Between Before and After
The show takes its name, Between Before and After, from the title of Clare Woods’s recent screenprint in which she portrays the fragility of life through the depiction of flowers.
Exhibited for the first time are four new pastel stencil editions by David Nash, whose work is based almost exclusively on his observations of nature and the rural landscape around his home in Wales. Two new intaglio prints by Emma Stibbon, which were made following location-based research and drawing from observation out in the field, will also be on show. Driven by a desire to understand how human activity and the forces of nature shape our surroundings, Stibbon’s prints include a depiction of Chamonix, France, where surrounding glaciers have been receding over the past few years.
Two new woodcuts by Christiane Baumgartner capture sunsets on the Baltic Sea. The Rising Sun, 2022, a colour etching by Ali Banisadr, is inspired by childhood memories and the history of painting and sound. Prints by Michael Craig-Martin from his new series entitled Past Present, pay homage to one of Craig-Martin’s favourite paintings, Bathers at Asnières, 1884, by Georges Seurat. Craig-Martin reinterprets the scene of working men lounging on the riverbank and bathing in the Seine, in his own distinctive style.
A new work by Yinka Shonibare CBE, entitled Modern Magic (in Pink), 2022, pays homage to African contributions to modernism, by highlighting the importance of African masks on Picasso’s early paintings and sculpture. This new work features Shonibare’s signature wax batik fabric collaged into areas individually hand cut from the prints.
Rhys Coren’s new group of four screenprints, entitled What is Love?, 2022, is inspired by memories of the first album he ever bought. Through his work Coren attempts to use drawing as a means to understand his 30 year relationship with the tracks.
Julian Opie’s new depictions of French villages and towns, in a variety of media, include Small French Town, 2022, representations of flat-fronted houses on varnished boards, that can be combined to create compact streets.
Four new woodcuts by Richard Woods, featuring the artist’s classic wood grain support and densely inked compositions, are inspired by government guidance on the COVID-19 pandemic and refer ironically to the prevalence of bar graphs, line graphs and pie charts to explain social, economic and political trends.
Three new prints by Paul Winstanley take as their subject a modernist stained-glass window inside St. Nicholas’ Church in Hamburg. Once the tallest building in the world, the Lutheran church was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War and rebuilt in a style that has become a symbol of renewal and renovation.
If you would like to receive a complete list of works in the exhibition please contact [email protected].
Header image: Clare Woods; Between Before and After (detail), 2022
Ali Banisadr | The Rising Sun, 2022
"Printmaking has added another layer of understanding to my paintings. It has also helped me try to understand how some of my favourite printmakers, such as Goya, Martin Schongauer, Breugel and Hiroshige, made their prints."
- Ali Banisadr
Christiane Baumgartner | New Prints
“I often sit and watch the sunset. A sunset lasts just for a short time. I remember my father saying that when the sun hits the horizon, there’s just four minutes until it vanishes. Every sunset is different, they’re never the same, and every day the sun sets at a different time and also in a different place in the sky depending on the time of year.”
- Christiane Baumgartner
Rhys Coren | What is Love?, 2022
“I wrote out some of the lyrics from the song 'What is Love' (1990) from Deee-Lite's World Clique album, then started to trace over them, then trace the trace, then trace the trace of the trace and so on. I repeated this for weeks, building a muscle memory for each part of each letter of each word.
Allowing the words to morph and take on new characteristics, but gradually enough that the images still retained the essence of the meaning of each word; Degorgeous, Dewithit, Degroovy, Define, Delectable.”
- Rhys Coren
Click here to find out more.Michael Craig-Martin | New Prints
"Georges Seurat completed 'Bathers at Asnières' (1884) at the age of 24. No painting has meant more to me personally and as an artist. I can recall my excitement at seeing it as a child when it was still in the Tate collection.
It is a painting of heroic modesty, a tribute to ordinary people, ordinary life, but presented at the scale and with the dignity of a great history painting."
- Michael Craig-Martin
David Nash | New Pastel Stencil Editions
"Trees have a life resembling our own, they communicate with others and have a social life. They work to thrive, trading in the soil with fungi, sugars for mineral, and trade in the air, oxygen for carbon dioxide. They take just enough and give back more."
- David Nash
Yinka Shonibare CBE | Modern Magic (in Pink), 2022
"In my view, the African contribution to modernism has never really been celebrated in the way it ought to be. I decided to trace back the story of modernism; how Picasso’s first experience of African art changed the trajectory of his career and how the avant-garde period was incredibly inspired by African objects."
- Yinka Shonibare CBE
Emma Stibbon | New Prints
"I have been fortunate to see some extraordinary places in the world, many of which are changing rapidly due to climate warming. My experience of being able to witness this first hand has really galvanized me to record the dynamic and fragile beauty of our planet."
- Emma Stibbon
Paul Winstanley | Large Window 1 – 3, 2022
“There’s something very international about that period of Modernism. Modernism has been one of the subjects of my work forever, in a slightly tangential way, it has underpinned lots of things I’ve done, from lobbies to the veil paintings. So when I walked into the church, I was just sightseeing really, and saw the window, I thought ‘wow!’”.
- Paul Winstanley
Clare Woods | Between Before and After, 2022
“For me, the vase of flowers represents a lifespan, in a tiny little environment. You’ve got the youth of the buds and the flowers in full bloom, before they droop and discolour, and then the petals fall off and they die. It’s the whole life cycle that I am interested in.”
- Clare Woods
Richard Woods | Lifestyle Pie Charts, 2021
“By choosing Work, Leisure, Budget and Diet as the titles for these works, I wanted to target the fundamental decisions we make daily. For example, I wanted to make the blue segment in the Diet pie chart four times as large as the red one. That was really important to me, what isn’t important to me is whether the blue signifies chocolate or grass?
The information I’m giving the viewer is clear and consistent although the details behind the information remain obscure and confused.”
- Richard Woods
