AN ARTIST is holding her second solo exhibition in Coventry, telling a story familiar to many young women.
Katie O’s exhibition Minor Malfunctions, Psychology of the Machine, is on show at The Lock at the Canal Warehouse beside the Canal Basin. It tells the story of a young girl setting out through life, beset with worries and indecisions, feeling scared by the – in this work – scary monster looming over her, and then here getting some guidance from the friendly robot. Dreams seem out of reach, life is empty and she wonders if it will ever change.
Author: Julie Chamberlain
Coventry and Warwickshire offer the best in big-name art shows
Paula Rego, The Bride’s Secret Diary, Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, Rugby Borough Council © Paula Rego
THIS spring the London art world features a host of big-name exhibitions – but you can avoid the crowds and still see some excellent works in the Coventry and Warwickshire area.
In London, you can be sure to be in a big crowd seeing exhibitions of works by David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Damien Hirst, Yayoi Kusama, and shortly the Bauhaus design exhibition.
But at Compton Verney there’s lesser-known Gainsborough landscapes on show, plus in Into the Light great works by Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Monet, Whistler, Pisarro and lots more great artists. And although you pay to get in, there’s also the great permanent collection, with the naïve art on the top floor offering lots of treats.
Rugby Art Gallery and Museum has all the fantastic Rugby Collection on show for the first time, 175 items, including a good selection of women artists – Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Prunella Clough, Maggi Hambling – and other well-known names such as Leon Kossoff, Bryan Wynter, Graham Sutherland and Lucian Freud. It would be mad to miss it. (see a full review in the Coventry Telegraph on May 4)
Coventry City’s day of glory lives on in The Herbert’s exhibition
SO today the Coventry City football season ended fairly ignominiously, but in The Herbert fans were still wandering around reliving the club’s most glorious day.
The largest exhibition on at the Coventry city centre gallery at the moment is From Highfield Road to Wembley Way, celebrating the Cup victory 25 years ago. There are pictures of all the team, as they are now, and a brief biog mostly stating what they’re now up to which is fascinating.
There’s the story of how Coventry reached the final, and lots of cabinets of memorabilia from the time, including the Coventry Evening Telegraph front page about the victory, and some bizarre items, such as a knitted set of all the players!
Fans are invited to write down their memories and put them up on the wall along with any pictures from the time. There’s some great reminiscences and some amusing 1980s looks in the photos. I wonder if the many fans for whom the day is a drunken blur now regret missing so much. For others it sounds like they had the time of their life.
Coventry City fans shouldn’t miss this one, and if some new visitors stop to have a look around the fantastic Coventry and Warwickshire watercolours exhibition, and the photos from Gaza in the Peace and Reconciliation Gallery that will be even better.
Compton Verney Gainsborough exhibition shows artist’s favourite landscapes
AN EXHIBITION of landscapes by an artist known for his portraits has revealed lots more varied work than Gainsborough is normally known for.
Gainsborough painted his 18th century portraits for a living, but apparently once said he was “sick of portraits” and wanted to paint landscapes “in quietness and ease”. The exhibition Gainsborough’s Landscapes: Themes and Variations at Compton Verney art gallery is the first for 50 years devoted to his landscapes, and brings together lots of works from public and private collections.
Architects’ space makes a great gallery
Coventry University art students are exhibiting their work in an interesting if hard-to-get-to space until the end of March.
The IDP Architects Practice in Spon Street, Coventry city centre, is in an old building which has incorporated some outdoor space into a spacious glass-fronted entrance and staircase area – you can see in from the street.
John Burns from the university’s School of Art and Design met some people who worked there while dining in Browns Independent Bar in the city centre, and the idea of using it to show students’ art grew from there.
John held an exhibition of some of his own work there last year, and now work by 40 students from the BA Illustration and Animation course has gone up on the brick walls.
Coventry University gets prime spot for new Lanchester Gallery Projects venue
Coventry’s newest and very prominent art gallery has opened with a conceptual exhibition which makes a statement about how it plans to progress.
The Lanchester Gallery has moved from inside Coventry University’s Graham Sutherland building, which houses the School of Art and Design, to a space on the front of The Hub in Jordan Well. In such an obvious position the pressure was on, and before this first exhibition, ÉVASION, opened there had been a week of near all-night work to get everything ready.
George Shaw and Graham Chorlton make New Art Gallery THE place to be
Above, Leytonstone 1995, 1999, 2012, by Laura Oldfield Ford
There is a Place…. where you can find works by six artists in a thematic show which brings together some great scenes of urban emptiness.
The New Art Gallery at Walsall is showing There is a Place…until April 14, and it’s a place well worth visiting.
Coventry-born George Shaw contributes both Humbrol-painted paintings, and more unusually, etchings, of Tile Hill. There’s a huge pile of rubble behind a fence, showing the end of a pub where his mother apparently once worked, and another empty space, and in The End of Time, a path leading to where a pub building once stood.
The 12 short walks are etchings of scenes from around the area, showing scenes that are becoming familiar if you’ve seen more of his paintings and watercolours – garages, bleak paths, but green tree-filled areas too, and poignantly fence posts with no fence in between. They’re small, detailed and show his versatility.
George Shaw’s even gettting written about in CAMRA’s Pint Sides
In the last year, George Shaw must have been written about in many places. But now he’s really made it – one of his works has been discussed in Pint Sides, the newsletter of the Coventry and North Warwickshire branch of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA).
It’s not your normal art criticism though. In Old Fred’s Corner, the writer says he spotted in a national paper in an article about the Turner Prize, a picture of a “derelict site that looked strangely familiar”. Of course this turned out to be a painting by George Shaw of a pub where he used to go.
Or, as ‘Fred’, told us, it was the Hawthorn Tree on Broad Lane, Lost Pubs No 36 in the Spring 2011 edition of Pint Sides.
Fred then goes on to reminisce about the history of the Hawthorn, the surrounding area and how it came to be lost, concluding “I must look out for more of Mr Shaw’s paintings of modern urban desolation”.
Luckily, the editor at this point tells us we can see the exhibition of George’s work at the Herbert until March 11, and I hope Fred has availed himself of this opportunity.
Ormeau Baths gallery closure a sad find on a good Belfast weekend
On my occasional trips away from Coventry, I like to see whatever exhibitions are on in the place I go to visit. Belfast is usually pretty reliable for a good selection but sadly not on my recent trip.
Turning up at the Ormeau Baths Gallery on Friday 13th was obviously a bad omen. The door was shut, boards were piled behind it and there was post inside the door. I had thought it was odd the website was out of date, but should have looked further – the gallery closed in October, blaming a reduction in income from sponsorship and corporate events, and a rise in costs.
It had shown exhibitions by Yoko Ono and Gilbert and George before, and a lot more obscure artists, and was a bit like the Ikon in Birmingham – an old brick building and big white spaces inside. It’s a sad lost to the Belfast art world.
First nights for Mead, LGP and Brink – you can join the party even if I can’t!
So January comes around and I’m looking forward to looking at paintings with a glass of wine in my hand, writing the odd note. Then what happens – on a weekend with three art show openings two of them coincide with long-arranged plans which mean I can’t get to either of them. Sigh.
But, YOU can still go along to all three and see for yourselves what’s on.
Private View II 