A fantastic new exhibition has just opened at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art.
Johnnie Shand Kydd is an acclaimed documentary photographer perhaps best known for his portraits of artist friends such as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst. In 2000 he embarked on a longterm project to capture the dramatic and chaotic world of Naples. Having never visited the city before, he soon developed a relationship with it that he described as ‘akin to a drug habit’, returning again and again over the next eight years.
Naples is known as the ‘Siren City’ because of the legend of Parthenope who, having failed to seduce Ulysses with the beauty of her song, threw herself into the sea and was washed ashore at the place that was to become Naples. Documenting the city’s streets, culture, traditions and people, Shand Kydd was seduced by its contradictory and complex nature – sinister yet humorous, sacred yet profane, theatrical yet real. He observed a darker side to Naples, related not only to its infamous corruption and criminality but also to the city’s inherent pagan character. Whilst seeing Naples as a tough, noisy and anarchic city he also finds beauty and a particular light-heartedness which, he argues, can be ‘discovered in the detail rather than the overview.’
‘Siren City: Photographs by Johnnie Shand Kydd’ runs until 12 September 2010. All exhibition materials have been created by TheFrameworks.
The new exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is ‘Another Country: London Painters in Dialogue with Modern Italian Art’.
Another Country brings together ten highly respected contemporary painters: Tony Bevan, Arturo Di Stefano, Luke Elwes, Timothy Hyman, Andrzej Jackowski, Merlin James, Glenys Johnson, Alex Lowery, Lino Mannocci and Thomas Newbolt.
Although the artists have exhibited together previously in Italy, they have come together through friendship rather than any shared style or technique.
For Another Country, each painter has opened a visual dialogue with an Italian artist from the twentieth century. The stunning series of paintings resulting from this establish and highlight connections, in terms of both ideas and practice, with artists represented in the Estorick Collection, or closely connected to them.
The approaches taken by these artists to the project are rich and various. The link between them and their chosen interlocutor is often subtle and understated and each of the painters has written a personal text for the exhibition catalogue exploring further their relationship with the twentieth-century Italian artist they have chosen.
The exhibition represents a fascinating encounter between cultures. As Brendan Prendeville says in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue: ‘It is in painting that the transforming power of art is most evident, for it can draw on what we might regard as a natural and universal faculty for seeing something as other than it is… Accepting that this potential in painting is universal, we might encapsulate its “Italian” realisation in an aphorism: painting takes us to another country.’
Another Country runs from 28 April to 20 June 2010. All exhibition materials have been created by TheFrameworks.
Following the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art’s recent Enjoy England Visitor Attraction Quality Assurance Scheme (VAQAS) annual assessment, the gallery’s website designed and built by TheFrameworks was highly commended.
VisitEngland’s assessor praised the layout and navigation of the site, the homepage Twitter integration and the comprehensive information presented on current, future and past exhibitions. The assessor was so impressed that she now uses Estorick’s website as a case study for other attractions on how to design a successful website.
VAQAS was launched nationally in 2001. It is a consumer focused quality assessment service for all types of visitor attractions. It helps to identify strengths of an attraction and highlights development areas based on industry examples. A wide range of attractions of all sizes, both large and small, throughout England have benefited from participation in the service.
The new exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is ‘Workshop Missoni: Daring to be Different’.
Missoni is one of the leading and most distinctive fashion houses in the world. The Missoni style has evolved out of a long-standing collaboration between the husband and wife team of Ottavio and Rosita Missoni. In the late 1940s, Ottavio Missoni established a workshop producing jersey tracksuits that were sported by the Italian Athletic Team at the 1948 London Olympics, where Ottavio himself qualified for the final of the 400m hurdle race.
While in London he met Rosita Jelmini, the granddaughter of a family of shawl and ladieswear manufacturers from Varese, in northern Italy. After marrying in 1953 they began making items of knitwear in a small workshop in the basement of their first home in Gallarate before moving, in the late 1960s, to the company’s present site in Sumirago with its magnificent views of the Monte Rosa mountains. Through the years, Ottavio and Rosita’s path has been followed by their children Vittorio, Angela and Luca, who today continue to keep alive the spirit of the Missoni style all over the world.
The Missonis’ designs were inspired both by the natural environment and by their own collection of art from Europe’s Modernist era including the work of Tancredi, Sonia Delaunay, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini, whose dynamic images of dancers reveal close parallels with the geometric patterns of Missoni fabrics. This is clearly illustrated in their designs for the catwalk – the exhibition includes over twenty outfits spanning the first forty years of their fashion output – and their ‘extra-curricular’ creative activities such as Ottavio’s works of collage and patchwork, examples of which are also on view.
Workshop Missoni runs from 1 July to 20 September 2009. All exhibition materials have been created by TheFrameworks.
