A roomful of paintings in Stephen Harwood’s distinctive style, straddling real life and dream (or is it nightmare?) Where the exact depiction, the clarity of the strokes, pulls us towards a sense of something missing. Maybe here and there the turbulence of the skies should be a clue. Look again.

These are views of the East End, just round the corner; but not ones we’ll necessarily recognise. A faceless terrace that used to be quite famous, the abandoned site of terrible industrial disease and struggle. You’d never know by looking.

Graffiti’d walls, padlocked gates, paths to who knows where. And messages everywhere, spelled-out calls to action, warnings, or secret codes we can take as misguided decoration of the public space, or the worst sort of criminal effrontery.

These are places we walk past and ignore with the only sign of life the upper stories of a distant tower block. Also faceless. In another world, green spaces, also unpeopled. And in the third of these worlds, left to our imagination, whatever it is that will replace every one of these solitudes, in days to come.

We’re used to seeing it in photographs, a modest part of the heritage industry: this is the way it was, grainy photos of unrecognisable streets with familiar names. Piccadilly Circus, garishly publicising forgotten soft drinks. ’Euston Arch (demolished)’.

Stephen Harwood is giving us something different. In a series of paintings made over the last few years, he offers us views of streets, buildings, walls, in this section of the East End. They mean nothing. Their importance is their insignificance. They matter because they will disappear. If edgelands have been defined as ‘the interfacial interzone between urban and rural’, these are the interface between today and tomorrow, decay and gentrification, neglect and profit. One day all these will be gated communities.

We’re used to seeing graffiti, watching it erase and evolve but we are now besieged by ‘street art’ carefully ‘curated’ and dutifully preserved. So-called re-generation has ossified real change. The beating heart has stopped. The paint has dried.

“…  la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel”

‘Le Cygne’ Charles Baudelaire

Studio 1.1 London
57a Redchurch Street E2 7DJ

All prints by Digitalarte Limited

www.coexistence.org
#CoExistence

First opening in approx 14 months 😱😀 was at the Sladmore Contemporary (@sladmorecontemporary) in the heart of London’s West End.

To accompany the CoExistence (@coexistence.story) exhibition taking place in the Royal Parks & Berkeley Square, artist George Butler (@georgebutlerillustration) has produced some amazing original artwork based on the theme of peaceful human-wildlife coexistence. From 15th June-23rd July an exhibition of previously unseen illustrated maps and prints depicting human-wildlife coexistence will be on display at Sladmore Contemporary, 32 Bruton Place (off Berkeley Square).

George Butler (@georgebutlerillustration) is an incredible, award-winning illustrator and published artist specialising in drawing conflict and current affairs for the digital and printed press. His work from the Syrian war is held in the National Archive at the V&A and in the National Army Museum.

All prints by Digitalarte Limited

Annely Juda Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of two interconnected bodies of work by Suzanne Treister. Treister has been a pioneer in the digital/new media/web-based field from the beginning of the 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds, and international collaborative organisations. Often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastic reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity.

SURVIVOR (F) and The Escapist BHST (Black Hole Spacetime) began as two independent projects until one day a portal opened between them, located somewhere inside a painting of an imaginary museum in outer space. In the exhibition the two projects are divided by a physical portal between the two main galleries.

All prints by Digitalarte Limited

THU 29 AUG – SUN 15 SEP

Which story do you want to tell?
There is nothing more powerful than a story and yet documentary photography storytelling has much to do with one’s perspective. Which story do you want to tell?

The works of fifteen resounding female photographers attests that images can drive social change, reframe harmful narratives and empower. These artists stimulate critical thinking about pressing local issues in relation to Female Lives and human rights alike. The exhibition tells a collection of very different stories, ranging from gender and feminism to sexuality, from communist grandmothers to rural lives and marginalised people such as refugees and LGBT. These photographs examine identity and human vulnerability. The works adopt a diversity of approaches to images ranging from fashion, theatre or landscape photography to post-war photojournalism. Coming from the Southeast Europe, many of these photographers are becoming household names in their native countries and internationally. Their accolades are well deserved in today’s world in which a single image can shift public opinion.

© Jelena Jankovic, “Halubian Bell Bearers”

© Boryana Katsarova, “Migrants Winter Journey”

© Glorija Lizde

© Mia Novakova

© Sanja Knezevic, “Uprooted Community”

PHOTOGRAPHERS:

Mia Novakova
Jelena Jankovic
Glorija Lizde
Imrana Kapetanovic
Boryana Katsarova
Marija Jankovic
Roxana Pop
Sanja Knezevic
Dijana Muminovic
Senja Vild
Andjela Petrovski
Jelena Zigic
Katja Goljat
Lazara Marinkovic
Marcella Zanki

Rich Mix >>
COBA >>

All prints by Digitalarte Limited

All prints by Digitalarte Limited

Denis O’Regan
Fine art limited edition prints
271 King Street
020 8067 5462
pictures@denis.uk
denis.uk

Open business hours
and by appointment

LARES FAMILIARES by Sonia Lenzi and LE POESIE DEI MURI by Gerry Badger – Exhibition opening – Thursday 21 March, 7pm

LARES FAMILIARES

Family relationships are the first ones we are confronted with and the domestic dimension is our starting point for that adventure called life. The meaning of our existence is therefore inherent in those relationships and places. In the Roman world, the lares were divinities who assured protection and luck for the families to whom they belonged. They were given an honoured place at the heart of the house, in a special shrine, the lararium. This practice bears more than a passing relationship with the neighbourhood and familial kiosks, the votive shrines in the old quarters of Naples.

The aim of this work it is not only to examine the fascinating link between these traditions, but to actually bring them together, and in essence demolish the centuries in between. History and culture are alternative, positive values that can heal the wounds created by the camorra or by difficult lives.

The lares of the Museum collection I chose, languishing in the Museum storerooms, and as wounded or forgotten as the people with whom I paired them, become three-dimensional photographic objects temporarily placed in shrines of the Quartieri Spagnoli, Rione Sanità, Forcella and Mercato. I also created contemporary lararia, so that the two traditions could be experienced side by side, as well as the memories of the people commemorated in the shrines.

In a further act of connectivity, the contemporary lares, which sat briefly in the shrines of Old Naples, have been given to the guardians of the kiosks. Hopefully, they will remain permanently in the selected shrines and bring their own bona fortuna directly from ancient Rome. This final performative action has been recorded by a video.

Sonia Lenzi is based in Bologna and in London. Her artistic practice has an interdisciplinary approach and involves interrelated themes, concerning identity and memories of people and places. She uses photography to recreate social relationships through signs, symbols, and gestures. She graduated firstly in Philosophy at the University in Bologna, then from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna with a degree in Painting, later graduating in Law and specializing in Administrative Sciences. She is part of Donne Fotografe – Italian Women Photographers’ Association. She has exhibited in Italy and abroad and her works are in a number of collections. Her photographic project It Could Have Been Me (2015) commemorating the 35th Anniversary of the Bologna Station massacre, was shown in Bologna at the High Speed Train Station, Family Archaeologies (2015), an exploration of her family home, was shown in London (2015), Lares Familiares at the Archaeological Museum in Naples (2016) and “Take Me To Live With You” in Bologna (Art City 2017).

LE POESIE DEI MURI

When I first went to Naples in 2016 I was fascinated by the wall art. I was aware of photographic ‘wall’ precedents, such as Nino Migliori, which made me cautious, because photographing walls seems too easy, and in a way it is. And yet these Neapolitan walls just drew me in. The subject is so rich, reflecting the city itself (of course) with multiple themes and characters on the walls of the city’s older areas – Maradona for instance, or slogans like Non Votare Lotta (Don’t Vote, Fight), and imagery ranging from abstract expressionist paintings to football to political slogans to dismembered surrealist faces.

The city itself, despite its much publicised problems, is one of the most vibrant in Europe. And the street art is amongst the best I’ve seen, not so much drawing upon the American hip-hop model but the street art of Pompeii. I photographed this aspect, but for the moment it’s the contemporary ‘wall paintings’ that fascinate me, and give me a subject that is poetic, and an ideal mix of the aesthetic with the social and political. However, these are not paintings, or painterly photographs, they are documents, and the whole project represents both the ‘poetry of the walls’ and a year in the life of Naples.

Gerry Badger was born in Northampton, England, and is a photographer, architect, and photographic critic. His own work is in a number of public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Gallery of American Art, Washington, DC, The Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Arts Council Collection, London, and The Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Among his books are Collecting Photography (2002), The Genius of Photography (2007), The Pleasures of Good Photographs (Aperture, New York, 2010), winner of the ICP Infinity Writer’s Award, 2011, and (with Martin Parr), The Photobook: A History (3 vols., 2004, 2006 and 2014), winner of Deutsche Fotobuch Preis and the Kraszna Krausz Prize in 2007, which was recently nominated as one of the top ten photographic books of all time by the writer Jeff Dyer. His first photobook, It Was a Grey Day, pictures of Berlin, was published in 2015. He is currently working on a history of post-war British documentary photography for Thames and Hudson.

All prints by Digitalarte Limited

In partnership with The Childhood Trust, Bedrooms of London presents a new body of work by photographer Katie Wilson highlighting the damaging consequences for children arising from the shortage of social housing in London. Focusing on the spaces in which children are sleeping, the photographs are shown alongside first-hand narratives from families collected and written by Isabella Walker, and offer a poignant insight into the lives and experiences of children living in poverty across London.

In a city where extreme poverty and wealth exist side-by-side, Bedrooms of London makes visible the often shocking and unseen reality of home life for the 700,000 children currently living below the poverty line in our capital, and challenges the prejudices and stereotypes associated with child poverty. Shown in the context of the Foundling Museum, the exhibition builds on the story of the Foundling Hospital, highlighting the situation today for some of London’s most vulnerable children.

The Childhood Trust was supported in producing this project by award-winning social change communications firm GOOD Agency. The exhibition has been created in partnership with the Foundling Museum.

Join the conversation #BedroomsofLondon

All prints by Digitalarte Limited

About Hahnemühle
Many companies claim to be steeped in ‘tradition’. However, there is hardly any company that is worthier of wearing this signet of consistency, experience and quality than Hahnemühle. The paper manufacturer from Dassel, Lower Saxony, was founded in 1584 and has been producing paper at the same location ever since then.

It all started with handmade writing paper, complemented over the centuries by artists’ papers and special technical papers With an uninterrupted expertise of manufacturing, today’s portfolio comprises more than 500 types of the finest artist and technical papers for industrial applications.

Traditional FineArt papers for painting and printing are made according to old recipes with high-quality cotton fibres or cellulose and pure spring water. Hahnemühle papers enjoy the best reputation as genuine mould-made papers, watercolour papers, drawing papers and in sketchbooks.
Hahnemühle is considered the inventor of digital fine art papers for inkjet printing. As a pioneer, the oldest German artist paper manufactory has been refining its real artist papers for exclusive prints of photographs and art reproductions.

All papers feature excellent ageing resistance and are trusted as a ‘brand of the century’ in more than 80 countries around the world by artists, photographers, museums, galleries and collectors.
Headquartered in Dassel, Lower Saxony, with offices in the United Kingdom,France, USA and China, the company employs approximately 200 people worldwide.

‘Reaching Out Into The Dark’ is a project that examines the experience of solitude and loneliness in the urban environment.

One of the ironies of our increasingly interconnected world is that many of us are living solitary lives. Solitude can be viewed as an active choice, providing time to reflect, to plan and to recharge. The unhappy converse of this though is loneliness, the experience of being involuntarily isolated.

This issue affects a significant proportion of the population in every social group and is more prevalent with increasing age. This can be associated with increased vulnerability, social isolation and poorer health outcomes in the elderly population.

In Britain:

• More than 7 million people live alone
• Over 9 million adults are often or always lonely
• 52% of parents have had a problem with loneliness
• For 3.6 million people aged 65 and over, television is their main form of company

Justin Carey
Reaching Out Into The Dark – Website

All prints by Digitalarte Limited