6.15 pm Henry Moore Institute Nice Style: The World’s First Pose Band

6.45 pm BlipBlipBlip Leeds United

Meet at Project Space Leeds at 5.30. For more information please contact gill@pavilion.org.uk or 0113 343 2718. The Art Walk is free and open to all. If you have access requirements please get in touch in advance as access varies between venues.

6.00 pm Wild Pansy Press Project Space The Multistand – Nehman Sie Doch die Blaue Pille! by Barbara Ryan

6.30 pm Leeds Art Gallery Northern Art Prize

Barbara Ryan is an artist, writer, perfumier and neurolinguistics researcher, based in England and the former German Democratic Republic. Her recent work explores the nature of synaesthesic perception of time, space and her olfactory to colour cross wiring modalities.

The Multistand will be in residence within the Wild Pansy’s ‘Magnolia Room and is the portal for ‘Time Junkies’ everywhere: Part Pharmacy, part Imbiss and part Library; ‘The Multistand’ invites you to take The Blue Pill as opposed to The Red; The Blue Pill being the Synaesthesic Key to Time and Memory – Past and Future. The Multistand warns that the Red Pill, like the infamous ‘Red Shoes’ will only lead you back to a contrived and delusional virtuality.

The Northern Art Prize

Exhibition presenting the work of four artists; Liadin Cooke, Leo Fitzmaurice, James Hugonin and Richard Rigg, shortlisted for this years’ Northern Art Prize.

United Enemies

United Enemies examines the problem of sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s, presenting work by over fifty artists made in a period when the very idea of sculpture was radically contested.

5.30 pm Armley Mills Looking for Lantern Lane by Carol Stevens & exhibition of Kalee projectors.

6.30 pm Lyric Picture House Lucy Skaer: Film for an abandoned projector (commissioned by Pavilion).

Meet at the entrance to Armley Mills at 5.30 pm. Please note that there is a 20 minute walk between the Mills and the Lyric. Parking is available at each venue if you would prefer to drive.
Bus no. 5 stops directly outside Armley Mills and goes from stop S7 at Leeds Railway Station every 20 minutes. There are regular buses returning to Leeds from outside the Lyric.
For more information please contact gill@pavilion.org.uk or 0113 343 2718

More about the exhibitions:

Looking for Lantern Lane by Carol Stevens

The film is the outcome of a residency by artist Carol Stevens at the Millspace. Carol became interested in the route that mill workers used to use to walk to work and began hunting for Lantern Lane after she came across this named route on the Leodis website. The film traces a morning walk along the route of this lane that no longer exists. Find out more about Carol’s residency here: http://millspace.notepadwebdevelopment.com/

At Armley Mills we will also have an introduction to the Kalee projectors that inspired Skaer’s work showing at the Lyric.

Film For An Abandoned Projector by Lucy Skaer

In the darkness of the derelict Lyric House in the Armley area of Leeds, the cinema’s old Kalee projector plays a new 35mm film. Specific to its place, Skaer’s sculptural film work is the imagined subconscious of the projector itself … Through repeated screenings, the film slowly bears witness to its own presentation through scratches and marks that visibly scar and efface the surface of the image. At the end of the project the cinema will once again be dormant.

In Film For An Abandoned Projector Lucy Skaer further explores her interest in the relationship between sculpture and film; between the machine and the resulting psychological space created by it. Skaer was inspired to develop the project when she learned that Leeds was the primary producer of cinema projection equipment in the mid twentieth century. Through its neglect, this precision optical instrument has slipped from the mainstream to become marginal, allowing different images and agendas to inhabit this usually commercial format.

Light Night takes place on Friday 7th October and features a whole host of exhibitions, performances and installations happening across Leeds city centre and University quarter. Leeds Art Walk have been working with 3 artists/artist collectives to bring you some special Light Night Artwalks that exist as interactive or performative events for you to participate in.

Her Side of the City – Audio Tour: by Conway & Young

This audio tour is an exercise in observation. Over the period of one hour, Conway & Young invite you to witness three Light Night events and in response to a series of audio prompts you will document your observations of the presence of women in Leeds city centre on a report card. Your report card, along with others, will be sent for inclusion in the Feminist Archive North, to form part of a documentation of women in Leeds over the period of one hour on the 7th of October 2011.

Leeds Monster Trespass by Andrew Wilson

Six invisible monsters are living in Leeds city centre. Using Advanced Monstrology skills find and observe them all and earn your Monster Spotters’ badge. Suitable for families and grown ups, but one of your group will need an iPhone. Download the app “Free All Monsters!” and meet Andrew Wilson on leeds Town Hall steps at 7pm or 8.30pm or self-guide any time using the app.

All Together – A collective walking tour by Harold Offeh

Meet performance artist Harold Offeh on the Civic Hall steps, Millennium Square at 6.30 pm or 8.00 pm for a walk that explores the dynamics and possibilities of a collective body of individuals to activate the urban environment at night. Walkers will participate in a number of collective activities that will transform and shift perceptions of different spaces. The tour will start and end in the open public forum of Millennium Square before talking in some of Leeds more forgotten backstreets and dead spaces. In the midst of the spectacle of Light Night and wider over lit cityscape there will be an attempt to locate the heart of Leeds’ darkness, by finding under lit and dark urban spaces.

6.15 pm Leeds College of Art (Vernon St): The Paradise of Individuality & Alex Farrar: Catalogue Available

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More about the exhibitions:

Mike Oakes

Mike will be showing a series of photographs documenting Clarence Dock in Leeds.

http://www.michaeljoakes.com/

Catalogue Available

For ‘Catalogue Available’, Alex Farrar proposed that his exhibition catalogue be expanded to include all the artworks currently in the Vernon Street building. The resulting publication reveals a found-exhibition of 30 works made in the past 50 years by over 25 artists, present at the time of Farrar’s solo exhibition.

Featuring the college’s hanging collection and on going temporary exhibitions, the catalogue also documents many clandestine projects which remain in the building long after their makers have left. These latent exhibits were researched by a group of former students, responsible for collecting verbal accounts of the mythical works that persist in the fabric of the building.

The project will be accessible through a single hand-printed book that will be permanently shelved in the College’s Vernon Street library. During the preview of the exhibition, a one-off tour of the exhibition will be led by Georgia Dennison.

The Paradise of Individuality

Graphic Design and Artists’ Books
“…the paradise of individuality…”, George Santayana’s description of graphic design, is an exhibition of artists’ books celebrating the breadth and versatility of graphic design from hand-set type to hand-drawn zines, comic art and illustration. It includes complete facsimile prints of the hugely influential De Stijl journal, highlighting the typographic work of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. They will be shown alongside artists’ publications from Nobrow Press and Ensixteen Editions, and book works by Andrew Morrison, Jane Kennelly, Michael Caine, Richard Long and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

The exhibition is a small sample of books from Leeds College of Art’s Special Collections in the Vernon Street Library.

Tacita Dean

This film study of the artist Mario Merz complements the exhibition Mario Merz: What Is to Be Done? showing in the main galleries. There will also be the chance to see the Mario Merz exhibition for those who missed it on the Art Walk last time. The film is accompanied by ‘Blind Pan (five monochrome landscapes)’, a set of five drawings made by Tacita Dean in 2004 that are part of the Leeds Museums and Galleries sculpture collection, which is managed in partnership with the Institute.

Tacita Dean is one of Britain’s most significant artists. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998, and in Autumn 2011 she will fill Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with a new work, the twelfth in the prestigious Unilever series of commissions. In 1997 her work was shown in At One Remove, the first contemporary group exhibition to be mounted at the Institute.

Dean’s work is concerned with the sculptural properties of light and space, which she explores through drawing, film and sound. As well as making films, Dean works with sound, photography and drawing to navigate interpretations and narratives of history.

Meet at 5.30 at PSL [Project Space Leeds]. This month the walk will involve approximately 15 minutes of walking in total, see below for a map of our route.

The Leeds Art Walk is a monthly tour of exhibitions in Leeds led by Pavilion and artist Amelia Crouch. The Leeds Art Walk takes place on the first Wednesday of every month and is free and open to all.

For more information please contact gill@pavilion.org.uk or 0113 242 5100

More about the exhibitons:

Young Hunters

An exhibition by young people inspired by the Artemis collection and the Hunter Gatherer exhibition at PSL.

Between May and July 2011, PSL partnered young people (15-17 years old) with their own mentor, all of whom are professional artists. The aim of the project has been to give young people an insight into how professional artists work and to give them space and time to think and create work themselves as artists.

Damien Hirst, Artist Rooms

A major new exhibition of work by Damien Hirst forms part of the national ARTIST ROOMS programme which will see collections of modern and contemporary art held by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland going on display at venues around the country.

Hirst has strong links with Leeds, as he grew up in the city and also attended Leeds College of Art and Design before shooting to national and international prominence in the mid-1990s with his groundbreaking and controversial use of animals preserved in formaldehyde in many of his works.

The Leeds Art Gallery exhibition will be the first dedicated display of Hirst’s work ever seen in Leeds, and will trace the artist’s career from his student days to his later works after he had established himself as one of the world’s highest profile artists. The key ideas behind his career – birth, illness, death and religion – will all be identifiable in the display, and it will include one of his seminal works ‘Away from the Flock’ which was first exhibited in 1994 at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

A Series of Artworks Carefully Arranged

Inspired by Damien Hirst’s Artist room, an exhibition of gallery artworks selected by young people studying Visual Communication at Leeds College of Art

“We are a group of self-selected students studying BA (Hons) Visual  Communications at Leeds College of Art, invited by the Gallery to curate an exhibition inspired by ARTIST ROOMS: Damien Hirst.

Since the project first began in September 2010, we have had many meetings, workshops and conversations, both as a team and alongside Gallery staff. We have worked on all areas of exhibition organisation and curatorial practise including: theme development, selection of artworks, exhibition display and interpretation. Two of us will be working with audiences to stimulate enjoyment and exploration of our exhibition theme over the summer.

Visits to the Gallery stores and conversations with the Gallery’s Curator of Contemporary Art, greatly influenced the final choices for our exhibition. In the end, we selected 19 artworks from Leeds Museums and Galleries’ collections, bringing together historical and contemporary Art. In the exhibition and Artspace are interactive artworks presenting our own responses to the theme. These invite our audiences to become part of the dynamic of the exhibition; a performance in itself.”

Mario Merz: What is to be done?

Mario Merz (1925 – 2003) was a leading figure of Arte Povera, a term referring to a loose grouping of Italian artists who turned their attention to their surrounding environment in the immediate post-war period. Merz rethought the possibilities of sculpture by observing the world around him. The title of this exhibition is a question central to Merz’s approach to art making. His work was driven by asking: what can an artist do in the face of a precarious future?

Along with other Arte Povera artists, Merz turned away from representing modernity for its own sake, instead seeking to explore the role of art in day-to-day human experience, turning to materials that were ready at hand. In Merz’s case, these include glass, metal tubing, blankets, bottles, wood shavings and neon, the focus of the selection of works in this exhibition.  His sculptures also respond to systems that form our natural surroundings, such as the mathematical Fibonacci sequence.

The exhibition presents twelve works made between 1966 and 1977; many have been rarely exhibited in the last four decades. ‘Automobile pierced by neon’ (1969-82) is a Simca 1000 car impaled with arrows of light from a neon tube; ‘What is to be done?’ (1968-73) poses the question of this exhibition’s title in neon on a bed of wax; and ‘Object hide yourself’(1968) is one of Merz’s distinctive igloos, built from bags filled with wood shavings circled by his own neon-lit handwriting.*

Merz began using neon in 1966, seeking to find a contrast between natural phenomena and the logical that would complicate and energise his chosen materials. The neon passes through different forms – here at the Henry Moore Institute these include a car, bottle, blankets, glass and wax. Merz described his use of neon operating as ‘a kind of thunderbolt that would enter objects’.

Alongside the selected works, two film portraits of the artist will be displayed, one by Gerry Schum (‘Lumaca’, 1970 from the Identifications series) and the other by Tacita Dean (‘Mario Merz’, 2002), who has recently been commissioned by Tate Modern to create the next installation in the Turbine Hall. Schum’s film shows Merz in a natural setting, drawing a snail spiral following the Fibonacci sequence directly on to the screen. Dean’s ‘Mario Merz’ shows the aging Merz in Tuscany, sitting in silence with a large pinecone in his hand. Both films are a study of light in space and form in nature – core ideas in Merz’s sculptural work.

To complement the main gallery show, on Thursday 27th October, there will be a one-day Mario Merz conference, The Politics of Protagonism, which looks at the social and political ambitions of Merz’s 1960s and 1970s work. Speakers include Lisa Le Feuvre, Nicholas Cullinan and Martin Holman. Additionally, there will also be a series of talks and an essay in the Institute’s Essays on Sculpture series.

Meet at 5.30 inside Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, the Parkinson Building, University of Leeds. This month the walk will involve approximately 20 minutes of walking in total, see below for a map of our route.

The Leeds Art Walk is a monthly tour of exhibitions in Leeds led by Pavilion and artist Amelia Crouch. The Leeds Art Walk takes place on the first Wednesday of every month and is free and open to all.

For more information please contact gill@pavilion.org.uk or 0113 242 5100

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More about the exhibitions

Carlos Nadal

Paintings in Yorkshire collections by the Expressionist Catalan painter Carlos Nadal (1917-1998), sometimes referred to as “the last of the Fauves”.

The Gallery at the University of Leeds brings together over 40 paintings and drawings in Yorkshire collections for this seminal exhibition. A range of his favourite subjects are selected, from rolling green landscapes, lively beach scenes, bold still life and figure studies, or ornate civic buildings – all in executed in his characteristically vibrant colours, wild brushstrokes and naïve style.

Joseph Gott in Leeds and Rome

One hundred and fifty years ago, at the age of seventy-five, Joseph Gott (1785-1860) of Calverley, near Leeds, died in Rome. He first arrived in the city in 1822, armed with a letter of introduction from the painter Thomas Lawrence to the greatest living sculptor, Antonio Canova. He settled there, amongst other ambitious avant garde British sculptors, for whom Rome had become an artistic Mecca.

Gott maintained his early links with Leeds and visited the city several times throughout his career. Encouraged by the support of his relative Benjamin Gott, then the leading woollen manufacturer and art collector in Leeds, he attracted an enthusiastic Yorkshire clientele, who visited his studio in Rome, commissioned portraits and purchased other work.

This display, curated by Dr Terry Friedman, brings together sculptures by Joseph Gott in the Leeds collection, many of which were commissioned by Yorkshire families, as well as drawings, prints, books and archival material from local collections, which place the sculptor within the wider context of artistic events in Leeds and Rome.

Junction

Junction is a series of temporary commissions for Leeds City centre utilising the ubiquitous ‘junction box’ as its canvas. Everyday we walk by these neglected metal boxes without a second thought, but now Junction offers artists and designers the chance to transform these tired boxes into vibrant, intriguing and humorous interventions in street life.

6.15 pm Test Space: Humbola (B on map)

6.45pm ENJOY Art Space: A Bundle of Measures by Grischa Lichtenberger (C on map)

7.15 pm Henry Moore Institute: Savage Messiah: The Creation of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (D on map)

Meet at the entrance of Leeds College of Art (Blenheim Walk building) at 5.30 pm. This month the walk will involve approximately 45 minutes of walking in total, see below for a map of our route.

The Leeds Art Walk is a monthly tour of exhibitions in Leeds led by Pavilion and artist Amelia Crouch. The Leeds Art Walk takes place on the first Wednesday of every month and is free and open to all.

For more information please contact gill@pavilion.org.uk or 0113 242 5100

More about the exhibitions

Stephen Felmingham

“The work begins in the Cold War bunkers of the Royal Observer Corps in the landscapes of East Anglia, bringing together strands of enquiry that arise in my research, that of a sublime in tension with the everyday; the uncanny; the phenomenology of perception; place and psychoanalysis. This field work proceeds through drawing in situ, drawing from objects retrieved temporarily from the sites and from photographs”.

Stephen Felmingham studied MA Drawing at Wimbledon School of Art where he won the Postgraduate Drawing Prize. He was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2009, the Celeste Prize 2010 in New York and has recently exhibited at the Kulturhuset, Stockholm.

Rose Vickers

Paper-cut artist Rose Vickers trained in applied arts and on graduating worked mainly in three dimensions using wood and stone for large scale public and private commissions. However after making several series of work using light boxes, paper cutting seemed to just emerge as the appropriate technique to carry the pieces forward, and she still feels inspired by the transformative effect that light has on what is essentially a flat object. She says that a paper cut is something which involves not only the elements of drawing
but also those of making, requiring a certain kind of discipline, skill and process in its’ creation.

Humblola – The Illustrated Tombola of Humanity

A creative showcase of up & coming illustrators celebrating the art of portraiture through a tombola of human genre.

Humbola is a celebration of the diverse culture in our world, an appreciation and exploration of human genres. Humbola is a show off show, a chance to see a mass of talent in contemporary illustration and portraiture, as diverse as our culture.

A Bundle of Measures – Grischa Lichtenberger

Grischa Lichtenberger, born in Bielefeld 1983, is involved in a variety of arts such as writing, graphics, installations, video and music. ENJOY Art Space invited Lichenberger to do a two week residency to develop into an exhibition.

The title a Bundle of Measures derives from a German idiom that translates to – every one has to catch their own bundle.

www.grischa-lichtenberger.com

Savage Messiah: The Creation of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

This exhibition highlights the extraordinary ways in which the life of the French-born sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) entered mainstream culture.

Savage Messiah: The Creation of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, curated by Dr Jon Wood (Research Coordinator at the Henry Moore Institute), presents the original 1929 manuscript of H.S. Ede’s biographical novel, first published in 1930.

The exhibition looks at the ways in which the life and work of this twentieth-century sculptor was constructed through biographical narratives and, in turn through film.

Acquired by Leeds Museums & Galleries in 2000, the Ede manuscript will be displayed alongside Gaudier-Brzeska’s graphic representation of the Ezra Pound and his portrait bust of Horace Brodzky. These will be exhibited alongside film stills and posters from Ken Russell’s 1972 film adaptation.

Both Ede’s book and Russell’s film concentrate on the artist’s relationship with Sophie Brzeska, whose surname he took; a radical act for its time.

The exhibition highlights this, also shedding light on the relations between sculptor and writer, sculpture and text, how Gaudier represented two subsequent writers (Pound and Brodzky) and how various writers represented the life and work of Gaudier in print.

AMENDMENT: It was previously advertised that we would be attending the launch of ‘Writing (the) Space’, this was an error. The project opens on 4th but there is not a specific launch event. However, following the walk we can head down the road to 153 Woodhouse lane for  ‘No Sharp Objects,’ a one night only student exhibition.

5.30 – PSL: Hunter Gatherer
6.15 – Henry Moore Institute: Dead Calm
7.00 – Wild Pansy Press Project Space: Writing (the) Space plus 7.30 – No Sharp Objects: 153 Woodhouse Lane.

Meet at PSL [Project Space Leeds] at 5.30pm. Leeds Art Walk is free and open to all, booking is not required.

For more information contact: ameliacrouch@hotmail.com

More on the exhibitions

Hunter Gatherer

Nine artists from across the North of England have been invited to create new work in response to Artemis, an amazing collection of over 10,000 objects relating to world cultures, fine and applied art, science, natural history, textiles and costume, social history, childhood and more. Based in Holbeck, Leeds, the collection forms an art loan service for Education Leeds to which artists have been given exclusive access.

The title of the show ‘Hunter Gatherer’ refers to a term used by anthropologists to describe the way in which human beings collected food before the advent of agriculture. Here it references the artists and the processes they have employed to sift through the vast Artemis collection. The resulting works include sculpture, installation, film, prints and drawing which form part static exhibition and part on-going project within the space.

http://huntergathererpsl.tumblr.com/

Dead Calm: Jean-Marc Bustamante

Born in Toulouse in 1952, Bustamante has been a significant figure in the international art world since the mid-1980s, through his work and teaching. This exhibition, made especially for the Henry Moore Institute, brings together two areas of his practice, and explores the relationship between photography and sculpture.

Bustamante’s early work aspired to give photography the status of painting and can be compared to others of his generation – such as Jeff Wall and Thomas Struth – who deployed larger formats and new strategies to edge photography up the established hierarchy. Having given his photographs new scale and grandeur in his ‘Grands Formats’, Bustamante moved to give it weight and volume.  This development was clearly registered in work he made for the two villas designed by architect Mies van der Rohe in Germany’s industrial heartland, where bland photographs of industrial hinterlands were presented in frames of precious wood and integrated into carefully designed pieces of furniture.

These works have an ambiguous relationship with the functional and draw on established vocabularies of art and design. Despite their coolness and apparent detachment, the exhibition and accompanying text suggest that these works bring us close to something morbid; to the cemetery or tomb.  Empty spaces – photographs of the abandoned breeze-block building foundations of summer villas and pools, boxes or frames – have intimations which go beyond the purely aesthetic.

Bustamante’s clear, direct vision is characterised by an extraordinary ordinariness that allows us see its subject, the natural and the built worlds around us, in a new way. Whether object or image, Bustamante’s works operate as holes in our perception.  The exhibition’s title, Dead Calm, derives from the artist’s predilection for the fine days of summer, and links to the idea of a final resting place.

Writing (the) Space

WRITING (the) SPACE is an exhibition and event series that explores Charles Olson’s unique poetics of writing in contemporary performance related practice – in particular, the possibilities of performance writing in spatial and physical terms.  http://open-dialogues.blogspot.com/2011/03/writing-space.html

No Sharp Objects

For one night only, No Sharp Objects invites you to enter its own, distinct
environments. Acting as metaphors for structures in the art world and in wider society, these environments employ a variety of media and forms, from painting to installation to live performance, in order to create an exhibition that will define and explore the concept of boundaries. Created by a group of Leeds-based artists, No Sharp Objects takes apart and examines ideas of movement, access and privilege in a selection of situations created for you to experience.

Meet inside Leeds Town Hall (side entrance on Calverley St.) at 5.30pm.

For more information contact Gill at Pavilion
T > 0113 242 5100
E > gill@pavilion.org.uk

Booking is not essential but it does help us estimate numbers.

More on the exhibitions:

Leeds Town Hall: We will view 3 different artworks/projects at Leeds Town, focusing on the Town Hall and how people relate to its history. The exhibition is designed to celebrate this history as well as opening up the building to the public.

The first part of the exhibition is the Postcard Project. Postcards have been distributed round the city for people to fill in with their stories and memories of the Town Hall and post back. A few of the stories received so far include; dancing on the stage, getting married, being on the jury for a murder trial, attending Light Night and graduating here. The project and exhibition is a way of collecting and archiving the social history of the Town Hall. A local artist and creative writer have been holding workshops with community groups to produce detailed postcards using a range of creative writing and visual art techniques. Postcards have been completed by people ranging from age 5 to 70. Some of the completed cards can be seen on the project’s flickr site

‘Prepare to Cheer’ by Amelia Crouch is the second strand of the exhibition and is a site-responsive artwork that collates information relating to different functions of Leeds Town Hall. Presented as a series of 6 brass plaques, the artwork refers to both past and present, symbolic and functional uses of the Town Hall. Amelia is interested in commemorating cumulative, everyday or fabled activities alongside the grand events usually included in such inscriptions.

The 3rd strand of the exhibition will be a series of photographs taken by David Lindsay who spent a day at the Town Hall exploring and creating images of the spaces that the public don’t have access to, to try and tell a story of the history and character of the building. Dave was given a free reign as to where he could photograph, so was able to enter the places that allow the building to work, such as the old Victorian ventilation system. Other spaces tell a story of the people who have contributed to its character over the years, including the inside of the organ and the personal spaces occupied by those who have worked there.  Dave hopes that the images will give an overview of the building through its life, and its continual importance and significance to the city of Leeds.

Henry Moore:

Radical, experimental and avant garde, Henry Moore (1898-1986) was one of Britain’s greatest artists. This major exhibition will re-assert his position at the forefront of progressive twentieth-century sculpture, bringing together the most comprehensive selection of his works for a generation. Henry Moore in Leeds will present over 100 significant works including stone sculptures, wood carvings, bronzes and drawings.

Henry Moore will reveal the range and quality of Moore’s art in new ways – sometimes uncovering a dark and erotically charged dimension that challenges the familiar image of the artist and his work. Henry Moore first emerged as an artist in the wake of the First World War, in which he served on the Western Front. This exhibition will emphasise the impact on Moore’s work of its historical and intellectual contexts: the trauma of war, the advent of psychoanalysis and new ideas of sexuality, and the influence of primitive art and surrealism.

The recurring motif of the mother and child will be explored throughout the exhibition. Moore called it his ‘fundamental obsession’, and presented a complex vision of the maternal relationship, ranging from the nurturing bond of Mother and Child 1930-31 (Private Collection), to Suckling Child 1930 (Pallant House).

Untitled Billboard: Matthew Darbyshire has become known for his unravelling of various contemporary design tendencies in the fields of furniture, architecture, fashion and graphics, and has recently been making particular reference to the history and conventions of billboard advertising since the 1970s.

It is most appropriate then that he has been invited to make a work for a billboard in the bustling Railway Station. Sited amongst other typical product and service adverts the chameleonic status of Untitled Billboard (Leeds Station) could easily be mistaken for one of them. The day-glo paint bombs work not only with the wording of the caption but as compulsory post-millennial icing, masking the drab 1980s corporate, colourless ad language of cutesy animals and black retro fonts with tokenistic, upbeat, candy-coloured social appeal. With an eye on the techniques employed by art/Aids activists of the 1980s such as Barbara Kruger and Group Material, Darbyshire combines slogans from the hard-hitting Eighties HIV public health campaign posters with the innocuous, familiar toilet tissue adverts also from that period. While these issue-based adverts created widespread fear at the time, Aids is still a global pandemic and alongside noting a worrying return to the politics of the Eighties here in the UK, Darbyshire asks whether we have in fact regressed in our fight against HIV/Aids too.

Pre-Fab: Brendan Fletcher’s contemporary paintings expose the visual and semiotic similarities between fetishized devotional objects linked to spiritual worship and the logo which has become the bearer of a branded identity and a marker for taste, sensibility and social aspiration – for some, an object of near religious devotion.

An icon is a symbol, a famous person or thing considered as representing a set of beliefs or a way of life and an image lifted beyond the status of a mere logo. From the simple Apple to the Nike swoosh these ‘icon’s’ symbolize the ‘must-have’ items in our capitalist driven society.

His work draws upon the language of abstract painting but the mythic touch of the painter is erased through the industrial process of vacuum-forming. process. The choice of material is crucial. Plastic is synthetic, inexpensive, easy to manufacture and versatile. It has become a synonym for our ‘throw away’ culture siting Brendan Fletcher’s work somewhere between cool industrial minimalism and high kitsch.