided that it probably wasn't the time to try and discuss art and left them to it. (I do hope the date went well - one of the many functions of art at work!) One couple I spoke to for some time raised the issue of compatibility of different belief systems, how an individual's belief system may have accommodate several others simultaneously. They were interested in the representations of astrology and Christianity, and in their own lives professed a belief in both. However they also knew people close to them who didn't feel that was tenable, and that astrology was un-Christian. Our discussion was focused on the ways in which all of us incorporate aspects of different systems, rituals and so on, into something that is coherent for us, and that for all of us there was a limit to how far we would go beyond our own comfort zone in having our beliefs challenged.

There is much I could write about Richard Grayson's Q&A (led by Andrew Brighton). Richard was warm, engaging, entertaining, and disarmingly open about his own lack of certainty around issues of belief. Although inspired in part by his concern that there seems to be a movement of specific religious beliefs back into the political sphere, he was keen to stress that he had no intention with the work to make fun of anyone's beliefs, nor to directly criticise, but rather to examine "belief in operation", "the functions of belief, rather than what the beliefs actually are."
He spoke at length about his problem with the (post-modern) idea of equivalence - the notion that one belief system offers exactly the same weight and validity as another - but he also struggles with any belief system that claims absolute truth and rightness. He described his own position as "fluttery" and that the work essentially is about examining rather than supporting or decrying the content of individuals' belief systems.

There is much else besides that was covered, and it made for an engaging walk and talk afterwards, although such was the level of engagement that the group never moved from beyond the beginning of the exhibition! All those taking part had seen the work previously and been present at Richard's talk, so the focus was on the questions raised by what they had seen and heard, rather than re-engaging with individual pieces. Questions that were raised included: how far is it one's responsibility when viewing work to be informed? This was in response to a reply from Richard to the effect that he presumed an audience for his work who understand the aesthetic - "a slightly art-geek audience". Some people in discussion felt it is the artist's responsibility to create work where the aesthetic engages the audience to get to grips with the ideas - others felt that the responsibility lies with the viewer, who on entering a gallery is engaging in a kind of unspoken contract to interrogate the work. This led on to a wider discussion of the relationship the DLWP has with the local community in Bexhill - which no doubt could have gone on for much longer! All those participating were Bexhill residents which is great.

A very full afternoon of thinking and discussion, which I could write ten times more about. This is a thought-provoking exhibition and the discussions have been fascinating.