England & Co - Contemporary Art Gallery Previous Exhibitions
216 Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill, London W11 2RH
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PAULE VEZELAY 1892 - 1984
Retrospective Exhibition 23rd October - 27 November 2004

Paule Vézelay was born in England in 1892, but by the 1930s she had become an active member of the Parisian avante-garde after moving to France and adopting the name Paule Vézelay. She lived for several years with the Surrealist artist André Masson, and mixed with many of the most significant artists of pre-war Paris including Kandinsky, Miro, Mondrian, and her great friends Jean Arp and his wife Sophie Tauber-Arp. Her work is represented in museums and public collections in Britain and abroad including Tate; The British Museum; The Imperial War Museum; The National Portrait Gallery London; The Victoria & Albert Museum; The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; The Kunst Museum, Basel; The Australian National Gallery; and the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Vézelay was invited to join the group Abstraction-Création in 1934 and exhibited in several significant pioneering exhibitions of non-figurative art in France, Italy and Holland. As her friend the British artist Paul Nash wrote in 1936, Vézelay 'contributed steadily to the modern movement'. Her early work was figurative, but apart from her Surrealist-inspired works from the 1930s and her wartime drawings, she became the first British artist to commit herself totally to the abstract movement.

In 1939 Vézelay returned to England, but continued to exhibit regularly in France after the war. In England she almost disappeared from public view until the Tate Gallery retrospective exhibition of her work in 1983. Her reputation as 'an innovator in non-figurative art' had been noted by the critic William Lipke in 1965, and her series of thread and wire constructions, the Lines in Space that she began in 1935, had already been acknowledged as 'a completely original and independent conception'. Lipke wrote that 'the current interest in British art of the thirties has revealed to the public the work of lesser known artists of the time whose innovations were as startling as those of Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson… Madame Paule Vézelay is an excellent case in point.'

At the end of her life Vézelay said that during her long career as an artist she had worked through each period 'into something else'. This retrospective exhibition encompasses early figurative pictures of circus, theatre and concert scenes; works exploring Surrealism; early abstract studies; major abstract paintings of the 1930s to 1960s; textile designs; and the constructions, pastels and paintings of her mature abstract style. In The Dictionary of Abstract Painting Michel Seuphor wrote that 'few artists illustrate as well as Paule Vézelay the many-sidedness of art. She has practised painting, sculpture, collages, compositions with stretched strings, drawings, engraving. Her work has a discreet charm and elegant purity.'

An illustrated monograph about Paule Vézelay will accompany the exhibition.
Also available to order on VHS or DVD will be the film The Art of Paule Vezelay, an Illuminations Production made this year.

JONATHAN PARSONS
JASON WALLIS-JOHNSON
15 SEPTEMBER - 18 OCTOBER 2004

This exhibition explores the work of two artists who have a certain synchronicity in the diversity of their practice.

Jonathan Parsons will be showing recent work including Zoned Out, a sculpture made from two dissections of the London Connections map; and Rats, a new neon work that is the reverse of the word 'Star'. His 'Flags' are investigations of codes of representation and their role as tokens of collective identities. Parsons' paintings are products of a conscious reversal of their own conventions - what he is doing in terms of practice is relating traditional modes of representation and production to issues of contemporary relevance.

Works by Jason Wallis-Johnson include his new London Light-box, one of an on-going series of illuminated maps made by obsessively pin-pricking black carbon paper; the resulting pierced surfaces shimmering against the light behind like night-time cityscapes seen from the air. This aviation theme is extended by gilded model aircraft for desk-top combat. Also included are some of his meticulous carbon drawings that use manual techniques to produce what seem to be mechanically-made abstract designs and devices on paper. A new series of sculptural works featured in the exhibition are multi-coloured marbled-silicone figures that have been cast from the interiors or fused with found porcelain figurines.

DESIGNS FOR FRAGILE PERSONALITIES IN ANXIOUS TIMES:
A new collection of objects by Michael Anastassiades, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
This collection will be displayed as a temporary addition to the exhibition of works by Jonathan Parsons and Jason Wallis-Johnson

STEPHEN BIRD
Recent Ceramics
16th June - 17th July 2004
An early childhood spent in the Potteries area of Stoke-on-Trent influenced Stephen Bird's later development as a ceramic artist. His extensive travels in Europe, America, Asia and Australia have added to the eclectic and primitive influences on his work, giving it a generic cultural folk identity. His inventive ceramics are a way of telling stories - he taps into the multicultural tradition of modern western societies and his works are totems of a society whose cultural and religious iconography is no longer specific to a location or community.
His particularly English interpretation of global folk culture makes conscious references to traditions that preceeded and support his personal 'folk art', evoking the nostalgia of commemorative industrially-made pottery. His idiosyncratic artefacts celebrate and mark universal domestic triumphs and events.
Last year Stephen Bird represented Scotland in the New Wave exhibition in Wales and Britain at SOFA (Sculptural Object, Functional Art) in chicago. His work has been acquired by several public collections, including the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The Creative Development Award from the Scottish Arts Council to produce and exhibit this new body of work recognises that he has worked consistently in recent years to establish himself as one of the leading artists currently working in the ceramic medium in Scotland. It has allowed him to realise works of ambitious complexity and scale that represent an increasing commitment to the exploration of his craft in the pursuit of his vision.
Illustrated catalogue available. After the exhibition a selection of Stephen Bird's ceramics will continue to be on view throughout August, and thereafter on request at the gallery.
Illustrated catalogue available £8.00 plus £1.50 post & packing

ALBERT HERBERT
Fifty Years of Painting: Works from 1950 ­ 2004
5 May ­ 12 June 2004
Over the past five decades Albert Herbert has consistently painted surprising and dream-like images: the product of an unusual and highly individual imagination. His seemingly naïve yet sophisticated paintings are the result of his life-long journey exploring "what lies beneath the surface of the mind". He has been on a search for 'the marvellous' which began with a youthful encounter with Surrealism, and has continued throughout his life. Increasingly recognized as an artist with a powerful and original poetic vision, he constantly renews and re-invents himself as he explores his inner world.
Born in 1925, Herbert studied at the Royal College of Art in the late 1940s and early 1950s alongside John Bratby, Edward Middleditch, Jack Smith and Derrick Greaves, a group that became known as the 'Kitchen Sink' painters. Herbert was less interested in the prevailing social realism, and was attracted to the truth and emotional significance he found in the paintings of Francis Bacon, whom he met when Bacon was working in a studio at the RCA in 1951-52. Herbert instinctively wanted to make figurative, emotive, symbolic paintings, and his paintings became increasingly introspective, more about states of mind than about the external world around him.
Herbert has always used stories as a way of explaining his subjective feelings. His universal narratives are drawn from a myriad of diverse sources including Biblical stories and his own life and experiences. In the late 1950s he was drawn to learn about religion, seeing it as a way of revealing the inner world of the collective mind. In the 1980s he adopted the use of Biblical and theological subjects as a way of making his paintings less private. The surface meanings were often a mask for something else ­ used as metaphors or universal symbols and archetypes which could be interpreted in several different ways.
He usually starts a painting with "some idea that could be put into words" although he has also often said that "art is not about meanings but feelings". When he was Principal Lecturer at St Martin¹s School of Art in the 1960s and 70s, Herbert for a time gave up painting in a representational way, repressing his drive to make images that tell stories. Finding abstraction too restrictive, he eventually found a way back to figurative painting through looking at children¹s art and making primitive, illustrative, figurative etchings.
Over the past couple of years Herbert has painted scenes and incidents relating to his own life and experiences, painting himself as a young soldier during the War and a recent series of garden landscapes that depict him both as an old man and as a young boy with his mother. This retrospective ­ Fifty Years of Painting ­ takes place in Herbert¹s 79th year, a year when he has been looking back over his life and remembering the past.
Illustrated catalogue available £8.00 plus £1.50 post & packing

STEPHEN HARPER - Recent Paintings
13th April - 1st May 2004
Stephen Harper's intensely observed and meticulously painted still-lifes are compelling with their subtle psychological intensity. He aims to present the 'real' and also to ask questions about how meaning is ascribed to that reality. His working process initially involves prolonged close attention to small, simple groups of objects. He says that during this process "the objects appear to acquire meaning and significance, both as themselves, and in their relationships to one another. The particular physical facts of the objects are examined but also their potential metaphorical or symbolic significance. The intention is not to impose meaning but to examine and use it as it occurs. Paradoxically, the more meaning the objects appear to acquire, the more intense their material existence appears to become." He says that his main intention is to acknowledge "the inherent dignity and strangeness of the physical world beyond any meanings we can ascribe to it. The objects act as symbols of the 'real', as metaphors for the existence of anything."

Preceding the paintings Harper engages in a long process of meditating on his arrangements and the relationship between the objects he has chosen to depict. The Italian master of the still-life genre, Giorgio Morandi, spent a lifetime studying familiar objects on a table-top, constantly re-arranging them and making minute shifts of their placement ­ he once wrote that "nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see".

Stephen Harper was born in Northern Ireland in 1954 and studied at Ulster College of Art & Design, Bath Academy of Art, and Liverpool Polytechnic, before completing his MA at Goldsmiths College in London. Since 1975 he has been represented in exhibitions in Ireland, America, Germany and Britain, including the Serpentine Gallery Summer Show 2; the Stadtische Gallery, Regensberg; Museé Imaginaire at The Museum of Installation, London, and several exhibitions organised by the Arts Council Belfast. His last one-man exhibition at England & Co was in 1992 and he has participated in numerous exhibitions with the gallery over the past twelve years.

ROLF BRANDT (1906 - 1986) Retrospective Exhibition
10 March - 10 April 2004
The artist and illustrator Rolf Brandt influenced generations of students when he taught at the London College of Printing in the 1950s through to the 1970s. The brother of photographer Bill Brandt, Rolf, although less known, was a distinguished artist in his own right. His career as an artist encompassed his early surrealist paintings and drawings; haunting drawings and illustrations of the 1930s and 40s; subtle and sophisticated abstract paintings of the 1950s; witty and inventive drawings and collages of the 1960s and 70s; and his final major series of works - the painted wooden constructions exploring colour theory and optical art made in the 1960s and 70s.
This retrospective exhibition coincides with the opening of the major Bill Brandt exhibition in the Photography Gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum: Bill Brandt: A Centenary Exhibition. An accompanying exhibition, Other Sides of Bill Brandt in the Photography Gallery at the V & A includes an album of Rolf Brandt's collages and drawings of the 1920s and 1930s from the museum's collection.
Rolf Brandt died in 1986, and there has been no opportunity to see his work since Apparitions, an exhibition of his drawings and illustrations organised by the South Bank Centre at the Royal Festival Hall in 1988. England & Co are delighted to be able to be able to present the first retrospective exhibition of Rolf Brandt that includes works from all periods of his career.
The Brandt brothers were born two years apart, Rolf in 1906 and Bill in 1904, and were to remain close throughout their lives. There was a real affinity between them - in tastes and interests, in their friendships and influences. Although born in Germany, the brothers had British citizenship through their family, and both came to live permanently in England in the mid 1930s.
Rolf was a professional actor, but in the 1920s became interested in Dada and Surrealism, making drawings and collages in his spare time. When Bill Brandt worked in Man Ray's Paris studio in 1930, he too became absorbed by Surrealism, which was to remain a potent influence on them both. The spirit of subversive experiment and element of dream-like atmosphere was Rolf's heritage from the Surrealists; and in 1929 he was drawn into the orbit of the Bauhaus when he lived in Dessau and visited Paul Klee's studio. Klee also became a significant influence, alongside the Bauhaus free spirit of innovation.
In London the Brandt brothers were part of an intellectual and artistic milieu in Hampstead in the late 1930s and 40s. They shared friendships and interests, and moved away from their German background. Rolf continued to work as an actor, attending drawing classes in London with Ozenfant, and in Paris with Paul Colin, before making the decision to leave the stage and draw professionally. His drawings were first published in the early 1940s and, as R.A.Brandt, he established a reputation for his quietly haunting illustrations and delicate pencil drawings with an elusive, often eerie quality. He captured the essence of the stories he illustrated, adding his own distinct nuance and atmosphere - his drawings were once described as "absurd as dreams and as mysterious".
Rolf Brandt had a very European sensibility, and in the 1950s and early 1960s was increasingly drawn to the subtle abstraction of French artists such as Jules Bissier, and the geometric abstraction and optical art of Victor Vasarely. Brandt concentrated in that period on painting and began to make wooden constructions that culminated with his colourful painted 'slat' constructions. He exhibited rarely and the last significant exhibition in his lifetime was at the Lisson Gallery in 1970.

Elisabetta Catamo - Constructions
7th - 28th February 2004
This is the second London exhibition of Italian artist Elisabetta Catamo¹s architectural constructions ­ works that fall somewhere between sculpture and painting. Catamo was born in Rome where she currently lives and works, and since 1979 has held over 20 solo exhibitions in Italy, Japan and Britain. Her works have been included in more than 65 group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, and in December 2003 she was one of the artists chosen to represent Italy in the 9th Cairo Biennale.
After studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Catamo first became known in the 1970s and '80s as a photographer of intensely coloured, surreal tableaux of juxtaposed objects. The theatrical settings she used in her photographs evolved into 'mini theatres' contained in boxes. Her more recent work has developed into wall-mounted constructions of wood covered in gleaming graphite. Some of these constructions utilise formal architectural elements, others have textured monochrome surfaces studded with nails. Some constructions are circular, reminiscent of tribal shields; some use plant forms; and another group of works are based on clothing ­ formalized garment structures are drawn from traditional costume and clothing of countries such as Japan, China and Egypt. These are refined and reduced to archetypal shapes, encrusted with stylized decorative elements, and presented emblematically on the wall.
Many of Catamo¹s recent works utilise coloured feathers, textiles, nails, and found objects that create strangely beautiful diversions from the austere graphite surfaces. Often objects are inserted and set into the constructions like archaeological 'finds' ­ Catamo uses them as signals and hints of what she says is 'something else': meditative and poetic qualities are combined with the pleasure she takes in the decorative and dramatic aspects of her work. Italian critic and author Enrico Crispolti wrote that Catamo's works can lead the viewer to slide into another dimension: "a state of evocative and contemplative suspension". He noted in her works a quality of "silence" and an atmosphere "verging at times on the metaphysical, with roots stretching all the way back to de Chirico".

Sophie Eynon - Recent Paintings
5th December 2003 - 3rd January 2004

Sophie Eynon's atmospheric, uncannily calm paintings are views of places she knows well and which she has felt moved by and connected to in some way. Stillness is important in these pictures - she is "interested in the surreal sense of time stood still, a quality which unnerves and separates the sight from one's stream of consciousness. She wants to capture that feeling of "time in suspense" which has impressed the scene upon her.
These paintings are specific to the last detail. Eynon says that she "cares that the characteristic of each tree is preserved, or that the particular feel of the sea or sky on that day is faithfully recorded. I have painted these spaces because I want to protect my own experience of them from receding into the memory. Each painting is a comfort zone, an evasion from the imperfections of everyday life, returning to an instant when the world was briefly perfect, balanced and unblemished. They are a personal refuge on the canvas plane."
Depicting the sea and expanses of water has tempted and challenged artists from Turner and Whistler to the contemporary Japanese photographer Sugimoto. Eynon's paintings have an almost photographic quality, and although seemingly simple and almost minimalist and monochromatic, on close examination they are revealed to be rich in detail and subtle variations of colour.
Sophie Eynon was born in Wales and studied in Italy and later in London at the London College of Printing, the Byam Shaw School of Art and the University of East London. She has been exhibiting since 1985 in England, South America, Spain and the USA.
KEN GILL: Stone Sculptures
Alongside Eynon's painting are works by Irish artist Ken Gill. He collects ancient stones and rocks in Ireland, which he splits open, making records of the interiors by taking impressions on paper before reconstituting the stones with a layer of glass placed between the component halves, which allows shafts of light to pass through. The stones are often carboniferous limestone from the Palaeozoic period (approximately 350,000,000 years ago) and Gill is fascinated by the idea of working with such a venerable and evocative material. Each stone is accompanied by its own impressed print on Japan paper of the stone's interior.
GIGI SUDBURY: Small Paintings
In the display cases will be a selection of Gigi Sudbury's paintings. These small pictures have the precise quality of a half-remembered dream - like a world seen through child's eyes with the mind of an adult.
IN THE LOWER GALLERY: Christmas Exhibition
A changing selection of works by gallery and other artists including boxed works by Chris Kenny, Georgia Russell and Adrian Bannon; ceramics by Stephen Bird; sculptures by Alex Simpson and Alastair Mackie; small paintings by Albert Herbert, Alan Macdonald, Peter Bunting, Paule Vézelay, Simon Nicholas, Morag Ballard and Anne Rothenstein.

Morag Ballard - Recent Work
1st - 29th November 2003
This is the fifth solo show of Morag Ballard¹s work at England & Co. Over the past twelve years she has continued to evolve her own individual and personal interpretation of the formal language of abstraction. Peter Davies comments in his book St Ives Revisited that Ballard "introduces an on-going freshness to a mode of work that one more easily associates with Naum Gabo¹s closest followers".
Ballard¹s paintings revitalise the constructivist language of 1930s
abstraction: they are explorations of formal geometric abstraction, yet often include forms derived from observable reality. Describing herself as "a constructivist at heart", Ballard is inspired by the play between two and three dimensions. She has made reliefs and three-dimensional constructions, although in recent years she has been concentrating on painting. Using the language of abstraction, she purifies and refines her work in a satisfying balance of refined technique, sensitive use of colour, and contemplative intelligence.
After leaving Bath Academy of Art in 1985, Ballard worked at the Guggenheim Museum in Venice where she had the time and opportunity to absorb and learn from some of the works of the twentieth century abstract masters found in Peggy Guggenheim¹s collection. Since 1991 Ballard has been living in Cornwall, and has been drawn to the work of those artists working in St. Ives in the 1930s, Œ40s and Œ50s who were closer to the European abstract movement. Ballard says that she "enjoys the playfulness that abstract work allows" as seen in the work of some of the earlier abstract artists she admires such as John Tunnard, Naum Gabo, John Wells, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Le Corbusier, and Jean Helion.
Many of her works start as pure abstraction, but others come from a specific place, man-made or natural, that she feels offers a structural drama with which she can explore. Her most recent visit to France included time spent in Carcassonne, where she was inspired by the town¹s dramatic location and unique character Although the basic structure of these works seemed initially to reveal itself quite quickly, the process of making the paintings evolved into many months of exploring, shifting and balancing the individual elements she had identified. Her achievement is to produce harmonious complete compositions from the chaotic and busy interior elements of Carcassonne. As Peter Davies has pointed out: Ballard "does not illustrate space, but rather constructs it in terms of an imaginative manipulation of these components".


Chris Kenny - Part of me is floating above myself
27th September - 25th October 2003
Chris Kenny makes three-dimensional 'drawings' and constructions from twigs, fragments of maps and strips of found text mounted on pins that draw out poetry and visual beauty from this ephemera. In his catalogue essay, Alain de Botton comments that it is "part of Chris Kenny's genius to collide apparently incongruous elements of the world in a way that will tickle, move us and make us dream...Kenny is a master at delicately excising something - a phrase, a leaf, a road in a map - from its normal setting, and settling it into a diminutive white museum where, hovering an inch or so above the base, it becomes free to release a hidden narrative or symbolic message."
Kenny's collage constructions bring together collections of found text with themes that are sometimes humorous, sometimes melancholy, as he mixes metaphors and subverts meanings. These text fragments, culled from discarded books, have an ingerited history, and the very materiality of the strips of words and the differing shades of ageing paper add to their visual and literary richness. With his three-dimensional 'twig drawings' Kenny finds graphic spontaneity in the unexpected turn of a twig, or expressive, sometimes poignant figures among the chaos of dried branches. These constructions of suspended twigs explore what he describes as the "rudiments of line, from scribble to geometry", or align "twig figures" with text labels that make us aware of their human features.
In his "Street Drawings" series of works with maps, Kenny says that he replaces "the cartographer's logic with an absurd imaginative system. The roads float and interact in unlikely combinations that allow one's mind to ricochet back and forth between disparate locations and associations." He uses the 'lines' provided in maps as elements in works that recall the formality of Mondrian's early abstraction.
Alain de Botton writes that "in this new collection, the tensions in Kenny's work - between the funny and the bleak, the order and the chaos, the banal and the profound - are at a new pitch. Here is an artist working at the height of his powers within his chosen parameters, an artist who has learnt some of the best lessons of the art of the last century and turned its insights into something utterly personal and beguiling."
Works by Chris Kenny have recently been acquired by The Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Museum of London and his works are in public, corporate and private collections around the world.