Tag: Nunnery Gallery

  • Bow Open Show – art review: ‘Exploring East London’s vast cultural history and identity’

    Bow Open Show – art review: ‘Exploring East London’s vast cultural history and identity’

    Photograph by Felicity McCabe of 11-year-old Ilhan Abdillahi Geel near Gargarra, Somaliland
    Photograph by Felicity McCabe of 11-year-old Ilhan Abdillahi Geel near Gargarra, Somaliland

    As a new summer of art gets underway, the Nunnery Gallery have brought back their annual show The Bow Open, featuring work from 24 innovative artists all belonging to the Bow Arts collective.

    This year’s eclectic offerings are curated by Anj Smith, an artist whose captivating – and often unnerving – detailed paintings weave the mystical with the everyday.

    The decisively topical exhibition plays with a wide range of mediums discussing issues of family, nationalism and gender to inventively explore East London’s vast cultural history and identity.

    Ladies and Gentlemen by Ryan Hodge
    Ladies and Gentlemen by Ryan Hodge

    No piece of work is entirely alike. An embroidered stretch of dazzling, chaotic silk and beads from Lizzie Cannon draws you in, while a metre away, Emily Whitebread’s audio What Is England chips away at the concept of patriotism with a series of disconnected but poignant spoken words connoting England.

    Looking further from home, Felicity McCabe’s photography, captures the dramatic and troubling effects of climate change in Somaliland, juxtaposing the image of a woman in bright clothing, blowing in the wind with a crooked, dead tree.

    Triptych by Michael Achtman
    Triptych by Michael Achtman

    Another fascinating journey is encapsulated in Michael Achtman’s triptych image as an accompaniment to his film April In The Country, following a blind woman’s trip to the Western Isles in search of her mother.

    Themes of gender and sexuality also take prominence in the exhibition. Ryan Hodge’s digital print Ladies and Gentlemen, offers a snapshot into transgender life struck through with lashings of shocking pink and Jaime Valtierra’s rich oil painting Not Always but Anytime peeks into the intricacies of female desire.

    There’s also recent St Martin’s graduate Mette Sterr, who says she’s interested in “blurring the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate”. This is certainly seen in her gothic photography, which on this occasion features an ageing mermaid staring gloomily through heavily made up eyes into the camera lens, with her man-made, costume tail trailing into the distance.

    Deeply personal and subtly provocative, the discursive pieces on show reveal not only the breadth of artistic talent available within one small space, but the shifting, eccentric character of the area itself. Expect more fruitful discussion and surprises with live performances, talks, and tempting gin cocktails set up for later this August.

    2016 Bow Open Show, Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ
    bowarts.org

    sssshhttt by Mette Sterre
    Sssshhttt by Mette Sterre
    Fictional Memory by Lauren Mele
    Fictional Memory by Lauren Mele
  • East London Painting Prize shortlist announced

    OMG I Love You by East London Painting Prize fainlist Marie Jacotey-Voyatzis
    OMG I Love You by East London Painting Prize fainlist Marie Jacotey-Voyatzis

    A shortlist of 23 artists has been announced for this year’s East London Painting Prize.

    Work by the artists is to go on show at Bow Arts Trust’s new artists’ studios The Rum Factory, a Grade II-listed former rum warehouse in Wapping that used to be part of News International’s printworks.

    The prize winner will announced on 13 May, and will receive £10,000 in cash and a solo exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow.

    The East London Painting Prize, now in its second year, celebrates the diversity and talent of artists who live or work in East London and is run by Bow Arts Trust and The Legacy List.

    Last year’s winner was Nathan Eastwood, whose winning painting, Nico’s Café, was an Edward Hopper-inspired image of an elderly man eating alone in a greasy spoon café.

    One of the judges Lizzie Neilson, Director of Zabludowicz Collection which supports the prize, said: “We had to be hard-nosed to get to this succinct group but I think there is a strength is showing the best of the best. Seeing these excellent paintings in the flesh was a fantastic experience and left me invigorated, as the breadth of painting practice in the East End of London is just staggering.”

    Rosamond Murdoch, Director of Bow Arts Trust’s Nunnery Gallery, added: “East London is a hotbed of talent and the painters shortlisted for this year’s prize are a distillation of that quality.”

    The shortlisted artists are:

    Hackney

    Michael Ajerman, Steven Allan, David Caines, Anna Freeman Bentley, Andrew Hladky, Kate Lyddon, Cathy Lomax, Lee Maelzer, Judith Rooze, Mimei Thompson

    Newham

    Peter Donaldson, Marie Jacotey-Voyatzis

    Redbridge

    Luke Rudolf

    Tower Hamlets

    Hannah Brown, Cyrus Shroff, Caroline Walker, Willem Weismann, Emily Wolfe, Vivien Zhang

    Waltham Forest

    Benjamin Doherty, Katrin Maeurich, David Ben White, Josephine Wood

  • Mary Barnes: Boo-Bah – art review

    Mary Barnes. Courtesy of Dr. J Berke
    Mary Barnes. Courtesy of Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop

    The Nunnery Gallery on Bow Road, hosting the first show of Mary Barnes’s artwork since the major 2010 retrospective at Space Studios, isn’t far from Kingsley Hall in Bromley-by-Bow, where Barnes spent 1965-1970 covering the walls with her paintings, using her own faeces and later grease crayons.

    Kingsley Hall was briefly home to anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s Philadelphia Association, which sought to provide spaces where people suffering from mental illness could live without being treated as insane. Barnes admitted herself in 1965.

    Laing contended that madness, rather than being an illness, was a reasonable response to chaos and injustice in society, with ‘anti-psychiatry’ in its more extreme forms coming to glamorise insanity, the mentally ill seen as exceptionally perceptive. Art was encouraged, both as ‘treatment’ and as a way of communicating such perceptions.

    “My first paintings were black breasts over the walls of the Hall,” wrote Barnes in 1969. “Joe gave me a tin of grease crayons. ‘Here, just scribble’. I did, on and on.” Joe – Joseph Berke, Barnes’s doctor at ‘the Hall’ – was also known to Barnes as ‘Boo-Bah’; the Nunnery show is named in his honour.

    Untitled by Mary Barnes, image courtesy Dr. J Berke, photo by Ollie Harrop
    Untitled by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop

    Barnes made and exhibited paintings until her death in 2001. Perhaps surprisingly, the Boo-Bah paintings are disciplined and composed. Small Figure, an early work, is made up of hurried, smudgy lines, but they are deployed deftly to reveal a little girl whose hunched awkwardness is expressive, moving and characterful, not clumsy.

    The row of colourful Untitled’s on the opposite wall bear similarly visible artefacts of their creation but their connected flow and intricacy of pattern have all it takes to trap a viewer’s stare.

    Barnes’s later works, done in oil pastels, have more solid blocks of colour and more figuration. They feature vividly drawn personages whose psychedelic colouring adds to their mystery, as though they were figures from an unknown religion.

    Small Figure by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke, photograph: Ollie Harrop
    Small Figure by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke, photograph: Ollie Harrop

    The exhibition is informative about the institutional origins of Barnes’s career and raises questions about untutored art, and art used as therapy. Do you look at Barnes’s paintings as symptoms of her illness or as one would a standard art-show? In this respect, some of anti-psychiatry’s eliding of distinctions is refreshing and brings clarity.

    ‘Outsider art’ – graffiti, ghost bikes, Christmas lights – is often more interesting and informative about contemporary culture than gallery shows. To see a suggestive blending of the one with the other, get thee to the Nunnery.

    A discussion of Barnes’s work, including Dr Joseph Berke on the panel, will be held at the Nunnery Gallery on 24 February.

    Mary Barnes: Boo-Bah is at Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ until 29 March
    www.bowarts.org/nunnery

    Volcanic Eruption by Mary Barnes, image courtesy of Dr. J Berke, photo by Ollie Harrop
    Volcanic Eruption by Mary Barnes. Image courtesy of Dr J. Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop

     

  • East London Painting Prize opens for entries

    Last year's winner: Nathan Eastwood collects his prize
    Last year’s winner: Nathan Eastwood collects his prize. Photograph: Bow Arts

    Applications for the East London Painting Prize are now open, giving East London artists the chance to win £10,000 and a solo exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow.

    Artists have until 8 March to submit their applications, with the prize open to both established and emerging artists of any age living or working in the boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Havering, Waltham Forest, Barking and Dagenham and Redbridge.

    Now in its second year, the East London Painting Prize aims to explore and celebrate the diversity in painting practices and different approaches to the medium.

    Last year’s winner was 41-year-old Nathan Eastwood, who said winning the prize had been a “huge boost”, allowing him to spend more time painting and producing new works.

    His winning painting, Nico’s Café, was an Edward Hopper-inspired image of an elderly man eating alone in his local greasy spoon café, in grey and white tones.
    Rosamond Murdoch, Gallery Director at the Nunnery, which is part of Bow Arts, said: “It’s never been harder to be an artist in London.

    This prize offers the chance for us to gather a world class panel of judges to select the best in contemporary painting today and challenge the art audiences of London.”

    The winner of the East London Painting Prize will be announced at a group exhibition featuring work from shortlisted artists to be held in East London this spring.

    www.bowarts.org/elpp

  • East London Painting Prize winner announced

    'Nico's Cafe' by Nathan Eastwood
    Winning painting: ‘Nico’s Cafe’ by Nathan Eastwood

    We all know how a prize works. Someone has to give it. Someone has to win. And then someone says thank you, and several more say thanks anyway. And the whole thing self-perpetuates thus.

    They’re fun for the judges and the winners alike –  quality is defined and rewarded, and for the weaker-willed among us, a gold standard is set. 

    But beyond that, who cares? One look at the East London Painting Prize exhibition catalogue left you wanting more of everything –  yet we’re left with just one winner.

    The shortlisted works – more than half of which come from Hackney painters –  were not, as the name suggests, a testament to East London as a place, but to a remarkable range of artists who happen to be based here.

    Among the finalists were images of a burqa-clad mother pushing a stroller in green-gloved hands, a woman with the face of a monkey clutching a tree, masterful plush country landscapes and several geometric abstractions. Cathy Lomax, director of Transition gallery, submitted a watercolour of a woman gazing hesitantly back through a half closed door, while Ben Jamie’s shortlisted work is an evening sun-lit landscape, complete with violet foliage and deep metallic blues. 

    The prize is awarded in the spirit of the East End-born painter and champion of emerging artists Jack Goldhill and in this, its inaugural year, the prize went to a documentation of the oft-unnoticed minutiae of a changing neighbourhood – its humanity defined and celebrated by the unremarkable incidents of everyday life.

    It began like this: 41 year-old painter Nathan Eastwood, who works from a studio on Cambridge Heath Road, stopped by his local greasy spoon for a “good solid lunch” of steak pie and mash, and snapped a covert photograph of an elderly man having a quiet meal alone, which was to become the winning painting, Nico’s Cafe – one of Eastwood’s many representations of “incidents of everyday life in East London,” he says. 

    The grey-and-white work is an homage to the café scenes of great American realist, Edward Hopper, but with malt vinegar and ketchup bottles instead of jaunty hats and coffee cups. And without the colour. Since finishing his MA, Eastwood has turned his back on pigment in favour of shades of black, white and grey. 

    As if describing a person, Eastwood describes his winning work as “very antagonistic. It was a real fight to get it the way I wanted it.”

    Eastwood’s scene of moody mundanity is charming, but the draughtsmanship in some of the other paintings was astonishing.

    For his efforts Eastwood will receive a £10,000 cash prize and a solo show at the Nunnery Gallery on Bow Road. With part of his bounty, Eastwood plans to expand his studio and travel to Holland to see Van Gogh’s early works in their natural habitat.

    The selection implied that the judges prefer the right atmosphere to technical accomplishments, which answers my question about whether the East London Painting Prize is about celebrating East London or celebrating its best painters. This year, it seemed to be the former.

    But that’s neither here nor there.

    For those of us watching from the sidelines, the value in this exercise lies in the ensemble. To the Jack Goldhill Charitable Trust – thank you very much for that.

    Nathan Eastwood’s solo show will take place at the Nunnery Gallery, Bow Road, E3 2SJ in October.