St Paul’s and the City |
Lifting the Lid on Art | City
Merchants | The Tube |
Winter | Imagine |
Terry Scales | The Queen in
the City | Looking down on the City of
London | The City's Insignia |
The Wapping Group of Artists |
Julian Perry | Painters
in Paradise | David Tress |
Cities at War |
Stalagmites | Art &
Language | Geoffrey Fletcher's City Sights
| Nelson - risk taker | Pair
a Picture
Pair a Picture
15 March – 8 April 2006
Sponsored by Barclays Bank, Kambani Artsis hosting Pair A Picture, a
comparative exhibition of contemporary African art and historic
British art at Guildhall Art. Three schools have also been invited
to take part in a creative writing project based around the
exhibition; Richard Cloudesley, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and
Grazebrook Primary School. The children were asked to pair a
picture from each collection to create their written piece.
Kambani Arts’ mission is to alleviate the poverty of its African
artists, mainly students from an impoverished arts sector. Through
exhibitions like Pair A Picture, Kambani hopes to highlight their
plight and champion a message of hope that will help to introduce
some young African talent into the contemporary art scene.
Film footage of the exhibition launch on Wednesday 15 March was
used for Kambani’s BBC Africa 05 legacy documentary. The
documentary was produced to demonstrate the positive impact the
BBC’s Africa 05 season had on local African lives.
For more detailed information about the exhibition, visit the
Kambani website:
www.kambani.com.
Nelson - risk taker
18 October - 2 January 2006
Lloyd’s, the world’s leading specialist insurance market, has
been insuring maritime risks for three centuries and in
collaboration with the Gallery, it will be presenting a collection
of letters, silverware and artefacts relating to Lord Nelson which
vividly recall his naval victories and his links to Lloyd’s.
This is also the first time that this collection will appear in
the public domain. One particularly rare item is a complete set of
Lord Nelson’s seven signatures marking key moments in his life.
Nelson changed his signature several times during his lifetime, the
most notable being losing his right arm in 1797. The Lloyd’s Nelson
Collection Exhibition will give enthusiasts the chance to see all
seven signatures together for the first time. The exhibition will
return to Lloyd’s as a permanent feature after going on display at
the Guildhall Art Gallery.
Geoffrey Fletcher’s City Sights
16 June to 28 August 2005
Geoffrey Fletcher, who died last year, was an artist with a
passion for London, whose drawings and books opened up an
unfamiliar and offbeat view of London for his legions of
admirers.
Between 1962 and 1990 he wrote and illustrated no less than
eighteen books about London, starting with his famous The
London Nobody Knows. Readers became familiar with his
enthusiasm for gas lamps, Edwardian tea rooms, cast iron lavatories
and crumbling terraces. His appealing drawings and highly personal
texts were a brilliant combination, so much so that ‘Geoffrey
Fletcher’s London’ became a recognised form of description.
Many fans of Fletcher’s London first encountered his work in the
pages of The Daily Telegraph, to which he contributed drawings and
articles for nearly three decades. Often these drawings drew
attention to buildings facing demolition in the wave of
redevelopments of the 1960’s and 70’s, and they became an
influential weapon for the conservation lobby.
The Guildhall Art Gallery exhibition is based on drawings held
by the adjacent Guildhall Library and concentrates on Geoffrey
Fletcher’s work in the ‘Square Mile’ of the City of London.
Art & Language
‘Now They Are
Surrounded’
6 April – 4 September 2005
Art & Language [sic] was among the originators of
the Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The
name now designates the practical artistic work of Michael Baldwin
and Mel Ramsden, who are joined by Charles Harrison for literary
and theoretical projects.
Organised in collaboration with London Metropolitan University,
Now They Are Surrounded consists of a single work produced
by Art & Language especially for Guildhall Art Gallery. It
comprises 144 images of texts, written by Art & Language, that
seem to have been damaged and repaired with sticky tape, now old
and faded. These will be distributed throughout the Gallery, placed
around and between paintings from our own collection. The texts
will appear almost as gallery labels – as some kind of
'information' about the collection. The question Art & Language
pose through this work is 'What internality or autonomy – if any –
could survive this masquerade? In an institutional world of
pictures, might texts that are pictures of texts invite cultural
reflection of a kind that pictures can no longer achieve, and to
which interventions made in other media – on other cultural and
technical terms – are simply indifferent?’
See the online catalogue of the exhibition here. Art
& Language are represented by
Lisson
Gallery, who will also be holding an exhibition of new work and
historic and performance documentation from 11 May to 2 July ‘Hard
to Say When’.
Lisson Gallery
52-54 and 29 Bell Street
London NW1 5DA
Tel 020 7724 2739
Fax 020 7724 7124
In connection with the exhibition, London Metropolitan
University is holding a symposium at Guildhall on 28 and 29 June,
to continue the discussions from What Work Does the Art Work
Do?, held at Unit 2, London Metropolitan University, in 2003.
The new symposium will consider the extent to which the art work is
characterised by complexity — either internal or contextual,
relational, and institutional: the problems and potential of
description.
For details, please contact Chris Smith
Email
Tel +44 (0)20 7320 1950
Hans van Koolwijk - Stalagmites -
Mixed Media
22 June – 15 July 2005
Roman Amphitheatre, underneath Guildhall Art Gallery
As part of the City of London Festival, Dutch artist Hans van
Koolwijk brings his sound sculpture Stalagmites to the
wonderful Roman Amphitheatre underneath Guildhall Art Gallery.
Van Koolwijk (1952) is fascinated by sound: primordial sounds
that you can hear and feel. For him sound is “substance” and he
builds instruments to his own design that explore his theory. Since
graduating from both the Dutch Royal and the State Academy for
Visual Arts in 1987, he has positioned himself in the space between
visual art and music and his pieces have been show in concert
venues such as the Ijsbreker in Amsterdam and the MACBA museum in
Barcelona.
Rising from the earth and from silence, Stalagmites
grow from nothing to create tone and movement in harmony, a
glorious moment of motionless rich sound and then the inevitable
melancholy of release. The piece was first shown in the Postojna
Caves for the World Music Days of International Society of
Contemporary Music in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2003.
Cities at War: Photographs of
Moscow and Leningrad 1941 – 1945
12 May - 12 June 2005
Marking the 60th anniversary of VE Day and the Russian
contribution to the Allied victory this exhibition of photographs
from the archives of the Russian News & Information Agency
Novosti (RIA-Novosti) will be held at the Guildhall Art Gallery in
London from 12 May to 12 June 2005.
Entitled ‘Cities at War’, the exhibition comprises photographs
of Russia’s two major cities, Moscow and Leningrad (now St
Petersburg) from both a civilian and military perspective. Most of
the photographs, retrieved from the Moscow archives of the Soviet
Information Bureau (RIA-Novosti’s wartime predecessor), have never
been shown in the UK.
Images include Muscovites building the barricades to defend
their city, the Germans already close enough to see the Kremlin
through binoculars, and horrifying scenes of the siege of Leningrad
when more than 640,000 people died from the effects of cold and
hunger. There are two photographs of the ‘Road of Life’, a road
built on the frozen Lake Ladoga which saved the city in the winter
of 1941-2 – one showing horse-drawn sledges making the hazardous
crossing across the ice, and another of fully laden trucks making
their way over the melting surface.
Many of the photographs are of women – building the defences for
their cities; sewing military overcoats, working in munitions
factories, growing cabbages in the centre of Leningrad, huddled in
the vast and beautiful underground railway stations that, like
London, were used as air raid shelters, on air raid watch on the
cities’ rooftops.
There are photographs of battalions of soldiers marching across
Red Square during the legendary 7 November parade in 1941, heading
directly for the front line only a few miles away; the famous
Hermitage Museum, stripped of its fabulous collection of pictures;
the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow with its fantastic camouflage of
trees and greenery.
The photographs are a powerful testimony to the desperate
struggle for survival of Russia’s two greatest cities. They are
moving – often harrowing – images of the bravery of its citizens –
culminating in the celebrations on 9 May, sixty years ago.
David Tress - Paintings and
Drawings of London
10 January – 6 March 2005
David Tress is best known as a semi-abstract painter of the
rugged and barren landscape of West Wales , but Guildhall Art
Gallery opens the year with an exhibition of 30 of his paintings
and drawings of London, made between 2001 and 2004.
David Tress was born in London in
1955 and studied at Harrow School of Art and at Trent
Polytechnic. However, since 1976 he has lived in West Wales,
where the coastline and the Preseli Hills, with their iron age
earthworks and burial cairns, provide the inspiration for much
of his work.
Tress’s paintings and drawings are characterised by a bold and
vigorous application of paint and other media, a rich mix of
colours, and surfaces that are often scraped and scarred with a
knife. Drawings may be cut up and reassembled, and collaged pieces
painted over, to create a powerful sense of atmosphere and the
turbulent forces of nature. This is no less true of his London
paintings and drawings than of his semi-abstract landscapes. Tress
returns to London once or twice a year, but his London works are
more about his memories and experiences of growing up here than
direct representations of the city.
David Tress has exhibited in Wales,
England, Ireland, France, Holland and America. His works are
held by public collections which include The National Museum
of Wales, The Contemporary Art Society for Wales and the
National Library of Wales. His work has been widely reviewed
in newspapers and magazines (eg The Independent 16
March 2001, Modern Painters summer 1997) and on
television. In 1999 Tress was one of forty-eight British
artists and designers chosen by the Royal Mail to design the
Millennium special issue of stamps, and in 2002 the Gorman
Press in association with the West Wales Arts Centre published
a book on him by Clare Rendell with an introduction by John
Russell Taylor.
Guildhall Art Gallery’s exhibition
is based on a current touring exhibition organised by the West
Wales Arts Centre, Fishguard, supplemented by additional
works. Many of the works are available for purchase, and
details of how to contact the artist are available from the
Gallery’s front desk. Please note that the exhibition dates
have been extended beyond those previously advertised.
David Tress’s landscapes can also be seen at the
Boundary
Gallery, 98 Boundary Road , London NW8 0RH , from 14 January to
12 February, while the touring exhibition will be at the West Wales
Arts Centre from May 7 to June 11.
Painters in Paradise:
an exhibition of Bermuda landscapes from the Masterworks
Bermudiana Foundation
17 November – 9 January 2005
Historic and contemporary links
between the City of London and Bermuda are the background to
an exhibition of lyrical beauty at Guildhall Art Gallery
between 17 November and 9 January. More than sixty oils and
watercolours of Bermuda’s people and her colourful
sub-tropical landscape are coming to London for the first time
from the collection of the Masterworks Foundation, established
in Bermuda in 1987 to reveal its artistic heritage and to
collect works by the many local and visiting artists who have
been inspired by its coral sands and whitewashed houses.
Within only thirteen years the Foundation has traced and
acquired for the Bermudian people more than one thousand
paintings and drawings. It is currently building a new Museum
to conserve and exhibit these works and to house its already
well-developed educational programmes. . Five successful
exhibitions drawn from the Masterworks collection have been
held in recent years in North America, but this is the first
time any of its works have been seen in Europe.
Bermuda is Britain's oldest colony,
established in 1612. It was once known as ‘the Devil’s Island’
because of its storms and the coral reefs on which more than
40 ships are thought to have been wrecked. Although discovered
by the Spanish in the 16th century, it was not until Admiral
Sir George Somers was shipwrecked on it in 1609 that its
potential as a colony was realised. Somers had been en route
to the beleaguered colony of Virginia with supplies and new
colonists when his ship, the Sea Venture, foundered on the
reef. All aboard reached the shore in safety and spent ten
months enjoying Bermuda’s temperate climate while they
constructed two new vessels of Bermuda cedarwood and wreckage
from the Sea Venture. When Somers eventually rejoined the rest
of the expedition, instead of hostile natives and disease, he
had an exciting story to tell of a beautiful, unpopulated and
welcoming land. The story received much publicity at home in
England, and Shakespeare based his play ‘The Tempest’ on it.
Three years after Somers rediscovered it, the Virginia Company
of London financed the first settlers on Bermuda. Both it and,
later, the Bermuda Company which ran the young colony were
financed with City money.
Bermuda’s location subsequently made it of strategic importance
in times of war, while in times of peace it has offered a warm and
tranquil welcome for visitors from around the globe. Almost 400
years since it was first settled, Bermuda’s leading status in the
world of finance and insurance still links it inextricably with the
City of London, the financial capital of Europe.
Painters in Paradise
celebrates not only these links, but also Bermuda’s
quincentenary next year (it was first mentioned by the Spanish
in 1505). The exhibition is a revelation of the way that
Bermuda’s subtropical climate, her pastel coloured
architecture, coral sands and brilliant blue seas have
inspired, and still inspire, local and visiting artists alike.
The general art lover will find a world of warmth and colour
in these pictures. Other visitors will discover with surprise
the well known and significant artists who have painted in
Bermuda, from Winslow Homer at the beginning of the 20th
century to the American modernists Charles Demuth and Marsden
Hartley, from Georgia O’Keefe to Jack Bush, from British
painter Vivien John in 1939 to abstract painter Jennifer
Bartlett (American but trained in England), and right at the
millennium the very first winner of the Turner Prize, Malcolm
Morley.
Painters in Paradise is accompanied by a fully
illustrated catalogue with a foreword by the Masterworks
Foundation’s patron HRH The Prince of Wales.
The Wapping Group of Artists:
Reflections of London and the River
4 - 28 November 2004
The Wapping Group of Artists was founded in 1946 to record the
life and landscape of the River Thames between Rotherhithe and the
Pool, then a busy commercial port. Over almost sixty years the
Group’s members – always self-limited to twenty-five - have
chronicled the river’s diverse and changing nature, from the age of
spritsail barges, steam tugs and square riggers to that of the
hovercraft, from working wharves and warehouses to executive flats.
The longest-established artists’ society still to meet regularly to
paint together on the spot, today the ‘Wappers’ venture as far as
Henley in the West to the Essex and Kent coasts to the East.
Reflections of London and the River includes atmospheric
paintings of Rotherhithe, Greenwich, Wapping and the Tower, but
also of riverfront subjects at Faversham, Maldon and elsewhere.
The City of London’s art collection at Guildhall Art Gallery
includes several works by past and present member of the Group,
many of whom have been or are still also members of the Royal
Society of Marine Artists. The RSMA held a number of its annual
exhibitions in the old Guildhall Art Gallery, while the Wapping
Group itself exhibited for many years at the Royal Exchange. We are
delighted now to welcome the ‘Wappers’ back to the City.
Most of the paintings included in Reflections of London and
the River will be for sale, giving Gallery visitors the
opportunity to acquire a unique and beautiful work of art, either
for themselves or as an early Christmas present!
Julian Perry: Testament: The Epping
Forest Paintings
8 September – 21 November 2004
This autumn Guildhall Art Gallery, in collaboration with Austin
Desmond Fine Art, presents the City’s first major public show of
landscape paintings by Julian Perry: Testament.
More than thirty paintings form an extraordinary portrait of
Epping Forest creating a testament both to its rich and varied past
and to its continuing significance for the future.
Testament is a two year Arts
Council-supported project to paint works inspired by the
forest. Perry’s research reveals strange and astonishing
features of the forest, both historical and ephemeral, ancient
and contemporary. The exhibition unveils the marks left by
history, preserved in the landscape, from Henry VIII’s
dissolution of the monasteries to the 1878 Act that
transferred the forest to the City of London and ensured its
protection forever.
Perry’s paintings remind us that extraordinary and distant
events leave traces in the most unexpected of ways; that the
landscape is filled with clues not only to past lives, but to the
way we live now.
Leading art critic, William Feaver says, “Julian Perry explores
Epping Forest with sharp eyes, deft appreciation and a wide range
of reference. His paintings bring imaginative perspective to bear
on the historic woodland, and most memorably, individual
trees.”
Julian Perry has an established reputation for his enigmatic
East London landscapes: The Museum of London, London Transport
Museum and Guildhall Art Gallery collections all hold examples.
St
Paul’s and the City
17 February – 18 October 2004
Marking the 1,400th anniversary of the Diocese of London, a new
exhibition exploring how artists have interpreted the diocesan
cathedral of St Paul over the centuries is taking place at
Guildhall Art Gallery. Running until 18 October 2004, the
exhibition celebrates this famous landmark, an emotive symbol of
the City of London - of which St Paul is the patron saint.
Comprising paintings, watercolours, prints, drawings and
manuscripts drawn from the City of London’s own collections
alongside rarely seen examples from the Cathedral’s own
collections, the exhibition includes the following highlighs:
- An original drawing from Christopher Wren's office
- A historical introduction to Old St Paul’s burnt in the Great
Fire, and to the rebuilding by Wren between 1675 and 1710.
- The 13th century 'Doomsday of St Paul's’
- An account of expenditure on rebuilding works, October 1696 -
September 1697, with Grinling Gibbons's signature against payment
for his carving in the Cathedral
- Seldom seen paintings and drawings of St Paul’s at War,
including David Shepherd’s evocative December 29 1940 – Again
tonight
Read the press release
Lifting
the Lid on Art
2 February – 5 September 2004
A variety of different kinds of paintings designed to get you
thinking about art. How do artists choose a technique or style to
get their idea across?
Supported by specially written worksheets, the pictures have
been specially selected to illustrate some of the main principles
such as – art as a language, making art (including the use of
texture, pattern, colour, line and tone) and considering the use of
shape, form and space in art.
Educational visits
Lifting the Lid on Art explores the National Curriculum
topic of understanding and communicating the language of art. The
display also ties in with other areas of the National Curriculum
including History and English Key Stages 1 & 2 and movements in
art for Key Stage 3 Art.
Groups
Educational groups receive free admission to Lifting the Lid on
Art. An Education Pack including specially devised worksheets has
been produced to accompany the exhibition which is priced at £20.
If you would like to arrange a visit and/or request an Education
Pack, please download and complete the form below.
The Lifting
the Lid on Art book, which accompanies the exhibition, is
available from the online City of London shop. It is also
available to buy if you visit the Gallery Shop
Lifting the Lid schools booking form (12kb)
City Merchants
1670 -1720 - 20
April - 22 August 2004
This exhibition accompanies the ground
breaking book ‘City Merchants and the Arts 1670-1720’, which
examines the lives and aspirations of the City’s merchant
elite after the Great Fire of London and challenges
traditional perceptions of the philistine man of business.
London’s regeneration after the Fire is revealed in the
exhibition through maps and plans, topographical views and
portraits, and detailed prints and drawings of the houses
which individual merchants built for themselves.
The Tube
1 - 31 May 2004
The Gallery is celebrating MGM 2004's theme – The Art of Travel
- with an exhibition of work from Tony Phillips’ project, The
Tube.
The artwork, mainly pen-and-wash
drawings, uses the London Underground as a structure around
which to express the idea of the complexity of the city. The
cultural diversity, the layers of history, the economic and
political significance, and the sheer magnitude of London,
present a character at once expansive, dense, and subtle. The
unifying logic of the Tube has been chosen as a device around
which to visually suggest this complexity.
The pen-and-wash drawings in the
exhibition are in two groups. One reflects travellers on the
Tube with a general assortment of imagery drawn from
contemporary London life. The other is a series in which, one
by one, the exterior views of the Tube stations on the
Northern Line, are featured as a backdrop to a variety of
little human dramas. These episodes are the first part of a
sequence which will eventually form a book including all the
stations on the Northern Line, in an attempt to characterize
the diversity of London life.
Winter at Guildhall Art
Gallery
28 November 2003 - 1 February 2004
Paintings, prints and drawings with a seasonal theme, from the
collections of Guildhall Art Gallery and Guildhall Library’s Print
Room.
Imagine - interactive
exhibition
25 October – 16 November 2003
Imagine all the places stories can take you...
Imagine is a special interactive exhibition which explores the
relationship between art, stories and the imagination, bringing
pictures to life with a wide range of fun activities.
Terry Scales – Homage to the
Working Thames
3 May - 15 June 2003
Artist Terry Scales has lived by the Thames all his life and has
devoted his painting career to exploring and recording the river’s
life and livelihoods. In this reflective exhibition, spanning more
than fifty years of work, he explores the ever-changing life of the
River Thames.
Charting the enormous changes that have taken place in London’s
Docklands in the last half century, the exhibition ranges from dark
and moving drawings made in the early 1950s to the bright and
cheerful paintings of bustling Greenwich and Bankside today.
The Queen in
the City
5 June - 1 December 2002
To celebrate Her Majesty the Queen's Golden Jubilee, nine large
paintings and numerous photographs and other material record the
visits she has paid to the City of London over more than sixty
years.
The earliest painting depicts her in 1935 as a little girl at
King George V's Jubilee Thanksgiving Service at St Paul's
Cathedral.
Looking Down on
the City of London - drawings from the tops of City churches
by Michael Heindorff
19 September - 17 November 2002
Michael Heindorff has long been fascinated with views from high
places. This exhibition comprised 30 specially-made drawings of the
views from the highest points of a selection of City churches. To
provide a historical context, a number of 17th century and later
engraved panoramic views lent by
Guildhall Library accompanied the display.
The
City's Insignia
27 July - 1 September 2002
The Lord Mayor's Collar of SS, the Sword of State, the Pearl
Sword and the Crystal Sceptre whose origins are shrouded in mystery
are among the fragile and beautiful objects which mark the
office of Lord Mayor . Also on display were the Fire Cup - the
only piece of plate to have been saved from the Guildhall before
the Great Fire reached it in 1666 - and the medieval Crystal
Sceptre, whose origins are shrouded in mystery.
Current exhibitions
Forthcoming exhibitions