A NEW exhibition at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum explores the intriguing connections between photography and textiles.
Curated by Birmingham City University's Marlene Little, the exhibition celebrates the long-standing relationship between photography and textiles. The featured artists all have different approaches to fusing the photographic and the textile - whether stitching directly into film or a photograph, collaging photographs on to textile canvases, or developing unique stitched drawings from photographic source materials.
The exhibition includes works by UK artists Julie Cockburn, Jess Edwards, Rosie James, and Marlene Little, and pieces by Danish artist Kirstine Roepstorff, Australian Patrick Snelling, and Sissi Farassat from Austria.
The exhibition also includes a display of glass plates and photographic images from the Redding Photography Collection. The collection was produced by a local photographer from the 1950s to the 1970s and captures a unique view of Rugby's social history.
A number of free family activities run throughout the exhibition, including the chance to dress up in period costume inspired by photographic portraits, and the opportunity to draw and make sheets.
The art gallery and museum also joins the Big Draw event on Saturday 12 October, offering visitors the chance to experiment with drawing. The free event runs from 10.30am to 3.30pm.
The exhibition is supported by Birmingham, City University.

Julie Cockburn - Jess Edwards - Rosie James - Marlene Little - Kirstine Roepstorff - Patrick Snelling - Sissi Farassat -
Curator Marlene Little -

Kunsthalle Basel is proud to present the first solo exhibition of Allyson Vieira in Europe. The exhibition opens on Friday, September 13th, 2013.

In the exhibition The Plural Present at Kunsthalle Basel, Vieira is showing sculptures made of simple construction materials such as brick, concrete, metal and plaster. Two collapsing walls of aluminium bars – The Long Walls – determine the choreography and our perception of the gallery space. These establish the direction of movement along the longitudinal walls and at the same time, through their regular matrix, establish visual axes right across the room. Between the walls we encounter the central figural group, Beauty, Mirth, and Abundance. The three female figures in contrapposto are modelled out of bricks and make allusion to the much-copied marble statue group of the Three Graces today housed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Leaning against the walls of the gallery are pieces from Vieira´s on-going Clads series, begun in 2012. They call to mind antique steles and wall reliefs, geological sediments, or minimalist sculptures such as John McCracken´s monolithic slabs.

Allyson Vieira -

The Buchmann Gallery is delighted to announce its first solo show of works by Raffi Kalenderian (*1981, lives in Los Angeles); Kalenderian´s works were first featured by the gallery in the exhibition Crystal World in 2010.

Raffi Kalenderian´s pictures show people from his circle of friends whom he portrays in relaxed, everyday poses. The specific situation during the portrait sitting plays an important role in the creative process and it helps to capture the flowing boundary between the physical and the mental world of the person portrayed. 
Kalenderian emphasises the interior world of the person he paints through the elements he adds to the figure. Wildly flourishing plants can be seen as a metaphor for a spirited, irrepressible personality, and abstract or surreal elements underscore the predominant mood of the picture.
Often he shows the model in several poses in a single painting. With this compositional approach he succeeds in capturing multiple emotional states in one picture, and at the same time portrays a sequence of events. The motif of the doppelganger indicates the various facets of the sitter´s personality.

Raffi Kalenderian -

The Buchmann Gallery is delighted to announce its first solo show of works by Des Hughes (*1970 in Birmingham); Hughes´ works were first featured by the gallery in the exhibition Crystal World in 2010.

The five sculptures, which were created specifically for this exhibition, are reminiscent of pieces of medieval armour and weaponry. The four rust-red, helmet-like objects and the ensemble of two larger-than-life figures dressed in chainmail appear on closer inspection to be too fragile and detailed to be made of forged iron. 
The material is only 3mm thick, as becomes visible in the areas where the hollow interior of the sculpture is revealed. In a complex process, Hughes shapes woollen scarves, woollen hats and plaster bandages and casts them in resin reinforced with fibreglass and iron powder. The resulting sculptures are simultaneously powerful and surprisingly fragile. 
Like the language of his materials, the shapes Hughes uses have a deep ambivalence: a tree stump is not made of wood, the chainmail shirt is not iron and a mask is a sock. Des Hughes creates a narrative and ironic figuration which develops its very own, distinctive and highly recognisable pictorial language.

Des Hughes -

Simon Gallery is pleased to present Laura McClanahan  third solo exhibition.

Laura McClanahan’s new paintings explore the metaphorical impressions of water and the element’s power to influence and pattern the course of our lives. Moments of time like a single drop or, the unpredictable immensity of the surging tide, shape and transform the world that is within, and the world that surrounds us. Evolving Patterns charts this process as it occurs. This work is McClanahan’s record keeping where the viewer realizes the transcendence that happens when the internal and the external experience relate, and unanticipated connections emerge out of the duality. 

Given her fundamental interest in deconstruction and transformation, Laura McClanahan addresses each painting in a straightforward and unpretentious manner.  She creates resistances of crackling roughness and dropped circles of acrylic paint on the surfaces, to challenge the flow of ink and water. McClanahan is heavy-handed with the water because she intends the paint be carried like sediment in a river. Employing earth tones; copper, silver, Mayan gold and turquoise, she creates mineral trails that flow away and manifest as petrographic and fractal patterns. Organic forms and molecular shapes float across the canvas reminding us of the rhythms and changes that influence the mysteries of the meandering stream of life.

Laura McClanahan -

With flying colors

In her exhibition Dysideological Reasoning, Tinka Pittoors builds an impenetrable place, a claustrophobic universe. It is an environment that completely isolates itself but also cries out loud at the same time: "you are connected". In this current era of excessive transfer of information and social media, symbols and signs became supreme. The flags - symbols par excellence of all identities - are dominant within Dysideological Reasoning. 
Tinka Pittoors exposed the flags in different ways and tries to get rid of their power, both markers for geographic areas and ethnic identity but also the joy of the happy flags for jovial celebrations. Their connotation is no longer a symbol of togetherness, pride or membership of a community.

Pittoors placed - almost nonchalant - sculptures throughout the by herself landscaped disorienting forest of flags, lumber, painted cardboard fruit and mirrors. It results in a game of search and find, reflection and interpretation, "Liking" and "dys-Liking".

Tinka Pittoors -

Christof Mascher -

Gerhard Hofland proudly presents the exhibition UNDER YTAN (beneath the surface) at the gallery of paintings and works on paper by Malin Persson.

Malin Persson lives and works in Amsterdam and completed her art training at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie and the Rijksacademie van beeldende kunsten, both in Amsterdam.  The artist’s work centres around one key theme: the landscape of her native Sweden.

Malin Persson -

Leslie Sacks Contemporary is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artist Alex Weinstein.

This new body of work by Alex Weinstein is executed on wood panels with deep beveled edges. The presence of the bevel invokes the illusion of the oil paintings floating off the wall, as a kind of reverse window or visual cut-out of the architecture. Weinstein´s process embraces traditional painting. The seemingly ambiguous and quietly tonal paintings come from extensive and rich building of color. The spectrum of the under-painted palette is revealed in the transitioning ambient light. Weinstein has long since employed the subject of the ocean as the vehicle through which he explores broader principles of interest. The works inevitably transcend the conventional depiction of the ocean and establish a new dialogue about painting.
Alex Weinstein´s paintings are a successful endeavor in bringing together on one picture plane the concepts of minimalism/objecthood, abstraction, and representation. The confluence of these three principles in a singular field presents both opposing and synonymous ideas and challenges the notion of what a painting can be. Working in both a rich additive and subtle reductive manner, Weinstein executes enigmatic paintings, which are all at once minimal objects, planes of abstraction and vague representation.

Alex Weinstein -

Thomas Erben is excited to present Curriculum Mortis, a sculptural installation of a cemetery, by Iranian multimedia artist Barbad Golshiri, his second solo exhibition with the gallery after Nothing Is Left to Tell in 2010. As one of the most prominent figures on the Iranian contemporary scene, over the past ten years Golshiri has produced esthetically and conceptually provocative art, in an impressive balancing act between political urgency and repressive conditions. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Aaran Gallery, Tehran.

Barbad Golshiri -