SS08: DAVID BATCHELOR
14TH MARCH 2011, 6PM
Byam Shaw School of Art Lecture Theatre, 2 Elthorne Road, N19 4AG

David Batchelor’s work is concerned above all things with colour, a sheer delight in the myriad brilliant hues of the urban environment and underlined by a critical concern with how we see and respond to colour in this advanced technological age. His studio is a treasure trove piled high with an endless variety of fluorescent plastic objects - clothes pegs, fly-swatters, buckets, spades, children’s toys, empty bottles of household products - found in pound shops and markets in cities the world over. He combines these everyday items with a range of light-industrial materials: steel shelving, commercial lightboxes, neon tubing, warehouse dollies, acrylics, plastics and so on to produce extraordinary installations which exalt the ordinary and celebrate the lurid and trashy whilst being, in themselves, often mesmerisingly beautiful.

Batchelor was born in Dundee in 1955 and lives and works in London. 

Information about David Batchelor’s Big Rock Candy project can be found here.

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Martin Creed
Artist Talk
Wednesday 24th November 2010, 630pm
Central St. Martins College, Cochrane Theatre

Martin Creed was born in Wakefield, England, in 1968, and from 1986-90 attended the Slade School of Art in London. He lives and works in London. He has exhibited worldwide and his work is featured in many public collections, notably the Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2001 he won the Turner Prize for ‘The lights going on and off’. Creed’s art is characterised by a gentle but subversive wit and by a minimalism rooted in an instinctive anti-materialism. His often extremely self-effacing works, all titled by number, have been characterised as ‘attempts to short-circuit the visually overloaded, choice saturated culture in which we live’. They also take their place in the honourable tradition within the avant-garde of making work which appears to have no material value - which resists or defies commodification, even if in vain. Hence his conscious use of modest and everyday materials. Whatever the materials, his work is always arresting and can be visually spectacular, as for example his neon works, or what is probably his most celebrated piece, Work No.200 1998, ‘half the air in a given space’. Widely exhibited, this consists of a sufficient number of twelve inch white balloons filled with air to half-fill the gallery space.

A central theme of Creed’s work is the relationship art and life and he explores the boundaries in funny, interesting and sometimes unsettling ways. Ultimately, however, Creed seems to want to do what art has always been supposed to do: ‘I want to make things. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s got something to do with other people. I think I want to try to communicate with other people, because I want to say “hello”, because I want to express myself, and because I want to be loved’.

EXHIBITION

Before and After Modernism
Exhibition Opening
15th November 2010, 6pm
Central St. Martins College, Lethaby Gallery

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EVENT

‘Before and After Modernism: Byam Shaw, Rex Vicat Cole, Yinka Shonibare’

22nd November, 6.30pm

Cochrane Theatre, Central Saint Martins, Southampton Row, London, WC1B 4AP

A special evening to celebrate the centenary of the Byam Shaw School of Art, founded in 1910 by the Edwardian artists, and close friends, Rex Vicat Cole and Byam Shaw. Featuring Yinka Shonibare MBE in conversation with Timothy Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University and curator of the winter exhibition in the Lethaby Gallery at Central Saint Martins (‘Before and After Modernism: Byam Shaw, Rex Vicat Cole, Yinka Shonibare’).

Tickets are free and will be released at midday on 9th November 

www.cochranetheatre.co.uk

Image: Yinka Shonibare MBE, ‘Egg Fight’, 2009  Commissioned by Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane on the occasion of their first centenary, 2008.

David Batchelor’s Big Rock Candy Fountain

1 November 10 to 27 March 2011

Every evening dusk – midnight

Above Archway Tube Station, Junction Road, London N19

An extraordinary fountain of light for a rather dark place. Commissioned by AIR at Byam Shaw School of Art CSM, a projects studio researching ‘what happens when we stay?’

 www.archwayinvestigationsandresponses.org

There will be a talk by David Batchelor as part of Shaping Sculpture, more information can be found here

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PARK 10: CANNIZARO PARK EXHIBITION
Saturday 8 May to Monday 10 May 2010
Cannizaro Park, West Side Common, Wimbledon, London, SW19 4UE 

If you go down to the Park today… In 2010 30 undergraduate and postgraduate students from both Wimbledon and Camberwell Colleges of Art exhibited in the long-standing, prestigious annual exhibition in Cannizaro Park that has come to be known as PARK. The artworks were selected by Guest Curator Sarah B Davies and Wimbledon College Alumni Tobias Fisher (Lisson Gallery) and Michelle Finn (freelance artist & arts manager), and were exhibited from Saturday 8 to Monday 10 May. 

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JANNIS KOUNELLIS
26 April 2010, 630pm
Central St. Martins College of Art and Design
Cochrane Theatre, Southampton Row

Kounellis, initially associated with the Arte Povera of the late 1960s, has exhibited all over the world, and is represented in major museum collections internationally. This Shaping Sculpture event with The Guardians Chief Art Critic Adrian Searle welcomes a major new exhibition at the Ambika P3 Gallery, University of Westminster.

THE A COURSE: AN INQUIRY
Friday 26th and Saturday 27th March 2010
10am-6pm Admission Free but booking essential

A forum is being held at Central Saint Martins Charing Cross Road site featuring Peter Kardia, Garth Evans and Gareth Jones, the surviving members of the four-man sculpture tutors group, who created the historic A Course.