1968

[ezcol_1half]Jonathan Callan| Simon Morley | Carolyn Thompson

7 February – 8 March 2019

The Eagle Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition focusses on how the turbulent events of 1968 have inspired contemporary artists to comment upon the present. 1968 was the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the year athletes raised their arms in a black power salute at the Olympics and when Enoch Powell gave his highly-provocative ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham, UK. Meanwhile in Paris, student protests grew into a general strike and the streets were engulfed in riots. The ‘summer of love’ of 1967 was definitely over.

Bringing together work by three contemporary British artists who have used source material from the period as a starting point, the individual pieces question and explore shifting views on culture, identity and politics.

Jonathan Callan’s work The Band … deconstructs a book about the group of musicians famously associated with Bob Dylan, who were immortalised in Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Waltz. Using thin strips from the photographic portraits in the book, Callan reassembles the faces upon a gesso surface in a notional structure – from far left through centre to far right – that alludes to the spectrum of political belief.

Simon Morley presents recent paintings: The Paris ’68 Series, which are derived from graffiti written on the walls of the city during May 1968. Researching the period Morley was struck by the utopian nature of the texts, which in the wake of recent terrorist attacks in Paris and the general lurch to the right in France, seem especially poignant: ‘Prenez vos dėsirs pour des réalités’ (‘Treat your desires as realities’, ‘Plutôt La Vie’ (‘We Prefer Life’) etc. The paintings’ dark brooding colours evoke a sense of loss while the striking use of gold offers hope. Further works from his on-going series of Book-Paintings allude to texts, including Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, which inspired the student activists.

Carolyn Thompson’s six works are from an on-going series that reference seminal Modern texts re-printed by Penguin, which will be shown in full at the Laurence Sterne Trust and the Eagle Gallery in 2019–2020. Concentrating on the works by black authors in the series, including James Baldwin, Cyprian Ekwensi and Martin Luther King Jr., Thompson employs a variety of different text-based techniques to echo the content and interpretation of writing that discusses marginalization, segregation, racism and feminism.

The exhibition is mounted in collaboration with Art First and coincides with the launch of Simon Morley’s books Seven Keys to Modern Art published by Thames and Hudson and Crushed Books by Naima Digital Art Publishing.

Carolyn Thompson 2019 catalogue

Simon Morley’s Crushed Books

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