Frith Street Gallery

Golden Square

17-18 Golden Square, London W1F 9JJ
T +44 (0)20 7494 1550 ~ F +44 (0)20 7287 3733

News from 2012

  • Thomas Schütte: Frauen

    Thomas Schütte: Frauen

    21 May – 23 September 2012
    Castello di Rivoli, Turin

    Curated by Andrea Bellini and Dieter Schwarz

    The Castello di Rivoli presents the first Italian museum exhibition dedicated to Thomas Schütte. The exhibition, prepared in close collaboration with the artist, has been curated by Andrea Bellini, co-director of the Castello di Rivoli and Dieter Schwarz, director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur. Co-produced by the Museum and by the NMNM Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, the Turinese exhibition marks the first of two events dedicated to this important German artist, whose work will also be presented at the NMNM in the Principality of Monaco between 6 July and 10 November. Within the spaces of Villa Paloma in Monaco, the exhibition concentrates on the series of architectural models of the One Man Houses, accompanied by a group of recent and as yet unseen works exploring various themes dear to the artist, such as bunkers and temples. The Castello di Rivoli exhibition, instead, examines the Frauen series, extraordinary portrayals of women whose bodies are submitted to spatial and organic deformations. What emerges forcefully from this group of works is Schütte’s ability to effect a true formal and imaginative revolution, not only with regard to the noble tradition of Western figurative sculpture but also to that of his own œuvre. The bronze and aluminium Frauen derive directly from some ceramic models chosen from the 120 different rough sketches realised between 1997 and 1999.

    Read more

  • Massimo Bartolini: TRACK

    Massimo Bartolini: TRACK

    12 May – 16 September 2012
    St Peter’s Abbey Vineyard, Sint-Pietersplein 14, Ghent

    TRACK is a unique art experience in the public and semi public space of the city of Ghent. It offers surprising, enriching and unexpected encounters with the city, its history and its inhabitants and incites to reflect upon urban realities and the contemporary human condition in a broader sense. 44 international artists were invited to conceive new art works that are strongly rooted in the urban fabric of Ghent but link the local context with issues of global significance.

    The two curators Philippe Van Cauteren and Mirjam Varadinis took the time to select exemplary locations in the wider city centre of Ghent and invited artists who have an affinity with the thematical context of those places.

    For TRACK, Bartolini is building an open-air library in the vineyard at St Peter’s Abbey, an oasis of greenery and tranquility in the centre of Ghent. This vineyard originated in the Middle Ages and Ghent’s Guild of Wine-Measurers breathed new life into it in the 1970’s. Visitors can borrow, buy or exchange second hand books here in the symbolic shadow of the Book Tower. Bartolini installs the bookcases inline with the vines, leaning against and parallel to the slope of the garden. According to Bartolini, books too can broaden the mind, just like a good wine.

  • TACITA DEAN: FIVE AMERICANS

    TACITA DEAN: FIVE AMERICANS

    New Museum, New York
    6 May – 1 July 2012

    This May, the New Museum will present an exhibition of works by British artist Tacita Dean—the most substantial presentation of the artist’s work in New York to date. The presentation focuses on a group of recent pieces that capture five important American artists and thinkers of the last fifty years and features Merce Cunningham, Leo Steinberg, Julie Mehretu, Claes Oldenburg, and Cy Twombly. These works are beautifully crafted portraits of each individual, opening a lens onto their artistic processes and personal memories. This installation, organized in close collaboration with Dean, provides insight into the way in which her filmmaking intersects with painting, sculpture, writing, and dance. This exhibition is part of a series of focus shows concentrating on a single project or body of work within an artist’s larger practice which began last May with presentations by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Gustav Metzger.

    Read more

  • Raqs Media Collective: 48 Sheet

    Raqs Media Collective: 48 Sheet

    Birmingham, UK
    2 – 29 April 2012

    48SHEET will transform the city of Birmingham into an urban gallery by utilising up to 100 billboards exhibiting regional, national and international artists work from the 2nd to the 29th April 2012.

    MadeIn Company (Shaghai) and Raqs Media Collective (India) have been commissioned to produce new work for 60 billboards and will be co-curated by Jonathan Watkins, Director of the Ikon Gallery and Dr Jiang Jiehong, Director of Centre for Chinese Visual Arts, Birmingham Institute of Art & Design (BCU).

    What begins with our eyes, travels to the brain, courses to our heart, and then returns to our eyes. Reading off the walls and billboards of cities, we become the words we think we feel, and yet, even as we look up or out to search for them, they always catch us unawares.

    Whenever the Heart Skips a Beat (Street) is a new work by the Raqs Media Collective (Delhi) – here; an array of billboards is scattered across the urban landscape of Birmingham. Each billboard shows a clock-face that features a set of words instead of numbers in order to indicate the hours. The words are pairs of adjectives and nouns that qualify each other. Every clock-race features two words or phrases that relate to each other in counter-point,. Taken together, the billboards produce a set of permutations and combinations of states of mind and being through an invocation of the actions of the hour and minute hands in a clock.

    Read more

  • Fiona Banner presents Orson Welles’ Heart of Darkness

    Fiona Banner presents Orson Welles’ Heart of Darkness

    Saturday 31 March 2012, 5.30pm. FREE
    Estimated running time 3.5 hours. Visitors are welcome to come and go throughout the event.

    Fiona Banner presents the first ever performance of Orson Welles’ screenplay Heart of Darkness. Beamed live from A Room for London / Roi des Belges to the Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London. An Artangel production in association with Southbank Centre.

    Read more

  • Marlene Dumas

    Marlene Dumas

    13 March – 17 June 2012
    Fondazione Stelline, Milan

    Organized and promoted by the Fondazione Stelline, the solo show of Marlene Dumas, one of the best known and most admired contemporary artists, presents twenty two recent works: fifteen new paintings exhibited for the first time, alongside seven works from her recent London exhibition ‘Forsaken’ (2011), and fifteen historical drawings and watercolours.
    Some of the artist’s favourite themes are powerfully featured here: the crucifixion, famous people linked to dramatic events, “people in extreme suffering” who represent the humanity that is the focus of her painting.
    The exhibition venue itself – the former orphanage and boarding school “Le Stelline” – and some sculptures from the Museo del Castello Sforzesco, including the Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini, have been a source of inspiration for the paintings, inspired by the encounter with Milan and created specifically for this event, alongside seven works from her recent series ‘Forsaken’ (2011).

  • Fiona Tan: Point of Departure

    Fiona Tan: Point of Departure

    22 March – 24 June 2012
    Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville

    Fiona Tan’s work explores memory, time and history. She initially became known for a body of work that relied on the use of archival films, questioning the observer and the observed and challenging the assumptions of the colonial past. Recent works concentrate on how memory is connected to images in our mind and on how inaccurate and yet creative memory can be.

  • A Room for London

    A Room for London

    A Room for London – Roi des Belges
    Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London
    January 2012 – December 2012
    Designed by David Kohn architects in collaboration with Fiona Banner. Programmed by Artangel and produced by Living Architecture.

    A Room for London – Roi des Belges, is a temporary building on the roof of Queen Elizabeth Hall. It is a studio for writers and performers who will live there for up to a week. The residents will create work in situ, which will be performed live and published on www.aroomforlondon.co.uk. The programme has been built around the themes and concerns of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

    Thames and Hudson
    Fiona Banner presents Orson Welles’ Heart of Darkness
    Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London
    Saturday 31 March, 2012
    Orson Welles wrote a screenplay based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness in the late 1930s. It would have been his first film but it was rejected by the studio RKO, and he went on to make Citizen Kane instead. At the time the script was considered too political, too expensive, and too uncompromising artistically, not to mention its narrative parallels with the rise of fascism in Europe. Today other parallels could be drawn.

    The entire screenplay will be performed for the first time ever, live to camera on the Roi des Belges. It will be broadcast on the web and as a live projection into the Royal Festival Hall below. A Room For London

  • dOCUMENTA (13)

    dOCUMENTA (13)
    9 June – 16 September 2012

    Frith Street Gallery are delighted to announce that dOCUMENTA’s artistic director, Carolyn Christov – Bakargiev has selected Tacita Dean and Massimo Bartolini to participate in dOCUMENTA (13).

    dOCUMENTA (13) is an exhibition of contemporary art held in Kassel, Germany, which takes place every 5 years and runs for 100 days.

  • Dayanita Singh: Monuments of Knowledge

    Dayanita Singh: Monuments of Knowledge

    26 January – 30 March 2012
    Inigo Rooms, Cultural Institute, Kings College London

    The inaugural exhibition at the Inigo Rooms, King’s College London is now open with Dayanita Singh’s photographic project Monuments of Knowledge.

    Dayanita Singh is one of the foremost artists working in the medium of photography today. Singh’s photographs often present an uncanny view of the seemingly everyday. Using both colour and black and white, her images reveal a landscape which exists as much in the artist’s imagination as in the real world. Publishing is also a significant part of Singh’s practice: in books, often published without text, she experiments with different ways of producing and viewing photographs.

  • Anna Barriball

    Anna Barriball

    The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
    20 January – 1 April 2012

    Anna Barriball makes work which moves between the parallel languages of drawing and sculpture, often using the practice of drawing to create something which might be more properly understood to be sculpture. Sheets of paper pressed insistently by her pencil up against windows, walls and doors become heavily material objects, while things in the world – windbreaks, found photographs, a fireplace – are redrawn as artworks through subtle alteration.

    This exhibition, organised in collaboration with Milton Keynes Gallery, brings together work from the last ten years, and includes new commissions alongside existing works.

  • TACITA DEAN

    TACITA DEAN

    The Unilever Series, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
    11 October 2011 – 11 March 2012

    Tacita Dean’s work, ‘Film’ is the twelfth commission in ‘The Unilever Series’ for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.

    Tacita Dean is one of the most respected artists working today. Her practice encompasses artist’s books, drawing, found objects, photography and sound installations, but she is best known for her use of 16mm film. Dean’s films act as depictions or portraits rather than conventional narratives, capturing fleeting natural light or subtle shifts in movement.

    • No news archived in 2012