HUSSEIN CHALAYAN
Sep 8 - Oct 2, 2010

CARMEN HERRERA
Feb 1 - Apr 3, 2012
A survey show of works from the 1940’s to the present day, including new works. Cuban artist Carmen Herrera was born in 1915. She moved frequently between France and her homeland in Cuba throughout the 1930s and 40s, before finally settling in New York in 1954. Despite the visionary nature of her work and association with artists of great reputation, including Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith, Herrera’s paintings were the subject of few exhibitions, until a large-scale survey at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 2009. This story of neglect was familiar to many women artists of her generation who emerged during the post-war years. Herrera’s work is characterised with reference to the lineage of modernist abstraction, particularly Latin American nonrepresentational concrete painting, thus establishing a cross-cultural dialogue within this international tradition. At the heart of Herrera’s work is a striking formal simplicity and attention to colour. Devoid of any referential aspects, her paintings combine line, form and space to convey an intense physicality.
press release

DAN GRAHAM : PAVILIONS
Mar 21 - Apr 28, 2012
Dan Graham's work questions the relationship between architecture and its psychological effects on us and remains as poignant today as it did in the late 1960's when Graham first began to investigate the relationship between architectural environments and those who inhabit them. His work continues to investigate the voyeuristic act of seeing oneself reflected, while at the same time watching others. This overlay of experience creates a focused dual perception amid a changing environment and / or audience. Dan Graham has described the broad practice of his work as "geometric forms inhabited and activated by the presence of the viewer, [producing] a sense of uneasiness and psychological alienation through a constant play between feelings of inclusion and exclusion."
press release

RICHARD DEACON
May 11 - Jun 23, 2012
Richard Deacon has been a leading figure in British sculpture since the 1980s. His consistently innovative use of form and his interest in materials and their manipulation make him one of the most inventive artists of our time. Throughout his career, Deacon has worked with a diverse range of materials including laminated wood, polycarbonate, leather cloth, stainless steel and clay. In a recent interview he explains: "changing materials from one work to the next is a way of beginning again each time (and thus of finishing what had gone before)." (Deacon, 2005) His hand-built ceramic works are inspired by the simple gestures of how the material reacts to methods of construction and manipulation, where hollowing, carving, piling and squashing become techniques in themselves. His constructions are often of unexpected scale, ranging from the domestic to the monumental.

JULIAN OPIE
Jul 11 - Aug 18, 2012
Julian Opie is one of the most significant artists of his generation whose artistic preoccupation has investigated the idea of representation and the means by which images are perceived and understood. Throughout his practice, Opie has developed his own reductive formal language which seeks to reflect, not reality itself, but rather the way in which reality is represented: his distinctive language of discipline and formal consistency which is employed in his current portrait and landscape work. Drawing from influences as diverse as billboard signs, classical portraiture and sculpture, to classical Japanese woodblock prints, Opie 'paints' using a variety of media and technologies which enable him to make three-dimensional explorations of his subjects.

ANISH KAPOOR
Sep 19 - Nov 3, 2012
Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. Born in Bombay, he has lived and worked in London since the early 70's. Kapoor sees his work as being engaged with deep-rooted metaphysical polarities; presence and absence, being and non-being, place and non-place and the solid and the intangible. Throughout Kapoor's sculptures his fascination with darkness and light is apparent; the translucent quality of the resin works, the absorbent nature of the pigment, the radiant glow of alabaster and the fluid reflections of stainless steel and water. Through this interplay between form and light, Kapoor aspires to evoke sublime experiences, which address primal physical and psychological states.

TONY CRAGG
Nov 21, 2012 - Jan 12, 2013
The manipulation of materials into forms and images that offer new experiences and insights lies at the heart of Tony Cragg's sculptural practice. His outlook is marked by an interest in analyzing the relations between materials, science and the body. This scientific method of analysis is however not mathematical but organic, based on the interaction between the material and the human body. Cragg's oeuvre centres around two bodies of research: Early Forms and Rational Beings. Cragg described the Early Forms as 'forms changing along an axis bilaterally curved with a simple profile'. These works explore the possibilities of distortion based on everyday objects such as vases or bottles. As the artist moves, the material is moved too, resulting in a sort of three-dimensional morphing. The sculptures belonging to the body of Rational Beings start from the outlines of a human gesture or profile. Their principal development is vertical, emphasizing their origin as non-objectual but anthropomorphic.