‘Masculinities,’ featuring works by Catherine Opie and Akram Zaatari is now on show as part of Arles, les Rencontres de la Photographie 2021.

“This exhibition charts the often complex and sometimes contradictory representations of masculinities, and how they have developed and evolved over time. Touching on themes including power, patriarchy, queer identity, racial politics, female perceptions of men, hypermasculine stereotypes, tenderness and the family, the exhibition examines the critical role photography and film have played in the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture."  - Text from the exhibition website.

Curated by Alona Pardo with support from Fluxus Art Projects. Exhibition organised by the Barbican.

Exhibition dates: 4 July - 26 September 2021.

British Art Show 9 is now open in Aberdeen. Works by Hurvin Anderson – including a new painting, ‘Dixie Peach’ - will go on show when the exhibition moves to Wolverhampton on 22 January 2022.

The BAS9 exhibition is structured around three main themes: healing, care and reparative history; tactics for togetherness; and imagining new futures. Each of the four touring shows will also adapt to local contexts: in Wolverhampton the exhibition looks at how we live with and give voice to difference, and in Manchester the exhibition will engage with the evolving nature of work and the ongoing struggle to shape a new social contract.

Pictured: Hurvin Anderson, ‘Dixie Peach’, 2020 © Hurvin Anderson. All rights reserved DACS 2021. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: Ben Westoby

'Masterpieces in Miniature: The 2021 Model Art Gallery’ is now on show at Pallant House in Chichester, including miniature works created by Cecily Brown, Michael Landy and Caragh Thuring.

The works, which all range from the size of a pound coin to no larger than 20cm, were made during lockdown. The 2021 Model Art Gallery will be displayed alongside two earlier model galleries – The Thirty Four Gallery and The Model Gallery 2000. Together, the galleries tell the story of Modern British art from the 1930s until today, providing an insight into the evolution of styles and influences across the decades and how different generations of artists have approached the unique challenges of working in miniature.

The earliest model gallery in Pallant House Gallery’s collection, The Thirty Four Gallery, was inspired by the 1924 Queen Mary’s Doll’s House at Windsor Castle. It was created in 1934, when art dealer Sydney Burney asked some of his most notable contemporaries, including Henry Moore, Ivon Hitchens and Vanessa Bell to create miniature artworks to fill a dolls house in support of charity. Lost for decades, some of the works were rediscovered in a suitcase by Burney’s grandson. The model was recreated by Pallant House Gallery in 1997 based on photographs of the original designed by the architect Marshall Sissons.

Exhibition dates: Saturday 26 June 2021 - Spring 2022

Michel François’ works ‘Panoptique’ are now on show at Halle Verrière, Meisenthal, France.

“I like the edges, borders, thresholds. I like to be able to crystallise the moment where everything can tip from one side to the next and suggest the possibility of a transgression, a passage. Many of the works I imagine express that, and seek to fix the relative inconstancy of a moment or of a sometimes indiscernible limit.” - Michel François

On view until September 2021. 

Michael Landy's Welcome to Essex is a new documentary commissioned by Firstsite to accompany their exhibition of the same name, currently on show in Colchester. 

The exhibition, Michael Landy's Welcome to Essex, runs until 5 September 2021 at Firstsite, Lewis Gardens, High Street, Colchester, Essex, CO1 1JH.

For his first major public gallery exhibition in the UK for almost a decade - and on the 20th anniversary of one of his most famous works, ‘Break Down’ - Landy has produced a series of ambitious new commissions based on the history of Essex and his fascination with the county’s contemporary portrayal in popular culture.

Visitors to Firstsite can also see ‘Michael Landy’s Break Down: 20 Years’, an archive exhibition of previously unseen documentation, video footage, drawings and ephemera from Landy's ground-breaking 2001 work.

Exhibition dates: 26 June - 5 September 2021

Paul Pfeiffer and Languid Hands will be in conversation with Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa on 1 July at 7pm GMT, in ‘Figuring the Invisible: anti-Blackness, Art & Testimony.’

To follow Anne Anlin Cheng, what happens when we ‘shift our attention away from the visibility of race to its visuality?’

What happens when we attend to the strategic modes of appearance within the visible developed by racialised subjects, or modelled to us through their art? What happens when we consider racialised forms of visuality and aurality as tactics designed not solely to evade racialised violence, but as methods of manifesting and mobilising subaltern histories, and embodied forms of knowing?

How should we respond to the grammars of black performance – in word, image and sound – as practices of knowing? How do we respond to the ongoingness of truths known to racialised subjects that are nevertheless inadmissible within the normative strictures of ‘proof,’ or the standard forms of documentary practice?

These questions will be taken up in a discussion between Paul Pfeiffer and Languid Hands, moderated by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, in a panel that centres around a screening of Pfeiffer’s ‘The Long Count’ (I Shook Up The World, 2000), Caryatid (Broner, 2020), and Languid Hands’s Towards a Black Testimony: Prayer/Protest/Peace (2019).

Pictured: Paul Pfeiffer, ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (15)’, 2004. 

A new large-scale painting by Cecily Brown will go on display in November 2021 as part of The Courtauld Gallery’s most significant modernisation project in its history. 

The work has been specially commissioned for the curved wall of the historic 18th century staircase, and will reflect Cecily Brown’s deep interest in the paintings in the Gallery’s collection. 

The commission revisits the early history of the building. In the 18th century a painting by Giovanni Battista Cipriani occupied this same location when this part of Somerset House was home to the Royal Academy of Arts.  

The commission has been supported by The Garcia Family Foundation.

Pictured: The Courtauld at Somerset House. Photo: Benedict Johnson

Congratulations to Steve McQueen and the Small Axe team for their 6 BAFTA wins.

Malachi Kirby - supporting actor
Jacqueline Durran - costume design
Jojo Williams - make up and hair design
Shabier Kirchner - photography and lighting: fiction
Helen Scott - production design
Gary Davy - scripted casting

Pictured: MANGROVE featuring Malachi Kirby, Small Axe. Credit: Des Willie/BBC/McQueen Limited

Michael J. Prokopow's Contemporary Painters Series monograph on Hurvin Anderson is published today.

This monograph is the first comprehensive overview of the career to date of British artist Hurvin Anderson (b.1965).

Anderson is known for painting loosely rendered 'observations' of scenes and spaces loaded with personal or communal meaning. Anderson's painting style is notable for the ease with which he slips between figuration and abstraction, playing with the tropes of earlier landscape traditions and 20th-century abstraction. His paintings of barbershop interiors, country tennis clubs and tropical roadsides teem with rich brushwork and multitudes of decorative patterns or architectural features, at once obscuring and adding to underlying ruminations on identity and place.

Drawing on interviews with the artist, Michael J. Prokopow offers a critical assessment of Hurvin Anderson's painting practice.

Image: Hurvin Anderson, Last House, 2013, oil on linen, Monsoon Art Collection © Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: Richard Ivey.