The best art exhibitions coming up in Bristol and the Westcountry – selected by the Friends of the RWA…
Here’s our pick of the best art exhibitions and events happening in and around Bristol and the south west – including a look ahead to upcoming features….
AT THE RWA
These Mad Hybrids: John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture
Until 12 May 2024
The exhibition positions a group of ceramic sculptures made by abstract painter John Hoyland RA in dialogue with a spectacular, international, assembly of contemporary sculpture by artists including Phyllida Barlow and Hew Locke. A display of paintings by Hoyland shows the dynamic connection between his sculptures and paintings.
Curated by sculptor Olivia Bax in collaboration with Sam Cornish and Wiz Patterson Kelly of The John Hoyland Estate, the exhibition is inspired by a group of unique ceramic sculptures by Hoyland, which he affectionately called his “mad little hybrids.” This is the first public display of the ceramics since 1994, and their first presentation alongside Hoyland’s abstract paintings from the 1960s to 2010s.
Friends of the RWA Exhibition
Until 28 April 24 (Tue – Sun 10am-5pm) FREE ADMISSION. Lower Ground Floor
The Friends’ Exhibition returns to the RWA. The high-quality exhibition features painting, prints and sculpture from artists across the region.
This selected show was judged this year by That Art Gallery owner Andy Phipps, Academicians Karl Singporewala RWA, and Angela Lizon RWA. Each work will be available for sale with a percentage of proceeds going to support the RWA.
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Compiled by Sue Quirk and Laurel Smart
1) NATASHA MACVOY: EYE WITNESS
UNTIL 13 APRIL, EXETER PHOENIX, EXETER
A solo exhibition featuring recent works by Gloucestershire-based artist Natasha MacVoy who works across sculpture, film, performance and text. Eye Witness showcases an approach to art making, research and language that probes the assumption that we understand what we see. Throughout her practice, Natasha explores ideas and motifs that relate to invisible labour, care and neurodiversity, realising these through the playful use of doubling, repetition, and the considered use of close-at-hand materials.
In an expanded video installation, site-specific interventions, sculpture, drawing and further film based works, the artist explores her own lived experiences; the various ways she has rehearsed, adapted, and changed the fabric of the world, in order to provide an invisible support structure for her neurodivergent children. Simultaneously, she highlights universal experiences based on our perception of space, the passage of time, processes of making, and how we might gather, hold, and return to our thoughts.
2) RUTH BROADWAY: TIME AND TIDE
UNTIL 14 APRIL, LONG GALLERY, BLACK SWAN ARTS, FROME, SOMERSET
Ruth Broadway is a multi-media artist based in Bristol. Ruth’s work captures things at the cusp of change – a moon, a moth, a girl, a woman, the tide. Ruth uses the physical acts of stitching, dyeing, printing, collecting and preserving to tether the ephemeral. This exhibition shows how the rituals of daily noticing, recording and making can foster appreciation of the quiet transformation happening around us. Inspired by traditional folk craft, Ruth embraces the prosaic nature of these techniques to create work that becomes love-letters to the passing of time, transformation and the fragility of life. Folktales – especially ones where the unexceptional hero must overcome apparently impossible obstacles (spinning straw into gold, silently weaving barbed shirts for seven cursed brothers, finding the way home by following bread crumbs and so on) – are a ceaseless source of inspiration and can be seen in the repetitive techniques Ruth uses. She is drawn to stories of transformation, whether physical or metaphorical; dramatic and magical or slow and ordinary.
3) HOLBURNE MUSEUM, BATH: 2 EXHIBITIONS
UNTIL 14 APRIL GWEN JOHN: ART AND LIFE IN LONDON AND PARIS; UNTIL 21 APRIL GILLIAN LOWNDES: RADICAL CLAY
GWEN JOHN ART AND LIFE IN LONDON AND PARIS: this exhibition brings together paintings, watercolours, drawings and sketches to chronologically trace Gwen John’s 40-year career. The exhibition places her art in relation to the two cities where she chose to live and work: from her early years at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and subsequent training under James Abbott McNeill Whistler at the Académie Carmen in Paris, to her permanent move to Paris in 1904 and the life she built as an artist there. The exhibition draws on new research into John’s connections to her contemporaries, dispelling the myth that the artist was an eccentric recluse and explores the relationship of her work to that of her brother, Augustus John, and Auguste Rodin – with whom she had a ten-year affair.
GILLIAN LOWNDES RADICAL CLAY: Gillian Lowndes (1936-2010) was one of the most daring and original artists of the post-war period. Though she trained as a potter, her work hovers between craft and fine art, pottery and sculpture. Often incorporating found objects into her practice, her unorthodox methods involved dipping materials in clay to be fired, burying work in sand and destroying fired pieces with a hammer, only to reassemble them again with ceramic mortar. Focusing on Lowndes’ work from the 1980s to the 2000s, the exhibition showcases a small number of tabletop and wall pieces which reflect the breadth of her practice in the last decades of her career and demonstrates the radical ways in which she stretched and subverted ceramic practice.
4) CELEBRATING THE ART OF 21 GROUP OF ARTISTS
7-12 MARCH, THAT ART GALLERY, BRISTOL
Group Show featuring the work of Tony Aldrich, Richard Allman, Lar Cann, Sonia Fynn, Mary Gillett, Jill Goodman, Dorothy Hanna, Val Jones, Wendy McBride, Bob Mountjoy, Nigel Moores, Clark Nicol, Teresa Pemberton, Jenny Pery, Ley Roberts, Rita Smith, Richard Sunderland, Oliver Teagle, Kevin Tole and Yana Trevail
5) CATHERINE DUCKER: EMOTION IN COLOUR
UNTIL 21 APRIL, VICTORIA ART GALLERY, BATH
Catherine Ducker’s luminous and vibrant floral works to brighten up the Victoria Art Gallery through the gloomy months of winter. Catherine aims to create soft, calm places in her paintings, to produce works that sing with colour and light and give people solace in a turbulent world. Surrounded by plants at all times, nature is ever present in her paintings, together with its therapeutic effects.
6) PRESENT TENSE: MIXED EXHIBITION
UNTIL 28 APRIL, HAUSER & WIRTH, BRUTON, SOMERSET
‘Present Tense’ spotlights the next generation of artists living and working in the UK, from emerging to mid-career, celebrating a breadth of creative talent and socially engaged practices. The multifaceted group presentation consists of 23 contemporary artists outside of the Hauser & Wirth roster, testing the boundaries of their mediums to address and confront notions of identity, consciousness, humanity and representation. Through their individual lens, each artist is responding to the cultural climate of the UK right now, depicting a range of lived experiences that coexist and connect within the rich fabric of the same location.
Features Lydia Blakeley, Sholto Blissett, Victoria Cantons, Emanuel de Carvalho, Shawanda Corbett, Vanessa Garwood, Ania Hobson, Clementine Keith-Roach, Sang Woo Kim, Christina Kimeze, Francesca Mollett, Christopher Page, Daisy Parris, Paloma Proudfoot, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, George Rouy, Antonia Showering, Ebun Sodipo, Ella Walker, Shaqúelle Whyte, Gray Wielebinski and Joseph Yaeger.
7) YOUNG IN HONG, FIVE ACTS
UNTIL 5 MAY, SPIKE ISLAND, BRISTOL
‘Five Acts’ is a new commission and solo exhibition by artist and Spike Island studio holder Young In Hong. The exhibition brings together tapestry, sculpture, video and performance to explore the bond between humans and animals through movement, sound and other non-linguistic forms of expression.
The centrepiece of the commission is a forty metre-long, embroidered tapestry that documents the struggles for better working conditions and fair pay of women workers in Korea during the period 1920–1980. Inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry – an 11th century embroidery depicting the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England in 1066 – Hong’s version pays homage to the women workers who fought against Japanese colonial rule and became a driving force behind South Korea’s modernisation. Divided into eight sections and suspended from the ceiling in an elliptical frame, the tapestry depicts historical events where women were the main protagonists.
Surrounding the tapestry is a group of willow and fabric sculptures that resemble animal toys found in zoos. A series of live performances taking place during the exhibition’s run invite a group of five performers to explore improvisation through movement and sound. Taking the tapestry as a manual for the performance and score, the performers interact with the sculptures while responding to the historical events narrated in the embroidery.
LAST CHANCE TO SEE
- UNTIL 6 APRIL: JULIA MALEEVA: MY THREE SEAS A journey between the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Black Sea. A solo exhibition of oil and cold wax paintings by Julia Maleeva. PENWITH GALLERY, ST IVES, CORNWALL https://penwithgallery.com/exhibition/julia-maleeva-2024/
WATCH OUT FOR
- YINKA SHONIBARE CBE RA: END OF EMPIRE UNTIL 23 JUNE A striking large-scale sculpture that comments on the balance of power at the outset of the First World War. THE BOX, PLYMOUTH, DEVON https://www.theboxplymouth.com/events/march-2024/yinka-shonibare-end-of-empire
The Floating Circle 