Exhibitions
Small Wonders
Group Exhibition Small Wonders with The London Group
Croydon Art Space
41 Lower Abiscombe Road
Capturing The Fleeting Essence Of Childhood
The exhibition is an intimate exploration of Marenka Gabeler's deeply evocative children's portraiture. The exhibition is designed to immerse visitors in the delicate, transient nature of childhood, as seen through Gabeler's eyes. Her portraits, which capture the innocence, curiosity, and fleeting emotionsof children, invite viewers to reflect on their own childhood memories and the passage of time.
The exhibition shows Gabeler's oil portraits, pencil and ink drawings of children. They are displayed in a way that encourages the viewer to move fluidly between the works, much like the fleeting nature of childhood essence they depict.
Preview Thursday 10th October 17.00-19.00
Opening Times Mo - Sa 10.00-18.00 Sunday 11.00-17.00
Stillness in Movement
PRESS RELEASE STILLNESS IN MOVEMENT
‘Not known, because not looked for But heard, half heard in the stillness Between two waves of the sea’
from Four Quartets by T S Eliot
These three lines from Eliot’s epic poem were the starting point of The London Group’s
latest, and perhaps most evocative exhibition, Stillness in Movement.
Its themes and offshoots are explored by 74 London Group members - the stillness before dawn; chance encounters that are frozen time; the anticipation and pause before a performance; the stillness between breaths...
An overriding narrative is that of nature changing and resting. In her gravure print, ‘Botanical Beach’, J. Yuen Ling Chiu depicts the stillness and movement of water: ‘Every day the water recedes... underneath granite outcroppings and along stretches of sandstone, tide pools form... every day the water returns.‘
There is a palpable energy running through this two-part show - Alexandra Harley’s sculpture, ‘Mariner Red’, with its cascading ceramic shapes and dancing colours; Barbara Beyer’s powerful, dark sculpture ‘Wave’ which conveys weight and balance within a stopped motion; James Faure Walker’s archival digital print, ‘Jupiter’, an abstract work which exudes both stillness and movement.
The exhibition also speaks of the moments in which art is created. Charlotte C Mortensson’s photograph, ‘May Pen cemetery’, is a cross section in working time - transfixed by the beauty of Trench Town’s concrete graves, the artist is unable to look away.
Diverse media are embraced in Parts 1 and Part 2 of Stillness in Movement - painting, print, drawing, photography, sculpture, olfactory art, film and video, embroidery and fabric work. Interestingly, Victoria Arney’s ‘Birdland’, employs still images in the form of cyanotypes and photographs to create a moving image film. It is a magical depiction of earth’s surfaces and bird migration.
Finally, the very notion of stillness is challenged by David Redfern with his submission, ‘An Atom’. The artist points out, ‘like the universe, an atom is in constant dynamic movement. The only time it is still is when it is imagined.’
The London Group was formed in 1913 and is one of the oldest artists’ collectives in the world. Founder members include Walter Sickert, Sylvia Goss, Ethel Sands, Jacob Epstein. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Lucien Pissaro.
Venue Bermondsey Project Space, 183-185 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3UW Dates PART 1: 17-21 September
PART 2: 24-28 September
Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 6pm www.thelondongroup.com
Landscapes - Sculpture Exhibition
Landscapes - Scultpure Exhibition
The London Group
Waterloo Festival
The London Group is delighted to present Landscapes, a free outdoor sculpture exhibition in St John’s Churchyard in partnership with St John’s Church and the Waterloo Festival.
The festival theme, “Gardens, Rivers and Marshes”, celebrates the early life of Waterloo and North Lambeth. Unlike Vauxhall to the South and Blackfriars to the East, this area took until the 19th century to develope into a dense neighbourhood. Prior to that, it was hot to fields, marshes, and wharfs. It was also well known for its pleasure gardens, including Cuper’s Gardens, and Ashley’s Circus, the first modern circus. This theme not only delves into Waterloo’s pre 19th century past but also highlights its current role as a pivotal urban centre. It is a celebration of ourgreen spaces and neighbourhood as wel as a chance to reflect on our environmental challenges.
The London Group have distilled this into the theme “Landscapes,” which the exhibiting artists hav interrogated from different perspectives and in different mediums. These include traditional, poetic, emotional and urban to name but a few. Barbara Beyer’s installation “Best Intentions” references young urban trees strapped between poles to supprt their early years growth. They need this support as they are taken out of their natural environment and the whole contraption reveals our ambiguous relationship to the landscape. Marenka Gabeler explores the landscape of emotions with a series of small sculptures that are to hang from, or be placed among the branches of a tree. The pieces are imprints of the negative shapes her hands make when feeling intense emotions.
This will be The London Group’s fourth sculpture exhibition in St John’s Churchyard as part of th Waterloo Festival.
Cradle
CRADLE
20 June - 14 July 2024
Private Viewing 20 June, 6pm - 9pm
28 Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, E8
Anne Berg, Annabel Emson, Camilla Emson, Marenka Gabeler, Clementine Keith-Roach, Hannah Rowan
Curate by Anna Souter
Cradle positions the maternal body as a site for exploring ecologies of care, resilience, and healing. Bringing together six artists working across a variety of media, the exhibition draws out themes of vessels, containment, and cradling, asking questions about how we hold our children in physical and psychological ways even as our bodies are simultaneously porous containers for our own pasts, emotions, and traumas. The exhibition attempts to give equal weight to frequently trivialised notions such as familial love and the everyday labour of raising children, as well as to formal concerns regarding the boundaries between figuration and abstraction and the properties of artistic materials. Cradle further considers motherhood as a route for engaging with the multivalence of existence within an environment, centring the maternal gaze as a method of re-examining the self as something leaky and unbounded, vibrantly emerging within the complex interconnected webs of our ecosystems.
111 Not Out
111 Not Out: The London Group (1913-2024)
Each of the 48 participating members has created work in response to one of the 32 founder members that most appeals to them in terms of personality and art practice. A QR-coded picture and a short explanatory text will appear alongside their work.