Contemporary Still Life

Guildhall Art Gallery 7 Sep 2017 – 2 Apr 2018 cityoflondon.gov.uk/naturemorte © the artist. Photo: C Lebedinsky paper maché, polyester yarn Jim Skull, Mr Smith , 2009 CONFRONT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN. Explore the transience of time and the challenges of mortality as the 16th-century tradition of still life meets Nancy Fouts, Rabbit with Curlers modern art. Featuring 100 works by major international taxidermy rabbit, 2010 © the artist contemporary artists - including Michael Craig-Martin, Polly Morgan and Gabriel Orozco, as well as London-based artists - this exhibition goes beyond the two-dimensional and invites you to pause and look anew at the human condition. cityoflondon.gov.uk/naturemorte

Events: Late Night View with music and bar: 16 Feb Cindy Wright, Nature Morte 2, 2010 oil on linen, courtesy of the artist and Curator Talks: 14 Sep, 12 Oct, 16 Nov, 14 Dec, 11 Jan, 8 Feb, Johan Willemen © the artist 22 Mar; 1pm-1.45pm FREE Please visit website for further events and full details, including how to book

Admission £8, concessions £6

Marc Quinn, Gobi Desert Bloom, 2011 Opening Courtesy Marc Quinn studio Mon-Sat 10am-5pm; Sun 12noon-4pm © Marc Quinn studio Getting there Guildhall Art Gallery, Guildhall Yard London EC2V 5AE Moorgate, Bank, Mansion House and St Paul’s Guildhall Art Cannon Street, Moorgate, Liverpool Street, Gallery City Thameslink & Blackfriars

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@GuildhallArt /visitthecity /GuildhallArtGallery MOCA London Museum of Contemporary Art113 Bellenden Road London SE15 4QY Nature Morte 44.207.771.9778 www.mocalondon.co.uk Contemporary Still life [email protected]

Guildhall Art Gallery, Guildhall Yard, London EC2V 5AR Dates: Thursday 7th September 2017 – Monday 2nd April 2018

Nature Morte seeks to illustrate how leading artists of the 21st century have reinvigorated still life, a genre previously synonymous with the 16th and 17th centuries. This major exhibition will be one of the largest ever presented at the Guildhall Art Gallery with works displayed by artists including Mat Collishaw, Michael Craig-Martin, Gabriel Orozco and Marc Quinn.

The exhibition is the final stop on a highly acclaimed European tour, and the only opportunity for UK audiences to view this show. The London exhibition will also be augmented with a number of new works from London-based artists including Clare Twomey and Michael Raedecker.

The still life, or nature morte, has been a constant subject throughout the history of art, its significance changing over time. As an independent genre of painting, the still life came into its own in the mid- seventeenth century when the Flemish term stilleven first came to be applied to oil paintings characterised by their tight focus on an assortment of objects sitting on a flat surface. Nature Morte is very different in tone from exhibitions we would usually expect to see at Guildhall with over 100 pieces from different disciplines going beyond the two-dimensional, including sculpture, digital, and sound.

Nature Morte displays a visually enticing selection of artworks as viewers are confronted with the questions, what is real and what is representative. Cindy Wright’s paintings of food challenge the viewer with the reality that eating meat and fish comes at a cost, the death of once-living creatures. The bloody, gutted fish coiled within a goldfish bowl stares out of the frame in an accusatory fashion. Meanwhile, Nancy Fouts incorporates taxidermy animals into her surreal works; Still life + real life (2011) is a seemingly classic still life of a flower arrangement yet on closer inspection a painterly collage with butterflies emerges.

This exhibition also includes prominent British artists such as Mat Collishaw; his startling photograph Last Meal on Death Row, Texas (Juan Soria), (2011) is part of a series staged to resemble seventeenth-century depictions of food or lavish spreads. In actual fact it documents the last meals requested by prisoners on death row in the United States. Each work is named after the prisoner who asked for the featured dish for their last meal.

Graham Packham, chairman of the City of London Corporation’s Culture, Heritage and Libraries Committee, comments

‘Nature Morte’ at Guildhall Art Gallery will put a modern spin on still life which, for many people, conjures up images of food, wine glasses, flowers and dead animals in art work dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries. The artists featured in this new show, which will take over the gallery’s main exhibition spaces, will bring still life right up-to-date with sculpture, sound, and digital art. With over 100 pieces of visually engaging contemporary art work, ‘Nature Morte’ will be a must-see for all art lovers.

Contemporary works in Nature Morte explore the timeless themes of life, death and the irrevocable passing of time in our modern world. The artworks invite us to pause and reconsider what it means to be human. The exhibition puts a new spin on the traditional topics of still-life - flora, fauna, the domestic object, food and vanitas.

Nature Morte is based on Michael Petry’s recent Thames & Hudson book of the same name. It brings together historic still life paintings and contemporary art works that seek to use the language of the past for modern audiences.

Michael Petry, curator and director of Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) London, comments,

‘It is a great privilege to present London’s ever expanding art audience with the final version of what has been a great exhibition tour. We are so excited about the new version created just for the Guildhall Art Gallery and look forward to sharing it as it is the culmination of a wonderful three year project.’

Nature Morte has been assembled by MOCA London.

Chief Curator: Dr Michael Petry (MOCA London) Curators: Roberto Ekholm (MOCA London) and Katherine Pearce (Guildhall Art Gallery)

Contemporary artist: Peter Abrahams, Sue Arrowsmith, Annie Attridge, Emma Bennett, Maurizio Bongiovanni, Aziz+Cucher, Kim Baker, Conrad Bakker, Barnaby Barford, Berthold Bell, Jan Kjetil Bjørheim, Elaine Bradford, Claudia Carr, Per Christian Brown, Mat Collishaw, Marcus Cope, Michael Craig-Martin, John Dugdale, Roberto Ekholm, Saara Ekström, Simon English, Nancy Fouts, Nick Fox, Ana Genovés, Ori Gersht, Helena Goldwater, Rigoberto A. Gonzalez, Cynthia Greig, Martin Gustavsson, James Hart Dyke, Jefferson Hayman, Paul Hazelton, Todd Hebert, Renata Hegyi, Bill Jacobson, Alexander James, Peter Jones, Darren Jones, Kate Joyce, John Kaine, Edward Kay, Rob Kesseler, Sally Kindberg, Alana Lake, Janne Malmros, Carol Marin- Pache, Livia Marin, Nils-Erik Mattsson, Caroline McCarthy, Aidan McNeill, Damien Meade, Lisa Milroy, John Mitchell, Polly Morgan, Museum Clausum, Carlos Noronha Feio, Dermot O’Brien, Gabriel Orozco, Bruno Pacheco, Guillaume Paris, Michael Petry, Philip Pirolo, Marc Quinn, Michael Raedecker, Victoria Reynolds, Eric Rhein, Miho Sato, Rebecca Scott, Andro Semeiko, Jane Simpson, Jim Skull, Matt Smith, Rob Smith, Jennifer Steinkamp, Richard Stone, Jane Telford, Yuken Teruya, Cammie Toloui, Clare Twomey, Maciej Urbanek, Mathew Weir, James White, Kraig Wilson, Cindy Wright

Historic: Henri Fantin-Latour, Pieter Claesz, Floris van Schooten, Willem Kalf, Thomas Sidney Cooper, Arthur Paine Garratt, Vera Cunningham, George Walter Harris, Pieter van de Venne

Cindy Wright Nature Morte 2, 2010 oil on linen © the artist The City of London Corporation, which owns and manages Guildhall Art Gallery, invests £80m every year in heritage and cultural activities of all kinds. It is the UK’s largest funder of culture after the government, the BBC, and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Notes to Editors Location Guildhall Art Gallery and London’s Roman Amphitheatre, Guildhall Yard, London EC2V 5AR, 020 7332 3700

Opening Hours Monday - Saturday, 10am-5pm, Sunday 12-4pm

Admission Standard ticket - £8 (concessions £6)

Free to the Gallery’s permanent collection and the Amphitheatre

Getting there – The closest tube stations are Bank (on the Central, Northern, District and Circle and DLR lines), St Paul’s (on the Central line), Mansion House (on the Circle and District lines) and Moorgate (on the Northern, Hammersmith and City, Circle and Metropolitan lines). The nearest rail station is Liverpool Street.

Twitter @GuildhallArt

Website http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/guildhallartgallery

Events

Curator Talks Join a talk from an Art Gallery Curator on the artworks within the exhibition. Thursday 1pm-1.45pm

• 14 September • 12 October • 16 November • 14 December • 11 January • 8 February • 22 March

Exhibition late view

• 16 February

Guildhall Art Gallery Guildhall Art Gallery was established in 1886 as 'a Collection of Art Treasures worthy of the capital city'. See works dating from 1670 to the present, including seventeenth century portraits, Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces and a fascinating range of paintings documenting London's dramatic history.

General admission to Guildhall Art Gallery is FREE; however, an entrance fee may be charged for some exhibitions, with concessionary rates for senior citizens, registered unemployed and registered disabled. Call 020 7332 3700 / textphone 020 7332 3803 for a daily recorded message or for more information.

The City of London Corporation The City of London Corporation provides local government and policing services for the financial and commercial heart of Britain, the 'Square Mile'. In addition, the City Corporation has three roles: • To support London’s communities by working in partnership with neighbouring boroughs on economic regeneration, education and skills projects. In addition, the City of London Corporation’s charity City Bridge Trust makes grants of around £20 million annually to charitable projects across London and we also support education with three independent schools, three City Academies, a primary school and the world-renowned Guildhall School of Music and Drama. • To help look after key London’s heritage and green spaces including Tower Bridge, Museum of London, Barbican Arts Centre, City gardens, Hampstead Heath, Epping Forest, Burnham Beeches, and important ‘commons’ in south London. • The City of London Corporation also support and promote the ‘City’ as a world-leading financial and business hub, with outward and inward business delegations, high-profile civic events and research-driven policies all reflecting a long-term approach. See www.cityoflondon.gov.uk for more details.

MOCA London The Museum of Contemporary Art, London was founded in 1994 as a project based museum. MOCA London launched a series of international exhibitions that incorporated sculpture, video, painting, photography and installation. Projects were curated for virtual and specific sites. In January 2004 MOCA London opened a project space in South London in the Bellenden Renewal Area to initiate a series of exhibitions that were locally based but global in focus. The Project Space exists to offer established and emerging artists the possibility of making non-commercial work, developing the projects over various periods of time to suit both the artist and MOCA London. This co-operative style of working means that the Project Space has no formal exhibition structure, and works are in situ when they are ready. MOCA London will host a series of exhibitions to compliment the Guildhall Nature Morte exhibition. These shows will present solo Showcases for artists in the book and exhibition. MOCA London is conveniently located in the heart of Bellenden road, 5 minutes walk from Peckham Rye Station

For more information, see www.moca.london Twitter: @mocalondon1 contact: [email protected] or [email protected]