03 Jan 2013

Music and Romantic Landscapes - NEO Bankside, London

Mary Mc Caughey and English Garden Lounging are delighted to announce Music and Romantic Landscapes, Winter, London 2012 as part of House of the Nobleman's Residency at NEO Bankside. The exhibition brings together artists who share a Romantic sensibility inspired by people in gardens and landscape.

My first meeting with Victoria Golembiovskaya, founder of House of the Nobleman, was in a restaurant near Green Park in Autumn 2008. Earlier that morning Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy had been announced and later that evening was Damien Hirst's Sotheby's auction.

Victoria showed me a drawing by Alexander Ponomarev of a Russian submarine emerging from the water by a Venetian Palazzo. The following summer the submarine, SubTiziano, arrived on the Grand Canal for the 53rd Venice Biennale.

The Romantic English tradition of landscape has always suggested continuity, the idea of a landscape not made but inherited and inspired by paintings and engravings of the sublime. House of the Nobleman evokes this idea of continuity – a sensibility that connects contemporary avant-garde artists with their predecessors across centuries, art forms and cultures. Palazzo Foscari, overlooking the Grand Canal, at the Venice Biennale in Summer 2009; Decimus Burton's Boswall House , designed under John Nash's Regent's Park masterplan, at Frieze in Autumn 2010 and 2011; and now in Richard Rogers' NEO Bankside, overlooking the River Thames, in House of the Nobleman the viewer can both stand in front of a painting and then gaze out through their grand windows on views that have inspired the greatest painters in history.

In On the Making of Gardens, first published in 1909, Sir George Sitwell writes on beauty:

'The mind... is always longing to be connected with the past, and dreading for itself confinement upon the plane of time, delights in evidences of the long continuance of nations, families and institutions, in hale and vigorous old age, in this fairy world of echo and suggestion where the Present never comes but to commune with the past, we feel the glamour of a Golden Age, of a state of society just and secure'.

That which is interesting is very real but it is the real that gives us the calm and luxury to look at a picture and enter a new world of imagination; to leave the real and turn to the ideal. In House of the Nobleman the real and the ideal, the painting in the room and the painted panorama through the window, the past and the present, the old art-world and the new, continuously meet and interplay, so we never see where either ends in the past or in the future; because as the sham rivers introduced into English Gardens by Capability Brown tell us, once the two ends of a river have been discovered they have lost forever their beauty and their ability to please.


Artists participating in Music and Romantic Landscapes include:

AEF+F - Russia

explore the possibilities of combining modern technology, Hollywood cinema, fashion photography, advertising and popular culture with the classical aesthetic of old masters' paintings. The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg held their mid-career retrospective in 2007. In recent years, they have exhibited worldwide including Cobra Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 4th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Tate and Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. AES+F are winners of the prestigious 2012 Kandinsky Art Prize (shared with Grisha Bruskin). www.aesf-group.org

Haluk Akakçe - Turkey

in Akakçe's paintings abstraction is not an end in itself, but a means to ask questions about the interplay between movement and stillness, the passing of time and the possibility of eternity, questions which indicate that his practice is essentially Romantic in its intellectual and spiritual nature. Important solo presentations include The Whitney Museum of American Art, (2002); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2003); Tate Britain, (2004); Museum Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City (2005).
www.galerist.com.tr

Isobel Brigham - UK

Born in England in 1963, Isobel studied at the Chelsea School of Art (BA Hons, Fine Art) and the Slade School of Fine Art (MA, Painting). She won 2nd prize at the BP Portrait Award in 1995, was awarded a bursary by The Prince of Wales Drawing School in 2001 and selected for The Threadneedle Figurative Prize in 2008, She lives and works in her studio off Portobello Road in London and is represented by Browse & Darby, London.

Sea Hyun Lee - South Korea

Korean artist Sea Hyun Lee works by using a manner of construction that is akin to collage, a constant and obsessive shuffling of recurring fragments. The series Between Red is a series of landscape paintings rendered in delicate washes of red. Large swaths of unmarked white meander between islands of crimson land. The blank spaces are harshly set against the carefully detailed fragments in red. Nonetheless, they cohere into the flawless totality that is created by each painting.

It is the fragmentation behind the landscape's seeming totality that is operating at the core of Lee's paintings. It is due to that fragmentation that these seemingly simple landscapes are able to evoke multiple dualities, a vast landslide of inconsistencies and fissures. This fundamental gesture of splitting, alongside its contrasting totality, is the uncanny tension that animates Lee's paintings, and that makes them compelling both on a conceptual and a purely aesthetic level. Sea Hyun Lee was born in 1967 in Geoje Island, Korea South.

Henry Krokatsis - UK

lives and works in London. Combining make-do opportunism with highly developed craft skill, Henry Krokatsis makes sculpture that explores our physical, emotional and intellectual reactions to enclosed architectural space. The work pulls us away from logic and rationality and towards the realm of childhood visions and dreams. Henry Krokatsis has recently exhibited in São Paulo and New York as well as the Hayward Gallery and the New Art Gallery Walsall.


Peter Newman - UK

Peter's photographs, sculptures, paintings and videos address a human relationship to the sky. For him, looking upwards is an inherently optimist gesture and something he compares to thinking about the future. As the artist has said:
'Gravity dictates the earth contains a buried past of dinosaurs and archeology, the surface reveals the activity of present daily life, but what is above is an empty field of possibility, a space in which to conceive and live the future.'
Peter Newman graduated Goldsmiths College in 1990.
www.peternewman.net

Şerban Savu - Romania

Şerban Savu paints the Romanian landscape, a topography where man lounges in nature. In depicting what is stereotypically perceived in terms of a diametric relationship between man and nature, Savu's portrayal of these forces takes its cue from Romanticism capturing moments of serene beauty, of people both at work and leisure, within the changing urban landscapes of Romania. His interior scenes depict people unaware of our gaze and absorbed in their own worlds, viewed through glass and embedded in compositions governed by architectural features. His exterior rural landscapes often portray solitary figures in the middle-distance, isolated yet revealing the romantic trope of the individual at the centre of life and art that crafts an expression of unique feelings and particular circumstances. www.plan-b.ro/index.php?/serban-savu/

Julian Simmons - UK

was born in London in 1971 and moved to Suffolk in 2007 where he is now living and working. He studied at Central St Martin's College of Art and at the RCA where he developed programmable electronic drawing machines and gained a Doctorate of Fine Art in the Philosophy of Tone and Inflorescence. He then taught at the RCA as a visiting lecturer and later worked with an Artificial Intelligence company. Simmons has been involved with photography for thirty years using 5x4' studio cameras as well as designing and making cameras and systems for radio-controlled aerial photography. In addition, he is an expert printmaker which lead to the creation of a unique process for pencil-drawn photographic prints. Most recent shows have been with Sarah Lucas in London, Brussels and Auckland in 2011, Situation, Sadie Coles HQ, 2012 and his most recent publication was PENETRALIA, in 2008.

Katherine Tulloh - UK

studied at Cambridge University and Chelsea College of Art. Through the creation of three-dimensional montages, which she lights, films, she creates fragmented, improvisatory animated narratives exploring the poetic languages of writers such as Poe and Baudelaire. Concentrating on the artist as seer and visionary she explores the cityscape and the inner territory of the self, the here and now and the world beyond. In her painting practice she aims creating a strange revelatory state through the confrontation of resonant symbols and intense colour. www.katherinetulloh.com

The exhibition will be accompanied by English Garden Lounging soundscapes.

NEO Bankside

NEO Bankside is an award winning £400m world-class residential scheme, developed by Native Land and Grosvenor and situated immediately adjacent to Tate Modern. The multi-award winning development, designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, comprises 217 premium residences arranged over four state of the art pavilions, set amongst a richly landscaped garden. The development's unique location at the heart of London's ribbon of culture puts the benefit of the South Bank on the doorstep door step of its residents, from Tate Modern and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre to the Southbank centre and Borough Market.

NEO Bankside was awarded 'Best Landscape Architecture in United Kingdom' and 'Best Landscape Architecture in London' at this year's International Property Awards. The development also took two Gold Awards at this year's national New Homes and Gardens Awards 2012, winning top prizes for the 'Best Communal Garden / Landscape', and 'Best Landscaped Urban Development. It has won Evening Standard's 2012 Grand Prix Award and The World's Best Development in 2011's International Property Awards for representing the very pinnacle of 21st century living.

Music and Romantic Landscapes is open from 2nd January until 12th January, 2013,
10 am – 5 pm, by appointment only. Private Views on New Year's Eve, strictly by invitation.
Mary Mc Caughey, +44 0 7931 425107, mary@englishgardenlounging.com