Arts Council CollectionNew Acquisitions 2011—12

Chair of the Acquisitions CommitteeCaroline Douglas

The external members of the Acquisitions Committee 2011–12:Jennifer HiggieJohn StezakerJonathan WatkinsNigel Walsh

Arts Council CollectionNew Acquisitions 2011—12

Untitled (Bar of the Egg Eating Egret), 2010-2011 pencil and gouache, 163.5 x 122cm

The Universal University, 2011 pencil, ink, acrylic and graphite powder on paper (mounted on linen), 204 x 291cm

The drawing constitutes a part of Charles Avery’s epic project entitled ‘The Islanders’ (2005-on going) in which he explores an imaginary island and everything it contains through the eyes of an explorer.

Untitled (Bar of the Egg Eating Egret), 2010-2011 depicts a bar where only McPhew, The protagonist of the fiction, hatches a plan to capture the Noumenon (A Kantian thing in itself) which has never been seen, in the name of his love for Miss Miss, the female protagonist, whom he is attempting to woo.

Charles Avery

Night, Music, 2007 steel, HDF, wood, acrylic, glass, blackboard paint 147 x 125 x 59cm

Becky Beasley Night, Music 2007 is a sculpture which was made after the photograph, Gloss (II), 2007 also in the Arts Council Collection. Beasley’s practice often involves a transition from sculpture to photograph after which another sculpture might be made. Questions of scale are key to understanding the ambiguities of relationships between images and objects present in Beasley’s work. The object photographed in Gloss (II) was made at two thirds the scale of the dimensions of an upright piano which Beasley then enlarged photographically to create Gloss (II). The title, Night, Music, originates in a short story Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote, which features both a piano and also a black mirror. Besides this, it refers to Aldous Huxley’s essay titled Music at Night.

Untitled, 2011 oil on canvas, 50.8 x 76.2cm

Varda Caivano’s modest paintings invite prolonged scrutiny and repay with intimate evocations that shift and grow with each viewing. Caivano’s paintings are undeniably of themselves yet they are also, unavoidably, touched by and suggestive of the world beyond the studio, beyond the gallery. We can view these canvases in procedural terms, for there is always a palpable, enlivening sense of the artist making decisions or changing course, deflecting quick resolutions or alighting on happy accidents that lead to another set of problems, more possible outcomes.

This is one possible journey through the work, during which we might dwell on

variations of touch and tone, alerted to qualities of paint as space is mapped and atmosphere created. However, equally strong are suggestions of landscapes or objects. Caivano’s great strength lies in her understanding of the ways in which objects and images impress upon us via essences of colour, shape and texture and how these essences affect us as deeply as the physical form to which they are usually attached. A sense of orchestration is brought to the fore in installations of Caivano’s work where touch, tone, pace and pitch are made resonant through juxtaposition and space is orchestrated as much through pauses as paintings.

Varda Caivano

Nest (Turquoise Loops), 2008 welded steel, paint, mirror, glass, vinyl, found porcelain figure, fimo, 45 x 105 x 40cm

Ruth Claxton “I work with a variety of media, in particular reconfiguring or altering pre-existing objects in order to create objects and installations which begin to question what it is to look, see or experience. I am concerned with articulating the fragile relationship between vision and bodily experience, image and that which it depicts. The exponential rise of the internet and other telecommunications systems has resulted in an increasingly dis-located society of individuals. The real world, as a place, is becoming superseded by a space of information, a virtual, global, digital space, book-marked not land-marked. An interest in communicating the complex relationship between direct and mediated experience informs much of my practice and primarily results in installations where the audience is physically and conceptually implicated within constructed ‘landscapes’.”

Collapse into Abstract [White], 2008–10 oil and floor paint on wood, newspaper, painted wood, lightbox, 162.5 x 136.5 x 2cmGift of the artists 2011

Cullinan Richards Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards have worked together since 1998, originally under the collaborative name Artlab. Collapse into Abstract [White], 2008-10, explores the artists’ interest in the breakdown of a figuration into abstraction. The image of the diving horse and rider functions as pure gesture, plunging into blatant materiality and abstracted form. The sports pages from newspapers attached to the frame and arranged on the floor connect to the moment of the making of the piece, situating the idea of painting as a gesture and the result of a kind of performance.

Michael FullertonKatharine Graham was chosen as a subject by Fullerton because she connected several threads that had been prevalent in his practice for some time: the relationship between painting and the public realm and the role that aesthetics plays in this process. That is to say how we understand and experience beauty in painting. Katharine Graham was in charge of the Washington Post, one of America’s most influential newspapers, making Graham one of the first female media magnates in America. The fact that she was female and the fact that she controled how and what information was disseminated is a key element of this work. Fullerton is interested in how the medium of oil paint is situated within the wider spectrum of media in general.

Katharine Graham, 2008 oil on linen, 61 x 46cm

Using Polish Technology, Alan Turing Devised a More Sophisticated Machine to Crack ENIGMA, 2010 screenprint on newsprint, 9 parts each: 100 x 75cm

How does painting compete with or augment the mass media in today’s

‘information age’?

“Greta and Blue and Orange Edges are derived from a found photograph of Auriculas, a primrose-like flower I have been enamoured with for some time. People who grow them often become obsessed enough to cultivate and show them – they were favoured in Victorian times for exhibition and would be presented in an Auricula ‘theatre’; a free-standing, open shelved cabinet, usually painted black to set off their unusual and many-varied palette and their distinctive silhouette.

The bucket of flowers in Faded Blooms had been gathering in my studio as I photographed the living and used it to discard the dying specimens. I was about to take it out to the compost, when I suddenly saw it for the exquisite picture it could be; Theceruleum blue of the plastic bucket set off the various pinks and pale yellow of the peonies and carnations beautifully.”

Blue and Orange Edges, 2010 wool and paper collage, framed: 50 x 41.5cm

Faded Blooms, 2009 archival digital print on fibre paper, framed: 40 x 51cm

Greta, 2010 wool and paper collage, framed: 50 x 41.5cm

Georgie Hopton

Living Arrangements (No. 4), 2006-2009

Living Arrangements (No. 1), 2006-2009 both Fuji archival lustre paper print, 33 x 52.1cm

Gift of the artist and Pavilion, Leeds.

Transitionary 9 / Karloff / Kinski / Krystal, 2005 cut photographs, 45 x 65 cm

Penny Klepuszewska

Graham Gussin

“Intrinsic to my work are the details and scenes, the small fragilities and brutalities of contemporary human existence. I combine a documentary approach with staging and construction, creating both accounts of the real world and self-contained fictions. I often utilize found occurrences taken from newspaper articles, personal stories, conversations and everyday life. Living Arrangements focuses upon significant changes in the patterns of family life over the last two decades and how this has created a large and expanding number of elderly people who are living alone, often with deteriorating health and no family support to hand. The home is often regarded as a place of shelter but for some in later life it can become an island of isolation.”

“The Transitionary series is made up of cut photographs from film stills, they bring two or three images together forming a visual collision. I’m interested in the way they come together to form a mix. Gender, genre, gesture and role are merged, coming together to form an image which is in transition between all of these things. In Transitionary 9 (Karloff, Kinski, Krystal) the kind of desire embodied in the three images was the staring point. I like the idea that the spaces of these fictions inhabit each other.”

In his work Haroon Mirza attempts to isolate the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound and music and explores the possibility of the visual and acoustic as one singular aesthetic form. These ideas are examined through the production of assemblages and sculptural installations made from furniture, household electronics, found or constructed video footage and existing artworks combined to generate audio compositions. The subject matter of his work pivots around socio-cultural systems such as religious faith or club culture and their relationship to music.

An_infinato is a three-piece ensemble including16mm film by Guy Sherwin and unedited video rushes by Jeremy Deller, (whose assistant Mirza was for a time)

An_Infinato, 2009 mixed media including footage by Jeremy Deller and damaged off-cuts from’Cycles #1’ 1972/77 by Guy Sherwin, dimensions variableFunded by The Elephant Trust.

Haroon Mirzato form a disparate yet lucid set of organised sounds. The title, An_Infinato alludes to a perpetual musical composition or passage such as a canon whose end leads back to its beginning. The film, Cycles (1972/77) by the experimental film maker, Guy Sherwin was originally made by hole punching frames of the film and its audio track. Part of his Optical Sound series, the resulting effect is a strobotic sequence accompanied by a pulsating soundtrack, which is in itself mesmerising.

Bulb Fair, 2005 c-type hand print, edition 1 of 5 + 2AP, 122 x 152.4cm

Mark NevilleIn 2004 Mark Neville spent a year working in Port Glasgow documenting the lives of those who lived there. The image of highland dancers performing was taken at the Port Glasgow Town Hall during the annual ‘Bulb Fair’; a week-long event which serves as a gardening competition, a show of handicrafts and home baking, and a platform for local dancing talent. Images of dancing frequently appear in Neville’s work as a metaphor for celebration.

Edward Higgins White III, 2011 embroidery, 42.5 x 72 cm

Edward Higgins White III is a continuation of a project first realised by Alek O. during a residency in Finland – at Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP) in 2010. Continued in London, Alek O. “collected several lost gloves on the streets of the city. Following the order of finding, unravelled and embroidered their threads on to canvas. The result is a composition of rows in chronological order of the discoveries.” The series title is the name of the first American astronaut to ‘walk’ in space. On his first walk Edward Higgins White lost one of his thermal gloves.

Alek O.

Elizabeth Price

Choir (Parts 1 & 2), 2011 HD video, running time: 9 minutes 5 secondsSupported by the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and Creative Scotland. With assistance from St. John’s College and Magdalen College, Oxford

Elizabeth Price works predominantly in moving image. She uses high-definition digital video, with live action, motion graphics, 3D computer animation and sound. Her work is informed by histories of narrative cinema and experimental film, but more precisely concerned with digital video, and in particular its contemporary heterogeneity as a medium used for navigation, advertising, knowledge organisation as well as cinematic special effects.

The conceptual proposition of Choir (Parts 1&2) is to consider the formal assembly process of video editing - the relation between the timeline and the cache/archive as a simile for the relationship between score and choir in polyphonic musical and dramatic form.

Ben Rivers’ films are at once aesthetic and anthropological projects. Rivers is intent on witnessing the lives of others and presenting them not as oddities, but precious anomalies to be appreciated. His previous subjects have included an elderly man living in a ramshackle cottage in the wilderness of the Scottish highlands and feral children playing amongst the debris of a farmyard. In short, his preoccupation is with those living beyond mainstream, urban culture, in rural if not totally isolated environments.

Whereas previous locations have been remote, Sack Barrow explores a small family run factory in the outskirts of London. It was set up in 1931 to provide

Sack Barrow, 2011 16mm film, colour with audio, running time: 21 minutesPart funded by The Changing Room, Stirling and Hayward Gallery, London.

Ben Riverswork for limbless and disabled ex-servicemen and, following many years of struggle to maintain a viable business specialising in metal electroplating for the engineering industry, the factory finally went into liquidation in 2011. In June that year Rivers filmed the environment and daily routines of the final month of the six workers, and has since filmed the empty factory once it had finally closed down. Ben Rivers won the Baloise Art Prize, with Sack Barrow, in 2011.

Meditations on a Triangle, 2010 HD video, 14 min, and three art objects by Mark Titchner, Shezad Dalwood and Jeremy MillarGift of the artist and Outset Contemporary Art Fund 2011.

Karen Russo Meditations on a Triangle 2010, is comprised of a video and a three art objects. It explores the application of Remote Viewing (RV) the psychic ability to see and describe remote geographical locations, or ‘targets’ to the exploration of outer space. The video work centres around an attempt by a Remote Viewer to psychically access an undisclosed target using only a set coordinates as a reference. During the Viewing, the Remote Viewer’s impressions were documented and then delivered to three artists: Mark Titchner, Shezad Dawood and Jeremy Millar, whose different practices address questions of religion and spirituality, para-psychology and mysticism and their relation to ideas of modernism. Russo asked these artists to create new works based on the visual descriptions provided or respond to the process. In their responses, each artist freely projects its own preoccupations and interests.

The Next Big Thing, 2010 Humbrol enamel on board, 147.5 x 198 x 5cm

George Shaw“The Next Big Thing forms part of what has become a series of paintings of landmarks no longer there. The pile of rubble is all that remains of a pub called ‘The Hawthorn Tree’. The pub itself appears in a painting of mine from 1999 called ‘The Hawthorn Tree’, and also as a ruin in a painting called ‘The Age of Bullshit’ in 2010. The pub sat in the Tile Hill Estate, and I went there frequently with my dad. Neither the pub nor my dad are here anymore. The land is now a housing estate of it’s own.”

Pavement Pulse RAL1016, 2011 powder coated aluminium, 150 x 275 cm

DJ Simpson DJ Simpson’s series of work made in metal combine the industrial process of powder coating with the hand folding of thin aluminium sheets. Like earlier works in laminated sheet materials, normally plywood, Simpson focuses on the qualities and behaviours of materials and material processes.

As written by John Chilver, Simpson’s practice combines “a sense of intimacy with a certain industrial facticity. Simpson’s reflection on material processes takes place in dialogue with modern painting. His completed works (as well as a number of necessary uncompleted or rejected experiments) are the fruits of these reflections.”

John Stezaker

Psycho Montage III (The Mirror), 1978 collage, 2 parts each: 41.5 x 59.3cmGift of the artist 2011

“The pair of collages subtitled ‘The Mirror’ belongs to a series based on stills from Alfred Hitchcock’s film ‘Psycho’, (entitled ‘Psychomontage’). The pair of collages addresses the moment in which Marrion’s sister (her narrative double), while searching for her sister, encounters a reflection of herself in the mirror of the dresser in the mysterious house on the hill. It is the moment of shock encounter with the doppelganger. The series proceeds as a series of splits starting with ‘Psychomontage I and II’ (The View/The Window). In the third (The Mirror) the split becomes a pair of collages. The remaining series follows other spaces of transition within the home or domestic space; the door, the bed. The series as a whole is a homage to Hitchcock’s montage technique,

as well as to Bachelard’s ‘poetics of space’. I wanted to adopt the images that Hitchcock used to create a sinister sense of domestic space, but put them to the service of Bachelardian reverie.”

Drunken Bellarmine, 2012 wood, acrylic, oak tray frame, 174 x 124 x 6cm

Toronto Cycle #20 Cadence and Discord (PCPCJDI), Traer los Sentidos oil on canvas, 179 x 152cm

Renee So

Jon Thompson

Renee So works with ceramic and wool, creating sculptural and knitted portraits that suggest a multiplicity of lineages and styles. Common to the ceramic and textile works is the image of a luxuriously bearded man. The title of this work Drunken Bellarmine gives a signpost to the origins of this image. In late sixteenth century Holland, stoneware jars for wine and ales were made bearing an image of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. Bellarmine was a fierce opponent of the Dutch reformed church, and protestants wishing to insult him did so by smashing the jars.

Continuing his Toronto Cycle series the paintings with the collective title Cadence and Discord (Traer los Sentidos) are layered with references. Referring at once to the musical theories of Glenn Gould and the notion of the sublime in the writings of St Ignatius Loyola.

Cadence and Discord are terms equally applicable to aural and visual tonality. They can be perceived as essential to the fractures and assemblies that bring a painting to a successful conclusion. While engaged with the musical analogies, each one of these paintings also draws upon the palette and colour structures of a different artist, ranging from Giotto to Gaugin, Caulfield to Cezanne. In this instance the connection is to Patrick Caulfield, Paul Cezanne and Jean Dominique Ingres.

Co-owned by Arts Council Collection, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund Collecting Cultures and facilitated and supported by the Contemporary Art Society.

Jane and Louise Wilson

Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard, 2000 four screen video installation, Edition 3 of 4, 6 minutes 50 seconds Commissioned by The Bohen Foundation, New York

Unfolding the Aryan Papers, 2009 single screen video installation, Edition 2 of 4, 17 minutes 48 seconds Commissioned by Animate Projects and the BFI, London

Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard, 2000 is based on a journey the artists made in August 2000 to the Russian Cosodrome at Baikconur in Kazakstan. The film concentrates on the three main launch sites that belong to the Russian Space Agency, and the Russian Military. The first site is for Proton Rockets, the second for all the manned space missions Soyuz Rockets, or Unity in English, and the final site is an abandoned site that was formerly used to launch the rocket. Energia or Energy and the Russian Space Shuttle Buran or Blizzard. Filming also took place in a Kazak religious site close to the Cosmodrome.

Unfolding the Aryan Papers, 2009 was produced in response to an Animate

commission to make an animation/film to be shown online. Jane and Louise Wilson were given access to the Stanley Kubrick archive at the London College of Communications. This involved a 10 day visit to the Kubrick Archive during which time the artists became most interested in the photographic and written/script research for a film that Kubrick never made. The film was to have been called

“Aryan Papers”.

Hippo Campus is a self portrait of the artist as a young boy asleep on a school bus trip in France, adapted from a photograph taken by a young girl making fun of him. The work is black and white, with a landscape (and the past) whizzing beside him. This treated image captures an uncanny moment of the artist, looking from the present, at a dreaming, unconscious boy with his future ahead of him.

Bedwyr Williams

Hippo Campus, 2010 Giclee print on German Etching Paper, 88.5 x 64.5cm

Lynette Yiadom-BoakyeHer subjects, mostly black, are bold, often confronting the viewer with a direct gaze. Speaking of her subjects the artist says:

“Although they are not real I think of them as people known to me. They are imbued with a power of their own; they have a resonance – something emphatic and other-worldly. I admire them for their strength, their moral fibre. If they are pathetic, they don’t survive; if I feel sorry for someone, I get rid of them. I don’t like to paint victims”. In a departure from previous bodies of work, the figures are sometimes shown in a landscape, exploring or scanning the horizon. The paintings evoke a narrative that is for the viewer to reconstruct.

Condor and The Mole, 2011 oil on canvas, 230 x 250cm (cover image)

L’Ortolan, 2011 oil on canvas, 95 x 85cm

Bettina von Zwehl

No.6 from Profiles III, 2005-2006 c-type print, Edition 1 of 5 + 1AP, 155.6 x 125.2cm

In Bettina von Zwehl’s series Profiles III, one year-old babies are photographed in an instant of alertness and total concentration. Depicted in profile and three times larger than life size, they appear almost monumental.

“As an artist I am drawn to the intensity of the resulting image and the descriptive power of the format. My work is an ongoing enquiry into the possibilities of portraiture and its fine nuances. With each series, I aim to depict psychological states in everyday life using controlled conditions to search for some note of perfect balance in which the sense of an intimate humanity might be revealed.”

The Arts Council Collection is based at Southbank Centre, London and at Longside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield. For further information about the Arts Council Collection please visit artscouncilcollection.org.uk Loans from the Collection are generally free of charge. Where exceptional curatorial or technical support is required a small fee may be charged to cover administration, preparation and installation costs. To enquire about borrowing work from the Arts Council Collection, email loans@southbankcentre.co.uk

Cover: Lynette Yiadom-BoakyeCondor and The Mole, 2011

All images © the artist