Flowers Gallery celebrates its 50-year anniversary on 10 February 2020, marking the event with a London exhibition of contemporary work by gallery artists produced especially for the occasion. The exhibition includes 50 works by 50 gallery artists, representing the diverse breadth of the programme developed over the past five decades and emphasising the ongoing focus on exhibiting contemporary works of art.
Produced in a range of media, each work will measure 50 x 50 cm.
I will be exhibiting a newly created LED artwork, the Brexshit Machine, based on my wider Brexit Lexicon series.
As part of the 50th Anniversary celebrations, Flowers Gallery is pleased to present 50 Years an exhibition of works by artists represented by the Gallery within their lifetime, on view at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street (5 – 29 February, 2020).
Find out more about the exhibiition here: https://www.flowersgallery.com/exhibitions/view/50-years
Flowers Gallery, London, 2020
SIXTEEN concludes its year long tour of the UK by bringing the faces and voices of over 180 sixteen-year-olds to London for the first time. Working in partnership with London City Bridge we will showcase work by all of the photographers in a bespoke outdoor public display overlooking the iconic Tower Bridge. The outdoor exhibition will run from 18 January – 16 February 2020 and is located at City Hall, The Queen’s Walk, London SE1 2AA.
My video portraits will be showcased at the R K Burt Gallery in Borough, fifteen minutes walk from City Hall. The exhibition runs from the 21 January to 13 February.
Events
Curators’ tour: Saturday 18 January, 2pm
On the mezzanine, adjacent to City Hall and The Scoop amphitheatre Queen’s Walk, London SE1 2BD
Curators’ tour and celebratory event: Thursday 23 January
Curators’ tour from 2pm – 3pm on the mezzanine (as above)
This is followed by a celebratory event and drinks reception from 4pm – 6pm
R K Burt Gallery, 57 Union Street, Borough, London SE1 1SG
*Please note RK Burt Gallery has limited capacity so please RSVP to confirm attendance
You can download a press release with more details HERE.
Belfast Exposed is proud to present the touring photography exhibition, SIXTEEN. ‘What’s it like to be sixteen years old now?’ This is the central thread running through the ambitious, exhibition SIXTEEN. Photographer Craig Easton conceived this work following his engagement with first-time voters in 2014. Unlike the rest of the country sixteen year olds in Scotland were given their suffrage for the first, and as yet only time, in the UK.
Sixteen is an age of transition. At a time of increasing national and international anxiety, these young people are shifting from adolescence to become the adults who will live in a politically reshaped country, divorced from the European Union. It is an issue they had no say in. Working with photography, film, social media, audio recordings and writing, Craig and his colleagues give voice to those rarely heard.
The incisive portraits and the young peoples’ candid testimonies reveal whom and what they really care about and reflect the trust engendered between the sixteen year olds and the photographers. This adds potency to the work and highlights how social background, gender, ethnicity and location influence a teenager’s life.
Craig invited fellow photographers Robert C Brady, Linda Brownlee, Lottie Davies, Jillian Edelstein, Stuart Freedman, Sophie Gerrard, Kalpesh Lathigra, Roy Mehta, Christopher Nunn, Kate Peters, Michelle Sank, Abbie Trayler-Smith, Simon Roberts, and Ulster University MFA candidate David Copeland. They joined forces with him to develop the project, and together collaborated with more than one hundred and seventy young people from diverse communities across the country to explore their hopes, fears and dreams.
https://www.sixteentouring.co.uk/
Video portrait: Amie and Natalie Stott, St. Paul’s Onslow Square, London, 2018
The next venue for the Civilization touring exhibition will be-
THE IAN POTTER CENTRE: National Gallery of Victoria, AUSTRALIA
CORNER FLINDERS AND RUSSELL STREETS
FEDERATION SQUARE, MELBOURNE
EXHIBITION DATES: 13 SEP 19 – 2 FEB 2020.
Civilization: The Way We Live Now is an international photography exhibition of monumental scale, featuring the work of over 100 contemporary photographers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe with over 200 original photographs being exhibited.
In this increasingly globalised world, the exhibition explores photographers’ representations of life in cities as its key theme and presents a journey through the shared aspects of life in the urban environment. The selected works create a picture of collective life around the world and document patterns of mass behaviour. The exhibition looks at the phenomenal complexity of life in the twenty-first century and reflects on the ways in which photographers have documented, and held a mirror up, to the world around us.
A major publication has been produced by Thames & Hudson in parallel with the exhibition.
Image: ‘Desert Blast #12, Large Glitter Maroon Flash, Nevada, 1999’
I have prints from my This Lands is Your Land series included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibition Go Down Moses.
The exhibition is guest curated by Teju Cole. An acclaimed writer, photographer, and critic, Cole is the former photography critic of the New York Times Magazine and is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University. This is his first major curatorial project.
Go Down Moses presents a reinterpretation of the MoCP’s permanent collection that can be understood as a visual tone poem of contemporary America, exploring elemental themes of movement, chaos, freedom, and hope. In doing so, Cole uses the photographic archive to interweave the past and present, suggesting an aesthetic approach to understanding the current psyche. He writes:
Questions of liberation tend to interleave the present and the past. What is happening now is instinctively assessed with the help of what happened before, and both despair and hope are tutored by memory. The old Negro spiritual “Go Down Moses,” beloved by Harriet Tubman and generations since, sought to link the black American freedom quest with the story of ancient Israel’s struggle to be free of Pharaoh’s bondage.
Humanity is on the move. The ground beneath our feet is shifting, the skies cannot be relied upon, and even our own bodies bear the marks of the strain. Everyone is longing to be free, and everyone is curious about whether hope is still possible. The photographic archive contains evidence that thus it ever was, that we have always lived in this urgency.Through an intuitive sequence of photographs, in images soft and loud, this exhibition proposes a redefinition: that hope has nothing to do with mood or objective facts, but is rather a form of hospitality offered by those who are tired to those who are exhausted.
You can read an article on the exhibition in the Guardian here.
Simon Roberts is included in Oakland University Art Gallery’s ‘Your Very Own Paradise’ alongside:
Nick Archer, Enrique Chagoya, Melanie Daniel, Maira Kalman, Amer Kobaslija, Andrew Lenaghan, Tayna Marcuse, Rebecca Morgan, Lamar Peterson, Orit Raff, Thomas Trosch, and Marc Yankus.
This exhibition explores notions and taxonomy of visual paradise. The subjectivity surrounding paradise is parsed via the depictions of motifs as progressive, optimistic existential indicators: home, food, identity, métier, harmony, euphoria and so on. In an era of crisis and dissimulation, this exhibition presents a conduit to inspire the viewer to repose in a visual culture that is less pessimistic and more open to the abundance of a positive and inclusive world view. Its ideology finds parallels in Nordic notions of hygge and the wisdom and enlightenment that compels us towards the actions of contemplation, assimilation and illumination.
More information here: www.ouartgallery.org/exhibitions/
To mark the retrospective exhibition of the celebrated British painter Ivon Hitchens, Pallant House Gallery invited Simon Roberts to revisit some of the places where Hitchens painted to create a series of new work from the fields, woodlands and hinterlands of West Sussex.
Find out more about the project and view images from the series here.
As part of the exhibition programme, Simon will be doing an In-Conversation with writer Dr Alexandra Harris and Pallant House Director Simon Martin on 27 July 2019, and running a landscape masterclass on 24 August 2019. More information on how to book the masterclass here.
In a major new touring exhibition leading contemporary photographers join forces to present the multimedia project Sixteen, exploring the dreams, hopes and fears of sixteen-year olds across the UK.
I will be screening my series of video portraits looking at faith.
Please join us for the official opening at Hull Central Library on Saturday 18 May, 12-3pm. The exhibition continues until 29 June 2019.
opening times: Mon & Tues 9.30-5pm, Wed 1 – 7.30pm, Thurs 9.30-7.30pm, Fri 9.30 – 1pm, Sat 10am – 4pm.
The exhibition will then tour to:
Shetland Arts (public realm installation in Lerwick) | 1 June – 30 June 2019
Public realm work will be situated on the King Harald Street development here
Audio visual work will also be presented at Shetland Arts venue Mareel
Williamson Art Gallery & Museum | 15 June – 21 July 2019
Private View: 5.30pm – 7.30pm, Friday 14 June 2019
Widnes Vikings Rugby Club | 15 June 2019 (opening event time TBC)
Full information on opening events and launches coming soon!
Works from my series New Vedute will be on show at the Museum of Rome as part of Photographers in Rome: Rome Commission 2003-2017 group exhibition.
Among the artists on show: Josef Koudelka , Olivo Barbieri , Anders Petersen , Martin Parr , Graciela Iturbide , Gabriele Basilico , Guy Tillim , Tod Papageorge, Alec Soth , Paolo Ventura , Tim Davis , Marco Delogu , Paolo Pellegrin , Hans-Christian Schink , Roger Ballen , Jon Rafman, Simon Roberts , Léonie Hampton.
Several works will also be entering the Roma Capitale Collection.
“Civilization: The Way We Live Now” presents more than 250 works by over 120 of the world’s most renowned photographic artists, offering a complex and sprawling vision of contemporary life. The images gathered here, produced in the past 25 years, speak to the changes brought about by globalization, and draw attention both to the increasing amount of complexity and conflict, and to the unprecedented degree of interdependence, that characterize life today. They attest, as well, to the development of the medium of photography, and its ability to document these sweeping changes. Organized in collaboration between UCCA and the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, the Beijing presentation of Civilization is curated by William A. Ewing and Holly Roussell.
More information: http://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/civilization-way-live-now/