- Museum of Everything
- Evil Xmas Fayre
- NZ at Venice
- From Now To Eternity
- Ecuador
- Waste Pyramid
- The Fall
- Atlantis
- Warholesque?
- Keane
- Soundlife
- Brompton Borders
- The Art of Ideas II
- The Art of Ideas
- The Art of Ideas, Artists' Project
- Adventure Ecology Projects
- State of Play
- Aurel Schmidt
- Oliver Clegg
- Second Time Around
- Video America
- Die Green Live Pretty
The Museum of Everything is London’s first and only public space for artists and creators living outside modern society.
Beautiful, challenging, delicate and democratic, this secret art has inspired generations of artists, from Jean Dubuffet to Jean-Michel Basquiat. In this inaugural exhibition, the museum has invited leading international artists, curators and figures to explore the connection with contemporary art.
Contributors include: Annette Messager, Eva Rothschild, Tal R, Jamie Shovlin, Bob & Roberta Smith, Richard Wentworth, Idris Khan, Arnulf Rainer, Ed Ruscha, Jockum Nordstrom, Klara Kristalova, Karin Mamma Andersson, Mark Titchner, Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave and Anthony Hegarty amongst others.
Each collaborator has chosen artists or artworks which influence or inspire them - including the spirit drawings of London-born medium Madge Gill, the recycled ceramic kingdom of Indian roads worker Nek Chand and the panoramic fairytale illustrations of renowned Chicago recluse, Henry Darger.
Darger is the most important marginal artist of the Twentieth Century - and this exhibition features a unique series of sequential images, displayed together for the very first time since his death in 1973.
From janitors to jailbirds, mediums to miners, The Museum of Everything features over two hundred drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations, presented within a 10,000 sft former dairy and recording studio in Primrose Hill, just a few minutes from the Frieze Art Fair in Regents Park.
The UK has never had a permanent home for artwork created outside mainstream art circles. Call it art brut, self-taught, outsider art, what you will, these names mean very little and they rarely do justice to the astonishing range of private and personal imagery, made often by those in the most difficult of circumstances. It is like stepping into another world.
The Museum of Everything, 2009
For more information please see the website. For further information please contact Rukhsana Jahangir on +44 20 7957 5322 or rj@musevery.com
Henry Darger
Untitled, c1950-60
Street art luminaries and emerging talent involved included Beatrice Brown, Deadbeat Donny, Ged Wells, Hornhead, Joanna Imrie, Ortiz, Panik, Pure Evil and Soozy Lipsey. The Art Car Boot Fair, E&K Arts, Museum of Everything and House of Fairy Tales.
The East Room & Sosho, 2 Tabernacle Street, EC2A 4LU
Judy Millar
Save Yourself
Francis Upritchard
The artists representing New Zealand are Judy Millar with the project Giraffe-Bottle-Gun and Francis Upritchard with 'Save Yourself'.
Stuart Haygarth
Meltdown Chair
Tom Price
Plastic in design
The pieces created for the From Now To Eternity project are available to view by appointment.
From Now To Eternity is a celebration of and debate around design, with a focus on one material: 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:
Ecuador Block 16 was the first exhibition presented in London in October 2007, with work by artist Gabriel Orozco, photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, and filmmaker Dustin Lynn. Along with the founder of Adventure Ecology, David de Rothschild, and National Geographic ethno-botanist, Maria Fadiman, this multidisciplinary team spent time with the remote Achaur community on the border of Ecuador and Peru. This seemingly untouched territory was in stark contrast to the damage the team witnessed in the North where international oil companies have drilled the vast oil reserves and disturbed the natural order. The devastation of majestic forests, some of which are 400 years old, and the disruption of its residents’ culture and health, are just some of scars left behind. ‘Block 16’ refers to an area of rainforest that the expedition team were taken to, to view the oil lakes left behind after drilling for oil has taken place.
"The switch in pace between each artist is fascinating - I spent a Sunday afternoon enthralled by the rough cut of filmmaker Dustin Lynn's footage of Orozco working, using rainforest seeds as paint."
Lucy Siegle, The Observer, October 2007
Scheduled: Pending
Alongside the pyramid Arts Co will curate an exhibition of McGowan’s work. Live screens of Mark in the pyramid will be part of the exhibition.
www.markmcgowan.org
Claire Morgan, 2007
Gayle Chong Kwan
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.
7th May – 6th June 2009
Private View 6th May, 7-9pm
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday, 10am-6pm
The Richard Young Gallery
4 Holland Street
London W8 4LT
Richard Young’s classic images have portrayed the canon of contemporary society; life on the streets of India and New York, groups from Harley Davidson bikers to Alternative Miss World contestants to USA troops in Iraq. Without the use of makeup artists, special lighting or trick photography, Young has captured a variety of people including Elizabeth Taylor, Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Andy Warhol.
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.
- Image Gallery
- Press:
The Guardian, January 2009
Creative Review, October 2008
Art Krush, October 2008
Design Boom, October 2008
Hype Beast, October 2008
Gardens by Arts Co and Martyn Ware. This project is a unique opportunity to reveal
the amazing three-dimensional sound world that surrounds us at all times in the
most fascinating and diverse city in the world. London will never sound the same
again.
The project is initiated and co-ordinated by Arts Co and Martyn Ware with support
from Westminster Council and Arts Council England.
Location:
Leicester Square Gardens
Westminster
London WC2H
Dates: June 4th-14th 2009.
Opening Hours: Monday to Sunday 9 a.m. - 7 p.m
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.
Simon & Tom Bloor
Art of Ideas II will comprise discussion events and networking opportunities, as well as a chance for people interested in the visual arts to see a variety of work through a special tours and events programme throughout July 2009.
- A Debate on The Art of Collecting - Wednesday 1st July 2009, 6 to 7.30pm
- A Debate on The Museum for the 21st Century - Wednesday 8th July 2009, 6 to 7.30pm
- Visual Exhibition - Tuesday 30th June to Sunday 12th July, 11.30am to 6pm daily, including weekends
- Art of Ideas Special Events & Tours Programme
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
Ravi Deepres
The Art of Ideas was part of a market development initiative developed by Arts Co for Arts Council England, Birmingham City Council and Business Link, exploring the place of art and creativity in shaping the West Midlands.
Samantha Cross, 2006
www.adventureecology.com
Aurel Schmidt, 2007
Mimi Joung, 2007
Adam King, 2007
Die Green Live Pretty Press Release