The Richard Young Gallery was founded to exhibit photography and fine art that employ a contemporary creative vision. Works by young and established artists and photographers will be curated across the space across the year.
In May the Richard Young Gallery is pleased to present Warholesque?, an exhibition that invites contemporary artists to intervene and respond to unseen photographs of Andy Warhol at his inaugural exhibition at the ICA in London in 1978. Artists include Sir Peter Blake, Steve Bishop, Kay Harwood, Daniel Pasteiner, Jamie Shovlin, Gavin Turk and Jessica Voorsanger and a mystery guest...
The Richard Young Gallery curatorial programme for 2009 has been developed by Arts Co.
April Fools' Day, although not a holiday in its own right, is a notable day celebrated in many countries on April 1. The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, enemies, and neighbours, or sending them on a fool's errand, the aim of which is to embarrass the gullible.
Urban street art has fast become a cultural phenomenon sweeping the UK and Europe with its audacious challenging of authority and cultural norms. Public but anonymous, these artifacts of clandestine performance by artists operating outside the established channels of exhibiting and selling their art, has contributed greatly to the dialogue of the enduring question, "What is art"?
Taking the ethos of the hoax into consideration, an eclectic collection of contemporary urban art will be exhibited and sold off the walls, with work constantly changing throughout the duration of the exhibition to spark the curiosity of the viewer. This exhibition showcases a collection of international artists who examine the genre's explorations into art in mediums that include painting, wheat-pasting, collage, drawing and sculpture.
Artists: Pure Evil, Dran, Benjamin Wright, Eine, Bom.k, Tom Hine, Beatrice Brown, Sten and Lex, Matthew Curry, Sonia Pang, Holly Thoburn & Vault49
This exhibition is generously supported by Brompton Estates.
Arts Co and street artist PURE EVIL have joined forces to invite the most innovative street artists in London to submit original art and prints to sell from our walls and create a cult Christmas event at The East Room in Shoreditch across three levels and the terrace!
The 'Evil Xmas Fayre' re-introduces some seasonal fun and frivolity into the thriving but increasingly commercial London street art scene. Original artwork and prints will be sold off the walls of The East Room during the Holiday Season until 31 January 2009, and on the 8 December for one exclusive night where artists will take over the space for a twisted take on the traditional European Christmas Fair.
The 'Evil Xmas Fayre' will be a day when the artists let loose on the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future and for all-comers to engage with street art in a fresh and informal way, indulge in some festive tastes and cocktails and to pick up some real art bargains and Christmas presents!
Festivities Include:
Masked story tellers
Sprayed and stenciled Christmas cards
Body painting by Santa’s evil helpers
Defacing of gingerbread cookies
Polaroid photos taken on evil Santa’s lap
PURE EVIL/K-GUY/BORTUSK LEER/L'ATLAS/THE SHAW/BROKEN CROW/DEUCE SEVEN/GALO/DAMON GINANDES/CAKE/FKDL/EGO LEONARD/FREEK VAN HAAGEN/SHAKA & NOSBE/BERT INDUSTRIES/HERO/BEEJOIR/PART2ISM/MIGHTY MO/PRESCRIPTION ART
The East Room
2a Tabernacle Street
London EC2A 4LU
12th November-6th December 2008
29 Thurloe Place, South Kensington, London, SW7 2HQ
Arts Co is pleased to present Atlantis, an exhibition by artist Gayle Chong Kwan. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, Chong Kwan has been involved in exhibitions both in the UK and internationally and last year unveiled her permanent installation for London Underground, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Chong Kwan’s work is in various collections including Arts Council England and The Government Art Fund.
Atlantis is an enormous mythical landscape, a city created and carved out of semi-opaque used plastic food packaging, collected from people who live in London and covering the entire exhibition space. This new work is based on master-planning projects, developments in tourism, regeneration and urban planning. It questions notions of waste, climate change and how this fits into our planning of cities and communal living.
The architecture of Atlantis is inspired by ideas of the lost city, whose beauty was unequalled but which vanished in a day. First described by Plato in around 360 BC, Atlantis was catastrophically buried under the sea, and an earthquake was unleashed onto the island, triggering the flood. Often treated as a literary device, Atlantis entered into the popular imagination in the 1880’s. Expeditions continue to search in various sites for the remains of Atlantis.
Mythologised for its abundance of beautiful temples, embellished palaces, harbours and luscious vegetation, the Atlantis of this exhibition has been carved out of plastic food containers, whose discarded remains may be found at the bottom of many of our rivers and seas, forming their own kinds of horrific waste cities or constructions themselves. With premonitions of our rising water levels, questions surround whether we are creating or living in the Atlantis of the future.
The Atlantis installation will be accompanied by large-scale photographs on the surrounding walls exploring this enchanting and uncanny city of plastic.
Plastic is with us virtually from now to eternity: impervious to bacteria, acid, salt, rust, breakage and, in some cases, able to withstand heat, plastic is something of a miracle substance. One hundred years ago, when it was first invented, no one could have anticipated that plastic would present one of our biggest recycling challenges.
Pioneering arts consultancy Arts Co has commissioned eight leading contemporary designers and design collectives to celebrate plastic through their work and look at ways to re-think our growing mountains of discarded waste. Their ingenious creations will be on display at From Now To Eternity, an exhibition launching during the 2008 London Design Festival and continuing through Frieze Art Fair, at the Biscuit Building in London’s East End.
The designers in the exhibition show how plastic’s versatility - transparent or opaque, hard or pliant, able to take on a myriad of colours and forms – can serve their creativity. The designers are Committee, FAT, Hiroko Shiratori, Raw Edges, Rolf Sachs, Stuart Haygarth, Tom Price and Tomoko Azumi.
A film and talks programme accompanies the From Now To Eternity Exhibition, and is supported by Arts Council England.
For more information:
Is it only the Arts?
No. Its starting point was the arts, but talented women from all fields are welcomed – science, politics, law and so on.
Past Arts Co Girls Evenings
Examples include:
Wasted will interrogate a UK environmental problem – the tonnes of traditionally un-recycled waste that end up in landfill and that will eventually become part of the earth’s stratum.
A stratum is a layer of rock or soil with internally consistent characteristics that distinguishes it from contiguous layers. Stratum when exposed either naturally, for example the Grand Canyon, or by human intervention in a quarry or mine, are typically a number of parallel layers that lie one upon another, laid down by natural forces. These vast sweeping lines of different colour represent a specific mode of deposition, for example river silt, beach sand, coal swamp, sand dune or lava bed.
In future millennia what will the stratum of the UK look like if we continue to deposit 99 million tonnes of waste per year? According to DEFRA figures, 109 square miles of the UK is occupied by landfill. If this continues the UK will run out of landfill space in under nine years. What processes or opportunities are there for architects, designers and artists to use these materials heading for landfill, for the every day, or in the built environment / urban landscape?
Can we create a new typology of landscape design and architecture using commercial waste streams? Can new and aspirational products be created from these reclaimed materials by artists?
Arts Co’s project seeks to re-think our concept of ‘waste’, our attitudes to re-use and re-cycling and present an alternative for this material.
The architect Ian Douglas-Jones will work from a palette of materials which would otherwise go to commercial landfill, reclaimed by E&KO, to include:
Ian Douglas-Jones is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art whose interests lie not only in architecture, but furniture and product design too. This fledgling designer recently launched design practice Atelier Apatura, as well as architecture, design, and conjecture site: www.i-n-d-j.com
This project for the London Design Festival forms the launch of E&K Arts.
16th – 24th May 2009 South Kensington
"There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight." (Jekyll).
The Brompton Design District is launching an experimental fringe garden festival called Brompton Borders to coincide with the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Brompton Borders celebrates a contemporary vision of urban nature by opening hidden green spaces in an area of London renowned for its historic parks, gardens and squares. Arts Co has invited artists to respond to the philosophies of influential British garden designer, writer, and artist Gertrude Jekyll.
Brompton Borders will involve broad spectrum of partners: artists, gardeners, museums, restaurants and shops to develop a holistic profile for the area. By encouraging partners to think about outdoor spaces, the Brompton Design District will encourage experimentation within the comparatively conventional arena of garden design through cross fertilisation with arts and design.
Analogies between art and gardening are manifold; a gardener's sense of colour, arrangement and symmetry are artistic qualities before they are technical or scientific. When a gardener looks at a pat of annuals as if they were a palette of paint, or at a muddy spade as if a dripping paintbrush, they are stepping on to the path of Gertrude Jekyll, one of the best-loved gardeners of English landscape history. Influenced by the Arts and Craft movement, she was renowned for her sympathetic approach to the relationship between the house and its surroundings.
The children’s novel The Secret Garden, published in 1911, uses the metaphor of a garden as a way of describing a safe place within one’s surroundings. Examining the themes of rebirth, love, innocence and the power of nature, this classic story parallels Jekyll’s romanticism with gardening and its milieu.
By asking artists to respond to the notion of the garden and employing the same approaches practiced by Jekyll; exploring poetry in colour and form, we are animating the secret spaces and borders of the South Kensington area that inspired her in the first place.
Internationally renowned artists and designers have been commissioned to create hand-made prototype habitats for the rapidly declining numbers of bird, bat and bee species in UK urban areas. These bird, bat and bee houses have been created using Phillips de Pury's waste material including cardboard, crates, invitations, catalogues, plastics and wood discarded in the process of packing, moving and installing art works.
Over 45 handmade prototypes will be auctioned on June 27 in London at Phillips de Pury & Company, the proceeds of which will benefit Adventure Ecology's Foundation, Sculpt the Future.
Additionally, the three most appropriate designs for manufacturing will be chosen and distributed through high-end premium retailers and museums. The proceeds of the sales will be donated to protect natural habitats.
The project aims to raise awareness about the endangered habitats of birds, bats and bees in the UK, while reusing corporate waste in a functional and imaginative way. It will also look at ways in which the designs could be produced for a wider market.
Artists and designers involved include:| Tomoko Azumi | Luis Berrios Negron |
| David Austen | Tom Price |
| Jurgen Bey | Raw Edges |
| Martino Gamper | Rolf Sachs |
| David Harrison | Sir Paul Smith |
| Stuart Haygarth | Michael Sodeau |
| Henry Krokatsis | Marcus Tremento |
| Max Lamb | Gavin Turk |
| Peter Marigold | Christopher Williams |
For further information or to attend these free events please contact info@arts-co.com / 020 7723 0285
The Art of Ideas encompassed:
1. Two evenings of talks
2. One evening of Art & Music – The Future of Sound Birmingham
Showcase
3. Commissioned Essays
4. An Artists’ Project
5. Cultural Art Map of Birmingham produced by artupdate
The talks, music performances, essays, artists' project, and the cultural art map of Birmingham aimed to shed light the West Midland’s rich and often overlooked cultural quality and diversity.
Speakers at the talks included Robert Yates - Assistant Editor, The Observer, Costa Award winning writer Catherine O’Flynn, James Yarker – Director, Stan’s Café, Stuart Murphy – Creative Director, TwoFour, award-winning musician Soweto Kinch, architect Sam Jacob of FAT – Fashion Architecture Taste, Gavin Wade – artist, curator & founder of Eastside Projects and curator & writer Matt Price.
The 'Future of Sound' Birmingham Showcase was convened by former Human League front man Martyn Ware and curated by Brian Duffy and Lewis Sykes, Director of Cybersonica. It featured Dreams of Tall Buildings, Juneau Projects, Modified Toy Orchestra, The Sancho Plan, and Soweto Kinch.
The commissioned essays were written by Catherine O’Flynn
and Matt Price addressing Birmingham's distinct identity and thriving
artistic life respectively.
The Other Birmingham:
Catherine O’Flynn (PDF)
The Other Birmingham:
Matt Price (PDF)
For the Artists' Project, West Midland Photographers Ravi Deepres, Chris Keenan, and David Rowan were commissioned to take the portraits of West Midland contemporary visual artists/art collectives in their studios. The artists photographed were Jane Anderson, Ayling & Conroy, Simon & Tom Bloor, Pogus Caesar, Mona Casey, Faye Claridge, Juneau Projects, Kate Pemberton, Liz Rowe, and David Thomas. The resulting ten photographs document the practice of contemporary art in the West Midlands and establish a creative dialogue between the work of the artists and that of the photographers. See ‘The Art of Ideas: Artists’ Project’ for images.
These were featured on the limited edition map produced by artupdate.com
"A stellar line up of names" Icon Magazine, October
"Top Ten of the London Design Festival" Wallpaper* Magazine, October
"The fantastic-all-plastic exhibition" Harper's Bazaar, October
"Plastic fantastic" World of Interiors, October
"Must See" Elle Decoration, October
"Some of the hottest design around" Telegraph Magazine, September
"The way design art is heading" Bloomberg News, September
"From hip to skip" Design Week, September
"A plastic fantastic design show" Tatler, September
"Our choice of the best" The London Paper, September
"The must see events" The Evening Standard, September
Harper's Bazaar
Casamica, October 2008
Actitudes, October 2008
Pulse, October 2008
London Info, September 2008
The Ecologist, October 2008 - 1, 2
Sphere, October 2008
Wallpaper, September 2008
Elle Deco, September 2008
World of Interiors, September 2008
Dezeen, September 2008
Evening Standard, September 2008 - 1, 2
The London Paper, September 2008
Semanal, September 2008 - 1, 2
idfx Magazine, September 2008
Crafts, September 2008 - 1, 2, 3
Telegraph Magazine, September 2008 - 1, 2
Tatler Magazine
Country House, September 2008
“Art has the power to shape an understanding of our natural environment. Artists today can engage and encourage support in a way politicians can’t. They are able to explore, question, challenge and create debate.”
Isabella Macpherson, Time Out, February 2007
“We started talking to Arts Co because they were interesting to talk to and have a lot of knowledge and understanding about how artists think.”
Deborah Curtis, Founder, House of Fairy Tales
If you would like to receive information about forthcoming Arts Co events or projects please send an email with 'events' in the headline to info@arts-co.com
Alexa Kusber
Alexa has worked in the contemporary art industry since 2003, beginning at MOCA San Diego working in the Development department. She attained a BA in International Business Marketing Communications and a minor in Registrar/Museum Studies, before relocating to the UK where she achieved an MA in Contemporary Art from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London. Alexa’s developed strong artist liaison and curatorial skills during her two-year tenure at Leonard Street Gallery in London, becoming an expert in Urban Art and consulting to individuals and brands including Chanel and Phillips de Pury. Alexa writes for Kultureflash and guest lectures in Urban Art at Sotheby’s Institute.
In his intricate ink drawings, Pio Abad pulls off an extraordinary meeting of obsessive precision and over-the-top excess. The ringlets of Marie Antoinette-like wigs and the lashings of gold gloss paint spilling over their surfaces reek of luxury, while the rigid background patterns keep this tussle between opposites in play. For Abad these themes have deeper significance: he grew up in Manila under the Marcos regime, acutely aware of its indulgences and decadence. Pio was selected for this year's Bloomberg New Contemporaries and has recently exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow and the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh.
Here they spent a day with Arts Co.
"Plastic is wholly swallowed up in the fact of use: ultimately, objects will be invented for the sole pleasure of using them. The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since." Roland Barthes, Mythologies
‘From Now To Eternity’ , a celebration of and debate around design, focused on one material: plastic. For this exhibition at Mother, eight leading and emergent practitioners celebrated plastic through their work and looked at ways to rethink our growing mountains of discarded waste.
Participating designers: Committee, FAT, Hiroko Shiratori, Raw Edges, Stuart Haygarth, Tom Price, Tomoko Azumi, Rolf Sachs, and WOKmedia.
This film by independent documentary maker Roland de Villiers highlights the artist’s process of examining this concept.
Wasted will interrogate a UK environmental problem – the tonnes of traditionally un-recycled waste that end up in landfill and that will eventually become part of the earth’s stratum.
A stratum is a layer of rock or soil with internally consistent characteristics that distinguishes it from contiguous layers. Stratum when exposed either naturally, for example the Grand Canyon, or by human intervention in a quarry or mine, are typically a number of parallel layers that lie one upon another, laid down by natural forces. These vast sweeping lines of different colour represent a specific mode of deposition, for example river silt, beach sand, coal swamp, sand dune or lava bed.
In future millennia what will the stratum of the UK look like if we continue to deposit 99 million tonnes of waste per year? According to DEFRA figures, 109 square miles of the UK is occupied by landfill. If this continues the UK will run out of landfill space in under nine years. What processes or opportunities are there for architects, designers and artists to use these materials heading for landfill, for the every day, or in the built environment / urban landscape?
Can we create a new typology of landscape design and architecture using commercial waste streams? Can new and aspirational products be created from these reclaimed materials by artists?
Arts Co’s project seeks to re-think our concept of ‘waste’, our attitudes to re-use and re-cycling and present an alternative for this material.
The architect Ian Douglas-Jones will work from a palette of materials which would otherwise go to commercial landfill, reclaimed by E&KO, to include:
Ian Douglas-Jones is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art whose interests lie not only in architecture, but furniture and product design too. This fledgling designer recently launched design practice Atelier Apatura, as well as architecture, design, and conjecture site: www.i-n-d-j.com
This project for the London Design Festival forms the launch of E&K Arts.
E&K Arts works with artists to create products which are ethically and environmentally sustainable and have 100% design integrity. 50 percent of profits from E&K Arts will be donated to charities.
Big trends of the last 10 years
The two retail stories of the past decade have been the ascendance of luxury and the importance of provenance. The big question now surrounds a product’s origin, from tuna to handbags. E&K Arts combines no compromise on luxury, while being a sound product – glamour for the planet.
Which artists?
An international group of sought after artists have each designed two of the ten innovative products - Lothar Gotz, Olivier Millagou, Paul Morrison, Simon Periton and Anya Gallacio. E&K Arts continues a tradition of artists working with product, but with a twist. Here they explore the possibilities of new materials, pushing the boundaries of design and manufacturing, to create gorgeous bags and accessories.
Why artists?
Architecture, art and design have the power to shape an understanding of our natural environment. Artists are able to explore, question, challenge and create debate. The Wasted Project during the London Design Festival and E&K Arts combines incredible raw materials and quality craftsmanship with artistic integrity, and will continue to evolve as new artists are introduced.
E&K Arts will be using materials that were previously destined for landfill. This first line focuses on decommissioned British fire hose, but also includes reclaimed office fabric, decommissioned parachute silk and sailcloth. 50 percent of profits will be donated to charities associated with the waste. In the case of the fire hose line, the donation will be made to the Fire Fighters Charity, a national charity that works to improve the quality of life of both active and retired fire service personnel.
A belt from E&KO’s current range was featured in the American Vogue June Issue, worn by Cameron Diaz.
For more information about the launch of E&K Arts products in Autumn 2009 please email us.
Is it only the Arts?
No. Its starting point was the arts, but talented women from all fields are welcomed – science, politics, law and so on.
Past Arts Co Girls Evenings
Examples include:
For further information or to attend these free events please contact info@arts-co.com / 020 7723 0285
Plastic is with us virtually from now to eternity: impervious to bacteria, acid, salt, rust, breakage and, in some cases, able to withstand heat, plastic is something of a miracle substance. One hundred years ago, when it was first invented, no one could have anticipated that plastic would present one of our biggest recycling challenges.
Pioneering arts consultancy Arts Co has commissioned eight leading contemporary designers and design collectives to celebrate plastic through their work and look at ways to re-think our growing mountains of discarded waste. Their ingenious creations will be on display at From Now To Eternity, an exhibition launching during the 2008 London Design Festival and continuing through Frieze Art Fair, at the Biscuit Building in London’s East End.
The designers in the exhibition show how plastic’s versatility - transparent or opaque, hard or pliant, able to take on a myriad of colours and forms – can serve their creativity. The designers are Committee, FAT, Hiroko Shiratori, Raw Edges, Rolf Sachs, Stuart Haygarth, Tom Price and Tomoko Azumi.
A film and talks programme accompanies the From Now To Eternity Exhibition, and is supported by Arts Council England.
For more information:
