British Art Show 7: Artists Announced
The artist list for the seventh edition of the British Art Show – which takes place every five years and tours to four different cities across the UK – has been announced. Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton (a contributing editor of frieze) , this year’s BAS opens at Nottingham Contemporary (pictured above) and will tour to the Hayward Gallery, then venues in Glasgow and Plymouth. This is apparently the first time in 20 years that the exhibition – which was originally intended to take art to ‘the regions‘ – will be coming to London.
The BAS has kind of a spotty history: the first edition, which opened in Sheffield in 1979 and was selected by the FT‘s art critic, William Packer, was criticized for its predilection for established white male artists; in 1995, a large portion of the show was seen as being too closely aligned with Charles Saatchi’s collection. As Neil Mulholland wrote in frieze four years ago:
‘An attempt to celebrate the resurgence of a ‘British’ art that had allegedly been repressed by the Modern Movement, the BAS was part of a reactionary Postmodernism that included Margaret Thatcher’s sabre-rattling, Merchant–Ivory costume dramas, Peter Fuller’s young-fogey Marxism and working-class girls with Princess Di haircuts. Such dusty ‘British’ values were, of course, specifically rooted in a south-eastern English aristo-bucolic mindset. This arrière-garde was quickly usurped by the New Object Sculpture and New Image of the 1980s (BAS 2) and the Brit Art of the 1990s (BAS 4).’
I’m more hopeful about this year’s edition: the artist list is strong, if low on big surprises. A few quick observations: while the gender balance isn’t quite the 50/50 of Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker’s BAS 6, it’s not bad, and there’s a definite tendency towards film (Duncan Campbell, Emily Wardill, Kirschner & Panos, Otolith, Luke Fowler) and sculpture (Karla Black, Steve Claydon, Roger Hiorns, Ian Kiaer etc) that seems to me fairly reflective of what’s going on in the UK at the moment, despite the relative lack of performance. There are some crossovers with the Tate Triennial – Charles Avery, Spartacus Chetwynd, Matthew Darbyshire, Nathaniel Mellors, David Noonan, Olivia Plender, Tris Vonna-Michell – but not as many as may have been expected (surprising that Ryan Gander hasn’t been featured in either?). The best-represented gallery is, by my count, Hotel, who must be happy with four of their artists on the list (Blightman, Campbell, Claydon and Noonan), while a few prominent London galleries are nowhere to be seen.
This year’s show is subtitled ‘In the Days of the Comet’, after H.G. Wells’ 1906 novel of the same name. According to the curators: ‘The story charts the appearance of a comet over the UK that releases a green gas creating a “great change” in all mankind, turning it away from war and exploitation towards rationalism and a heightened appreciation of beauty. We are interested in the recurrent nature of the comet as a symbol of how each version of the present collides with the past and the future and the work of the artists in British Art Show 7, in many different ways, contest assumptions of how “the now” might be understood.’
Follow links below to articles from the frieze archive:
Charles Avery
Karla Black
Becky Beasley
Juliette Blightman
Duncan Campbell
Varda Caivano
Spartacus Chetwynd
Steven Claydon
Cullinan Richards
Matthew Darbyshire
Milena Dragicevic
Luke Fowler
Michael Fullerton
Alasdair Gray
Brian Griffiths
Roger Hiorns
Ian Kiaer
Anja Kirschner & David Panos
Sarah Lucas
Christian Marclay
Simon Martin
Nathaniel Mellors
Haroon Mirza
David Noonan
The Otolith Group
Mick Peter
Gail Pickering
Olivia Plender
Elizabeth Price
Karin Ruggaber
Edgar Schmitz
Maaike Schoorel
George Shaw
Wolfgang Tillmans
Sue Tompkins
Phoebe Unwin
Tris Vonna-Michell
Emily Wardill
Keith Wilson
The artist list for the seventh edition of the British Art Show – which takes place every five years and tours to four different cities across the UK – has been announced. Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton (a contributing editor of frieze) , this year’s BAS opens at Nottingham Contemporary (pictured above) and will tour to the Hayward Gallery, then venues in Glasgow and Plymouth. This is apparently the first time in 20 years that the exhibition – which was originally intended to take art to ‘the regions‘ – will be coming to London.
The BAS has kind of a spotty history: the first edition, which opened in Sheffield in 1979 and was selected by the FT‘s art critic, William Packer, was criticized for its predilection for established white male artists; in 1995, a large portion of the show was seen as being too closely aligned with Charles Saatchi’s collection. As Neil Mulholland wrote in frieze four years ago:
‘An attempt to celebrate the resurgence of a ‘British’ art that had allegedly been repressed by the Modern Movement, the BAS was part of a reactionary Postmodernism that included Margaret Thatcher’s sabre-rattling, Merchant–Ivory costume dramas, Peter Fuller’s young-fogey Marxism and working-class girls with Princess Di haircuts. Such dusty ‘British’ values were, of course, specifically rooted in a south-eastern English aristo-bucolic mindset. This arrière-garde was quickly usurped by the New Object Sculpture and New Image of the 1980s (BAS 2) and the Brit Art of the 1990s (BAS 4).’
I’m more hopeful about this year’s edition: the artist list is strong, if low on big surprises. A few quick observations: while the gender balance isn’t quite the 50/50 of Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker’s BAS 6, it’s not bad, and there’s a definite tendency towards film (Duncan Campbell, Emily Wardill, Kirschner & Panos, Otolith, Luke Fowler) and sculpture (Karla Black, Steve Claydon, Roger Hiorns, Ian Kiaer etc) that seems to me fairly reflective of what’s going on in the UK at the moment, despite the relative lack of performance. There are some crossovers with the Tate Triennial – Charles Avery, Spartacus Chetwynd, Matthew Darbyshire, Nathaniel Mellors, David Noonan, Olivia Plender, Tris Vonna-Michell – but not as many as may have been expected (surprising that Ryan Gander hasn’t been featured in either?). The best-represented gallery is, by my count, Hotel, who must be happy with four of their artists on the list (Blightman, Campbell, Claydon and Noonan), while a few prominent London galleries are nowhere to be seen.
This year’s show is subtitled ‘In the Days of the Comet’, after H.G. Wells’ 1906 novel of the same name. According to the curators: ‘The story charts the appearance of a comet over the UK that releases a green gas creating a “great change” in all mankind, turning it away from war and exploitation towards rationalism and a heightened appreciation of beauty. We are interested in the recurrent nature of the comet as a symbol of how each version of the present collides with the past and the future and the work of the artists in British Art Show 7, in many different ways, contest assumptions of how “the now” might be understood.’
Follow links below to articles from the frieze archive:
Charles Avery
Karla Black
Becky Beasley
Juliette Blightman
Duncan Campbell
Varda Caivano
Spartacus Chetwynd
Steven Claydon
Cullinan Richards
Matthew Darbyshire
Milena Dragicevic
Luke Fowler
Michael Fullerton
Alasdair Gray
Brian Griffiths
Roger Hiorns
Ian Kiaer
Anja Kirschner & David Panos
Sarah Lucas
Christian Marclay
Simon Martin
Nathaniel Mellors
Haroon Mirza
David Noonan
The Otolith Group
Mick Peter
Gail Pickering
Olivia Plender
Elizabeth Price
Karin Ruggaber
Edgar Schmitz
Maaike Schoorel
George Shaw
Wolfgang Tillmans
Sue Tompkins
Phoebe Unwin
Tris Vonna-Michell
Emily Wardill
Keith Wilson
