Ben Uri: 100 for 100

Founded 100 years ago in London's East End Jewish quarter, Ben Uri is now located in a small gallery in Boundary Road, NW8 and houses a 1300-piece collection largely hidden from view. Ben Uri is ending its centenary year with a larger and extended version of Out of Chaos held at Christie’s South Kensington.

100 for 100 provides a rare opportunity to enjoy spectacular works from the Ben Uri collection at Christie's South Kensington saleroom by showcasing works usually hidden from view, including David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Mark Gertler, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, alongside their international contemporaries including Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine and Georg Grosz.

The exhibition also includes lesser-known but no less historically important artists, whose stories help trace complex narratives of war, forced journeys, migration and loss. The final room features contemporary artists from refugee and migrant backgrounds, accompanied by newly-uncovered archival material illustrating Ben Uri’s colourful history and wide cultural programming as well as the far-reaching impact of émigré artists on 20th century British art and design. These spectacular highlights secure Ben Uri’s future as a museum of identity and migration.

Exhibition open 21 May – 9 June
Closed 28th, 29th, 30th May.

Held at:
Christie’s South Kensington
85 Old Brompton Road
London
SW7 3LD

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Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy - Symphony No.2 "Lobgesang (Hymn of Praise)".

Jim Morphesis and Corita Kent

The Pasadena Museum of Californian Art is currently showing work by Jim Morphesis:

'Since the 1980s, Jim Morphesis has been one of the most influential members of the expressionist art movement in Los Angeles. Taking its title from what Friedrich Nietzsche called "The Eternal Wounds of Existence," JIM MORPHESIS: Wounds of Existence examines an impressive oeuvre that has captured the profound predicaments of human life. Morphesis most often works serially, on imagery and themes as varied as the Passion of the Christ (influenced by his Greek Orthodox upbringing), nude torsos (inspired by Rembrandt and Soutine) and universal symbols of mortality, including skulls and roses. His paintings of the Passion are grounded in art history, sharing aspects with Diego Velázquez's Christ on the Cross and Giovanni Bellini's Pieta, but are made undeniably modern by his sensuous, textured surfaces. For the past four decades, his paintings have communicated a deep, universal concern with the dehumanization of society throughout history.'

Later in the year they also have a retrospective of Corita Kent's body of work:

'Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent is the first full-scale exhibition to survey the entire career of pioneering artist and designer Corita Kent (1918-1986). For over three decades, Corita experimented in printmaking, producing a groundbreaking body of work that combines faith, activism, and teaching with messages of acceptance and hope. A Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Corita taught at the Art Department at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles from 1947 through 1968. At IHC, she developed her vibrant, Pop-inspired prints from the 1960s, mining a variety of secular and religious sources and using the populist printmaking medium to pose philosophical questions about racism, war, poverty, and religion. Her work was widely recognized for its revolutionary impact and remains an iconic symbol of that period in American history. As a teacher, Corita inspired her students to discover new ways of experiencing the world by seeking out revelation in everyday events. Bringing together artwork from Corita's entire career, this exhibition reveals the impassioned energy of this artist, educator, and activist.'

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Morrissey - Now My Heart Is Full.

Maciej Hoffman: the collision of thoughts with reality

All the angst of the world seems spilled out in drips, splatters and gestural brushstrokes on the huge unstretched canvases of Maciej Hoffman's current exhibition at Walthamstow's Tokarska Gallery. The distressed surfaces depict equally distressed characters with existential Expressionist force and a seeming spontaneity of style.

'Disquiet', 'Powerless', 'Nameless', 'Confused', 'Agitator'; Hoffman's titles are accurate indicators of his content. These are grandiose dramatic works full of the tension and conflict by which Hoffman is frequently seized; the collision of thoughts with reality. Stress and fear flow from the problems of the everyday through the walls of his studio to rip apart the work. Almost all his days, he says, are accompanied by stress and the fear of danger, encircled, as he is, by a world in which a price is paid for each breath. 

The child of artists, Hoffman was antagonistic to following in his parents footsteps which resulted in a "troubled" childhood. He was a teenager during the beginning of martial law in Poland. Then came the fall of communism and his immersion in the birth of Polish “capitalism, post-communism”. For fifteen years he worked for one of the biggest Polish advertisement agencies yet this freedom to use art for commercial purposes combined with the unrelenting dominance of the profit principle came to seem as much of a trap and constraint as that which he had experienced under communism. 

Hoffman is interested in art as freedom. His sense is that our control systems for classification, measurement and supervision are narrowing our space for what is irrational, imperfect or disordered. Artistic creation remains the one real margin of freedom we can use. His fluid, gestural manipulation of paint on canvas is seemingly raw, random, unfinished, and yet the emotional impact of his angst is as great as the size of the works themselves. Soutine, de Kooning, Keifer are inspirations and references but Hoffman is assuredly his own man with his own tortured vision.

Maciej Hoffman's paintings are at the Tokarska Gallery until 6 October, Thur - Sat, 12pm - 7pm.

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Lou Reed - Sad Song.