Gillian Ayres RA OBE, one of Britain's most respected painters, will unveil new paintings in an exhibition that marks her 80th birthday at Alan Cristea Gallery from 3 February 2010.

Broadcaster Andrew Marr described Gillian Ayres as ‘probably the finest abstract painter alive in Britain'. He continued: ‘Ayres has always been obsessively concerned with painting - the unfolding of a self-contained logic, whirling chaos held just in check. In her acid/sweet collisions, the complexity and crampedness, and then the unscrambling, of the canvas, it's about energy, laid down in colour and transmitted in shockwaves to the viewer. ‘

Ayres is best known for her vibrant palette and the sheer physicality with which she applies paint to canvas. The works in this exhibition contain many familiar motifs but also represent a marked progression. Each work brims with her usual energy, however these new compositions are more distilled and exude the confidence of a painter at the height of her powers.

Ayres was initially influenced by American Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, but sees her work as part of a European tradition. Gillian Ayres said: 'Titian, Rubens and Matisse are the greatest painters, unashamedly, of sheer beauty but they also used the medium to the fullest in every sense before or since..'

Ayres studied at Camberwell School of Art and had her first solo exhibition at Gallery One in 1956. She held a number of teaching posts through the 1960s and 1970s including Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art until 1981. She was awarded an OBE in 1986, was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989 and in 1991 became a Royal Academician. Her work has been shown in major national and international spaces during the course of the last six decades including exhibitions at Tate Britain, The Royal Academy and Southampton City Art Gallery and is the subject of a major monograph by Mel Gooding. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with an introduction by writer Christina Patterson.  To order a copy, please call +44 207 439 1866 or email info@alancristea.com

Gillian Ayres RA OBE, one of Britain's most respected painters, will unveil new paintings in an exhibition that marks her 80th birthday at Alan Cristea Gallery from 3 February 2010.

Broadcaster Andrew Marr described Gillian Ayres as ‘probably the finest abstract painter alive in Britain'. He continued: ‘Ayres has always been obsessively concerned with painting - the unfolding of a self-contained logic, whirling chaos held just in check. In her acid/sweet collisions, the complexity and crampedness, and then the unscrambling, of the canvas, it's about energy, laid down in colour and transmitted in shockwaves to the viewer. ‘

Ayres is best known for her vibrant palette and the sheer physicality with which she applies paint to canvas. The works in this exhibition contain many familiar motifs but also represent a marked progression. Each work brims with her usual energy, however these new compositions are more distilled and exude the confidence of a painter at the height of her powers.

Ayres was initially influenced by American Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, but sees her work as part of a European tradition. Gillian Ayres said: 'Titian, Rubens and Matisse are the greatest painters, unashamedly, of sheer beauty but they also used the medium to the fullest in every sense before or since..'

Ayres studied at Camberwell School of Art and had her first solo exhibition at Gallery One in 1956. She held a number of teaching posts through the 1960s and 1970s including Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art until 1981. She was awarded an OBE in 1986, was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989 and in 1991 became a Royal Academician. Her work has been shown in major national and international spaces during the course of the last six decades including exhibitions at Tate Britain, The Royal Academy and Southampton City Art Gallery and is the subject of a major monograph by Mel Gooding. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with an introduction by writer Christina Patterson.  To order a copy, please call +44 207 439 1866 or email info@alancristea.com

The Alan Cristea Gallery will be presenting the first major retrospective of the prints of Bauhaus artist and designer Anni Albers from 18 March.

The exhibition will be the most comprehensive survey of her graphic work to date and will include nearly every print she has made, alongside studies, photographs and source material loaned from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The exhibition will be accompanied by the release of the catalogue raisonne of her prints - the first major monograph on this aspect of her work.

Albers primarily worked in textiles and, late in life, as a printmaker. At the Bauhaus, Albers experimented with new materials for weaving and executed richly coloured designs on paper for wall hangings and textiles in silk, cotton, and linen yarns in which the raw materials and components of structure became the source of beauty. Like Josef, she focused above all on her work-happy to pursue it whilst remaining detached from the trends and shifting fashions of the art world. In 1984, Albers wrote, "... to comprehend art is to confide in a constant."

Anni Albers (b.1899) attended the Bauhaus as a student in 1922 where she later met and married her tutor, Josef Albers. After its closure in 1933, they moved to Black Mountain College where she taught until 1949. Her groundbreaking exhibition of textiles at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1949 was the first of its kind and toured from 1951 until 1953, establishing Albers as the most famous weaver of the day. Aside from her work in textiles she was an accomplished printmaker and made first prints in 1963 at the Tamarind Institute. From this point most of her time was devoted to the practices of lithography and screenprinting. Her earliest prints clearly show the influence of the weavings, with the drawn line taking on a thread like quality, but as her graphic work progressed, she developed a more hard-edge geometric style often making use of layering, rotation and subtle combinations of techniques to create hypnotic and at times, optically challenging, works on paper.

 

‘De Waal's pots - and the way he groups the pots to display them - are unlike anything else I have seen. They are solid and at the same time vanishing and ghostly, Platonic ideas of the essence of forms and the essence of glazed porcelain.'

A.S. Byatt, Song of Porcelain, The Guardian, 10 October 2009

In March 2010 Alan Cristea Gallery opens its first exhibition of ceramic installations by Edmund de Waal. This will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with introduction by Booker Prize-winning author A.S. Byatt.

From Zero takes as its starting point a line from Kasimir Malevich's manifesto The Non-Objective World: ''It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins". The works on display will consist of groups of porcelain pots which use wood, plaster, lead, charred oak, glass and steel to ‘frame' them. This includes a sequence of white boxes, some lead-lined, others plaster-lined, which contain groups of vessels in varying white and celadon glazes. De Waal will also be exhibiting his first vitrine piece, using glass and black steel to encase over 100 pots of different sizes. A red lacquer shelf of white pots will be installed high on a gallery wall; a shelving unit with doors will hide and reveal collections of vessels in 15 different white glazes.

De Waal is a potter of international reputation, whose work has most recently been on display at Tate Britain as part of Kettle's Yard's 50th Anniversary celebrations and at the V&A where his commission Signs and Wonders has just been launched as part of the new Ceramic Galleries. De Waal's work is held in over 30 public collections worldwide including the British Council; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Western Australia, Perth; the World Ceramic Exposition Museum, Ichon, Korea and the Museum für angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt.

As well as exhibiting at the Alan Cristea Gallery in 2010 (the artist's first commercial gallery show in London for more than eight years), de Waal's solo exhibition water-shed opens at Leamington Spa Museum in January and he is part of a group exhibition The Artists' House at the New Art Centre, Salisbury from February to May, alongside Richard Hamilton and Chien Wei Chang.

De Waal is also a writer, whose publications include Twentieth Century Ceramics (Thames & Hudson, 2003) and Bernard Leach (Tate Publishing, 1998). His forthcoming book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance is being published by Chatto and Windus in June 2010. Alan Cristea Gallery will hold a major print retrospective by Bauhaus artist Anni Albers to run concurrently with their de Waal exhibition.

 

"I always need to find some theme, some tangible subject matter besides the paint itself. Otherwise I would have been an abstract artist. I need that hook... Something to hang my landscape on" Jim Dine in Jim Dine: Five Themes, 1984

Such is Jim Dine's importance that his work has been celebrated in solo exhibitions from the Guggenheim to the Getty in his native America and in museums in major cities across the length and breadth of Europe over the past 55 years. As he nears his 75th birthday, the demand for his work from institutions and collectors grows ever greater and he still exerts enormous influence over contemporary art practice both here in the UK and abroad.
The "Heart", one of his most enduring vehicles for his explorations of line and colour and one of his most expressive motifs, will be the common denominator in some 40 recent works, made in his studios in New York and Gottingen, Germany, and on a recent journey to India, which we will exhibit in both of our Cork Street galleries in April and May.

Dine is the Renaissance man of contemporary art - originally performance artist, now at once poet, writer, photographer, sculptor, painter and printmaker.

Our exhibition will concentrate on a series of some twenty watercolours and a similar amount of limited edition prints which combine new and time-honoured technology - etching, screenprinting and digital printing.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated and documented catalogue. Please contact us for further details.

 

"I always need to find some theme, some tangible subject matter besides the paint itself. Otherwise I would have been an abstract artist. I need that hook... Something to hang my landscape on" Jim Dine in Jim Dine: Five Themes, 1984

Such is Jim Dine's importance that his work has been celebrated in solo exhibitions from the Guggenheim to the Getty in his native America and in museums in major cities across the length and breadth of Europe over the past 55 years. As he nears his 75th birthday, the demand for his work from institutions and collectors grows ever greater and he still exerts enormous influence over contemporary art practice both here in the UK and abroad.
The "Heart", one of his most enduring vehicles for his explorations of line and colour and one of his most expressive motifs, will be the common denominator in some 40 recent works, made in his studios in New York and Gottingen, Germany, and on a recent journey to India, which we will exhibit in both of our Cork Street galleries in April and May.

Dine is the Renaissance man of contemporary art - originally performance artist, now at once poet, writer, photographer, sculptor, painter and printmaker.

Our exhibition will concentrate on a series of some twenty watercolours and a similar amount of limited edition prints which combine new and time-honoured technology - etching, screenprinting and digital printing.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated and documented catalogue. Please contact us for further details.

Part 1: The Diner at Alan Cristea Gallery

Part 2: The Gas Station at Poppy Sebire

Scenes of small-town America come to life in Back-Roads Journeys, an exhibition of new work across two venues by British artist Boo Ritson at Alan Cristea Gallery and Poppy Sebire from 13 October.

Back-Roads Journeys begins in ‘The Diner', an installation at Alan Cristea Gallery, where visitors are introduced to the Diner Waitress, unhappy in her job, waiting on the Trucker's table; he's stopped by for a quick burger. Their portraits are set alongside still lifes of fast food, a new series of screenprints on plexiglass of classic American diner food and a triptych interior scene made familiar through American road movies.

The story moves to ‘The Gas Station' at Poppy Sebire's gallery where we see the Diner Waitress who, having quit her job for a new life in the South, is hitching a lift with her friend the Trucker. Here, the narrative evolves with the addition of new characters associated with life on an American highway.

Boo Ritson depicts characters and still lifes drawn from her own imagined narratives merged with borrowed Americana. For each piece she paints her subject in a thick emulsion and then has the scene photographed whilst the paint is still wet. The resulting image sits somewhere between painting, sculpture, performance and photography. Ritson has always located her work in an American cultural context and has been fascinated by the process and by history of painting. In these new works at Alan Cristea Gallery and Poppy Sebire, she introduces her first ‘unfinished' subjects, each one defined as much by what is absent as what the viewer sees.

www.poppysebire.com

 

Including Baumgartner, Davenport, Hamilton, Opie, Craig-Martin, Motherwell, Lichtenstein, Paladino, Nauman

Mixed exhibition of gallery artists including works by Jan Dibbets, Julian Opie, Christiane Baumgartner, Lisa Milroy, Catherine Yass and Gordon Cheung.

Since 2005 Lisa Milroy has focused on large-scale paintings that break away from painting as a window-on-the-world to painting as an all-encompassing experience. Alan Cristea Gallery is pleased to present "Life on the Line", the latest in Milroy's environmental explorations.

The visitor enters the gallery and sees a large painting of an armchair leaning against a wall. Across the gallery a group of banner-type paintings hangs from ropes along the ceiling, depicting clothes, landscapes and still lifes. As the visitor walks back and forth in front of this installation, the images shift kaleidoscopically, stirring up in the visitor's mind a sense of the self. The visitor turns back to inspect the armchair painting and the state of mind induced by the banners is eclipsed. Instead, the visitor becomes aware of stillness.

 

 

 

 

The Alan Cristea Gallery will be holding a retrospective exhibition of Patrick Caulfield's prints. Caulfield died in 2005 leaving an indelible contribution to British painting and printmaking.

Caulfield was a student at the Royal College of Art between 1960-63 alongside David Hockney and Allen Jones. However his subject matter drew more from the masters of modern art such as Braque and Gris than from the consumer culture that preoccupied his fellow students. The works in the exhibition have been selected to represent every aspect of his printmaking career and will date from his very first print, Ruins, made in 1964 right through to his final edition entitled Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Vues de Derrière.

Caulfield made Ruins as part of the ground-breaking ICA portfolio in which 24 artists worked with Chris Prater at Kelpra Studios. It was here at Kelpra that Caulfield was to make all of his prints up to 1987 and where he developed a style and approach to printmaking that dominated his graphic work thereafter. By distilling elements of still life into their simplest form, and by using pure line and colour, he created an immaculate and instantly recognisable pictorial style.

On the whole his prints are devoid of human content. Instead traces of life, such as a discarded napkin or an empty wine bottle, imply a presence and evoke mood and emotion. Caulfield's illustrations to Jules Laforgue's poems exemplify this approach to printmaking. The images, which appear deceptively simple, perfectly mirror the poet's text. In each case a haunting image captures Laforgue's ironic, and at times melancholy, insights into the poignant banality of everyday life. His work has had a profound influence on generations of artists, including many of today's leading painters.

The gallery has published the complete catalogue raisonné of his prints, illustrating and documenting every print he has ever made. This hardback book will be available during the exhibition.

 

 

The gallery at No. 31 Cork Street is showing a selection of Howard Hodgkin's large prints, including the Venice Series, and Into the Woods.

The Alan Cristea Gallery will be exhibiting two new monumental works by British artist Sir Howard Hodgkin. The pair, titled As Time Goes By, are without a doubt Hodgkin's most ambitious and complex works to date. Measuring over 20ft long each, these two new pictures are the largest works the artist has ever made and will be unveiled for the very first time at the opening of Alan Cristea Gallery exhibition.

Each piece consists of five panels worked on with a combination of aquatint, carborundum embossing and painting in acrylic. These are the largest works ever made, by any artist, using this technique.

Howard Hodgkin is one of the most important painters and printmakers working today. His works are held by almost every major international museum and he has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, most recently at the Tate Gallery, London in 2006. Alan Cristea has been the exclusive publisher of Hodgkin's prints since 1987 and in 2006 the Gallery collaborated with the Barbican to mount the first large-scale touring retrospective of the artist's work in this medium and which has since toured to galleries and museums across the UK.

 

 

 

 

Alan Cristea Gallery is holding a major exhibition of Joe Tilson's printed works. The exhibition will see Tilson's ground - breaking screenprints and collages from the sixties hang alongside his most recent etchings and aquatints, as well as unique works, revealing a continuum in the artists' preoccupations, inspirations, motifs and media that has spanned almost half a century of activity, between 1963 and 2009.

One of the founding figures of British Pop art in the early 1960's, Tilson was an enthusiastic proponent of the hedonism, optimism and political activism that were such striking characteristics of that decade. His work embraced advances in technology, reflected the ever-increasing power of mass media and exposed changing attitudes towards sexual liberation. In the 1970's he began to spend more and more time in Italy and the subject matter of his work radically changed to reflect this shift, with a new emphasis on the five elements and Greek and Roman mythology, and later, to reflect his passion for Venice and Cortona, where he now lives and works for part of the year.

A lifelong dedicated and subversive printmaker, his work is held in collections internationally including the Tate Gallery, London, MoMA, New York and the Stedelijk, Amsterdam. A Royal Academician, his artistic career was celebrated at the Royal Academy in a retrospective exhibition in 2002.

The exhibition coincides with the launch of TILSON - The Printed Works 1963 - 2009.

Compiled and written by Enzo di Martino, and published by Papiro Arte, Editalia and the Bugno Gallery, Venice, the book it is a celebration of the way in which Tilson's printmaking has infiltrated and informed every aspect of his creative output over the past 46 years.

 A set of three limited edition prints have been made to accompany the book.

 

 

Including Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Jim Dine, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Allen Jones, Leon Kossoff, Roy Lichtenstein, Joe Tilson.

In March 2009, the Alan Cristea Gallery will present a major new body of etchings and monoprints by British artist Ian Davenport. The exhibition will include over 30 new works and will be his second solo show with the gallery.

The first part will consist of a series of 33 small etched monoprints, each made from the same copper plate, and each realised using different combinations of foreground and background colours. These will be hung all hung together as an installation. The exhibition will also include a new series of three Etched Line prints which will further explore the stylistic developments seen his most recent paintings, with the use of more fluid lines which pool to form puddles of colour at the bottom of the compositions. This will also be the first opportunity to see Davenport's largest and most ambitious edition to date - a multi-coloured line etching entitled Etched Lines: Bright White, which will be shown together with a number of unique versions of the same composition.

Ian Davenport graduated from Goldsmiths College of Art in 1988 and as one of the generation of Young British Artists, he participated in the 1988 exhibition Freeze, curated by Damien Hirst. In 1991 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize on the basis of his ability to demonstrate 'the expressive possibilities of abstract paintings'*, and since then has exhibited extensively across the world, and undertaken several large scale site-specific murals, including the 50m long mural under the bridge on Southwark Street.

This exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and also by a short film, the latest in a series of short films made by Alan Cristea Gallery.

 

 

At the beginning of 2009, Alan Cristea Gallery is bringing together a group of new works on paper by four artists, all under thirty, based in the UK, who use film and photography as inspiration and source material to produce elaborate works on paper in other media.

Although Kate Atkin took her MA in photography (2003-05) at the Royal College of Art, she actually makes large-scale, intricate pencil drawings which she thinks of as slow-paced ‘re-enactments' of what is shown in a photograph. Atkin also works in other media: her sculpture was recently selected by Richard Cork as part of the exhibition A Life of Their Own at Lismore Castle in 2008. She has work in the British Council Collection and UBS Art Collection amongst others.

Film inspires Marie Harnett's work. She makes series of highly detailed, minuscule drawings derived from film stills, which capture fleeting moments of drama, suspense or beauty. In 2007 Harnett was selected for the Contemporary Art Society's ARTfutures at Bloomberg Space and exhibited at The Aspect Prize at The Paisley Museum. She showed at Brave Art in 2006 and more recently was shortlisted for the Threadneedle Figurative Prize at the Mall Galleries. Harnett graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2006.

Nathalie Guinamard is ‘interested in using a medium associated with editing and erasing for creation.' Her complex collages are both playful and uncanny and have a dark, surreal quality. Guinamard was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize and ARTfutures in 2007 and was included in the Red Mansion Art Prize exhibition in 2008, following a residency in China. She has a forthcoming installation at the Rivington Grill in Shoreditch. She graduated from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in 2007.

Eilidh Young makes works on wood and paper which reference technical drawing books and photographic images of architectural ruins from lost cities of the world. By taking elements of the structures and reconfiguring them through the act of drawing, she distorts the perspective and creates complex geometrical forms. In the exhibition, she is also exhibiting a series of photopolymer prints based on Fellini's 8 ½, the director's dense classic about the film-making process. Young graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2007 and was selected in the same year to exhibit at Brave Art in London. In 2008 she was included in the New Faces exhibition at the Leith Gallery in Edinburgh.

 

Jim Dine, Mimmo Paladino, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Howard Hodgkin, Julian Opie, Joan Miro, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Hamilton

Gillian Ayres, Christiane Baumgartner, Gordon Cheung, Michael Craig-Martin, Ian Davenport, Jim Dine, Allen Jones, Idris Khan, Langlands & Bell, Lisa Milroy, Julian Opie, Mimmo Paladino, Cornelia Parker, Boo Ritson, Paul Schütze, Joe Tilson, Rachel Whiteread, Paul Winstanley.

From November until January both our galleries at nos. 31 and 34 Cork Street will be devoted to the presentation of works by artists whom we represent either for their entire output or exclusively for their print editions. The common feature is that all of this work has been made during the course of the past twelve months. The range of media employed is vast.

The new sculptures by Rachel Whiteread represent our first collaboration with the artist as do the woodcuts by Christiane Baumgartner, the lithographs by Idris Khan, the set of eight etchings by Paul Winstanley and the six digital prints by Cornelia Parker. The new large etching by Ian Davenport serves as a foretaste of his solo exhibition that we will hold in March/April 2009, as do the etchings by Joe Tilson whose exhibition we will stage in April/May. Unique works appear in the show in the form of watercolours by Allen Jones, gouaches by Ian McKeever, paintings by Lisa Milroy and Gordon Cheung and both acrylics on paper and oils on canvas by Gillian Ayres. As well as traditional media, new technologies are employed by Langlands & Bell in their neon editions, by Julian Opie in his lenticular acrylic and in his flocked works and by Michael Craig-Martin in his computer animations, the latest being his interpretation of Velasquez's Las Meninas.

A pole dancer called Shahnoza is the subject of a new series of nine, life-size works by Julian Opie, titled This is Shahnoza in 3 Parts, and featured in the exhibition of the same name at Alan Cristea Gallery from 13 October 2008.

This is Shahnoza in 3 Parts features linear images of the pole dancer in nine different poses, each divided into three framed panels. In all of the works, the line of the figure is made using a combination of silkscreen and flocking. This marriage of techniques gives a rich, black and velvety surface texture which contrasts with the pure white acrylic support panels. Flocking is the process of adhering fine textile fibres to a surface. Historically it is associated with wall coverings that became popular during the reign of Louis XIV of France and its use continues, in various forms, to the present day.

A group show including new editions by Paul Winstanley and Rachel Whiteread, animations by Julian Opie and Michael Craig-Martin, new work by Langlands & Bell and Boo Ritson

‘Christiane Baumgartner's art is slow art, like slow cooking. It takes time to produce and it demands to be savoured and in those characteristics it seems to protest at the speed of the world. She may be fascinated by speed and enjoy the sense of liberation that accompanies it but she recognises its potential for destruction. This ambivalence lies at the heart of her work.'

Jeremy Lewison, ‘At the Still Point of the Turning World'. The Prints of Christiane Baumgartner, 2007, published by Johan Deumens, Haarlem.

Christiane Baumgartner is best known for her monumental woodcuts based on her own films and video stills. She first came to public attention in the UK in EAST international in 2004 and a year later with a major solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (with accompanying 80-page, fully illustrated hardback catalogue). Her work is held in over 30 public collections around the world including the Albertina, Vienna; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Baumgartner is particularly interested in the passage of time; much of her work takes the form of diptychs or series of images depicting the same scene, taken seconds apart. The sheer scale of these works and the fact that she prints them herself in her studio makes them some of the most exciting and ambitious prints being made today. This exhibition will include new and recent woodcuts on varying scales, many of which will be shown for the first time. Formation I & II shows two frames isolated from a video which depict Second World War planes (I) and their shadow cast on the ground (II). Treffer continues this theme of war and destruction with four images of explosions. Brandenburg is a smaller work made especially for the exhibition which shows one of the artist's classic images of a still from a journey on a motorway.

All these works demand viewing from a distance and yet the blurring of the horizontal lines seen close to is equally captivating. Baumgartner's work often documents time, distance and speed and yet the results are still and contemplative. It is the combination of the ancient art of woodcut with contemporary digital technology which makes her practice so innovative.

Christiane Baumgartner was born in Leipzig, Germany and studied there at the Hochschule fur Grafik und Buchkunst before completing her Masters in Printmaking at the Royal College Art in London in 1999. She now lives and works in Leipzig. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Museum für moderne Kunst, Goslar, the Kunstverein Ulm, Johan Deumens, Heemstede and the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig. Following her exhibition at Alan Cristea Gallery, she will be exhibiting in October at the Royal College in a group show curated by Christopher Orr and has her first solo show at SPACEX gallery, Exeter, in December.

 

Throughout his career, Craig-Martin has explored the aesthetic and linguistic character of everyday, designer and most recently iconic ‘art-historical' objects. In the new Alphabet prints, outlines of familiar objects from his recognisable vocabulary - an umbrella, a glove, a glass - are set against a background of vivid monochrome colour and overlaid with a single letter. In some cases there appears to be a link between the object and letter and in others the connection is more ambiguous.

For this exhibition, the artist also completed his first series of digital inkjet prints, Tokyo Sunsets, which again draws upon his vocabulary of generic and iconic objects, only this time set against a backdrop of vivid colours which graduate seamlessly from one print to the next.

Jeffrey Blondes, Catherine Yass, Julian Opie, Michael Craig-Martin, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Ron Haselden, Dan Flavin, Langlands & Bell

Soho's disused and derelict Marshall Street Baths, dinosaur skeletons in a deserted Oxford museum and illusionary glacial landscapes are among the images included in ‘Twilight Science', a photography exhibition by artist and musician, Paul Schütze (b.1958, Australia), at Alan Cristea Gallery from 14 May.

The exploration of specific locations and ambience through photography follows Schütze's parallel and interconnected work as a musician and sound artist for which he has made many site-specific sound pieces including those with the land artist, James Turrell.

 

The works in the exhibition are from McKeever's Assembly series, which is one in a group of four series that collectively form the body of work, Four Quartets. McKeever began Four Quartets in 2001 and took the title from TS Eliot's poem of the same name. There are no literal connections or direct references to the poem within the works but the poem resonates within the paintings.

London-based artist, Gordon Cheung takes inspiration from John Martin's famous 19th-century illustrations for Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost in an exhibition at Alan Cristea Gallery throughout February 2008.

This biblical story covers the fall of the rebel angels into Hell, the temptation of Adam and Eve and their subsequent expulsion from paradise. Cheung sees this story as having a metaphorical relevance to the way we have entered the 21st century. The series of 24 works in the exhibition depict imaginary worlds on the brink of devastation reminiscent of a sci-fi landscapes in spray paint, Chinese ink and Financial Times stock listings.

The works in ‘Allen Jones at Seventy' at Alan Cristea Gallery have been made over the last two years in England, China and Santa Fe, New Mexico. They revisit Jones' familiar vocabulary of dancers and the catwalk and introduce the theme of the magician and his assistant. The ‘Magic' paintings, a series of recent oil paintings, are a variation on the theme of artist (or pianist) and his muse that has greatly preoccupied Jones for around a decade and illustrate the influence of Marc Chagall.

Jones is fascinated by performance and movement of the figure and aims to achieve an idealised beauty in his presentation of it. By setting his figures within the context of the stage he is able to distance them from everyday life allowing fantasy to become a believable reality.

The most comprehensive Ben Nicholson print exhibition ever held, with over 110 works. The majority of the works come from an important private collection which has been built up over many years and which is now being offered for sale exclusively through the gallery. The collection contains a number of extremely rare early hand-worked linocuts, drypoints of St Ives, annotated working proofs, trial proofs, hand-coloured etchings, as well as original printing plates and lino-blocks. Many of the works in the collection are unique.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated hard-bound catalogue which will contain a new essay by Jeremy Lewison, a former curator at the Tate Gallery and an acknowledged expert on the artist. His essay will re-examine in depth the way Nicholson conceived and printed the various series that make up his entire printed oeuvre. To date there has been no complete catalogue raisonné of Nicholson's prints and this new publication will contain more prints than any previous volume.

 

AN EXHIBITION TO CELEBRATE THE LAUNCH OF THE NEWLY EXPANDED AND REFURBISHED ALAN CRISTEA GALLERIES

GILLIAN AYRES - JOSEF ALBERS - ANNI ALBERS - PATRICK CAULFIELD - GORDON CHEUNG - MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN - DEXTER DALWOOD - IAN DAVENPORT - JAN DIBBETS - JIM DINE - HOWARD HODGKIN - NAUM GABO - RICHARD HAMILTON ALLEN JONES - LANGLANDS&BELL - IAN MCKEEVER - LISA MILROY - JULIAN OPIE MIMMO PALADINO - BOO RITSON - PAUL SCHÜTZE - JOE TILSON - CATHERINE YASS

 

 

Ayres is best known for her vibrant palette and the sheer physicality with which she applies paint to canvas. The works in this exhibition are classic examples and contain many familiar motifs but also represent a noticeable progression. Each work brims with her usual energy, however these new compositions are more distilled and exude the confidence of a painter at the height of her powers. The titles of these works - which include shipping forecast areas and sixties songs - are chosen by Ayres not as indicators or hints at content, but simply as words and phrases that please her.

‘Perspective Corrections' was the title of a groundbreaking body of work Dibbets began in 1969 in which he explored the illusory effects that could be created using a camera. He drew out trapezoid shapes on various backgrounds, from his studio wall to fields of grass, and then photographed them, each time angling the camera in such a way as to give the illusion that the mapped out shape was a square. The square, by virtue of not actually existing, appeared to hover uncomfortably in the pictorial space.

In this new body of work, Dibbets has re-visited this idea, this time adding into the compositions minimalist artworks from his own collection by his artist colleagues including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Ryman, Sol LeWitt and Robert Mangold

Within the past two years the leading American artist Jim Dine has been working on a major body of work based on Carlo Collodi's classic morality tale The Adventures of Pinocchio, which was first published in 1883. The Alan Cristea Gallery will be holding an exhibition of these new works which will consist of eight huge hand-painted lithographs and woodcuts, together with a portfolio of 41 prints.

Since the 1960s, Dine has used printmaking with unequalled inventiveness and skill. He finds that printmaking allows constant reinvention and numerous possible combinations of techniques and formats and is known for his obsessive re-interpretation of the same subject matter. These new prints exemplify his approach to the medium and the exhibition will be a celebration of Dine's enduring fascination with this particular subject. All the editions were made at the printing studio of Michael Woolworth in Paris and the exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated hard-back catalogue published by Steidl.

 

The Alan Cristea Gallery will be holding an exhibition of 21 of the most important lithographs by Henri Matisse. It will be a unique opportunity to see such a large group of rare prints in one exhibition. The lithographs date from 1913 to 1930 and all explore different aspects of the female form, developing the themes of the artist's paintings and sculpture - the nude, the odalisque and the dancer. None of the impressions on display will have been exhibited before.

Many of the works in the exhibition, for example Reclining Nude with Louis XIV Screen and Arabesque were included in the 2005 Royal Academy exhibition Matisse, His Art and His Textiles, which toured to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Indeed editions of many of the works in the exhibition are held in major public collections including MOMA, New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

 

 

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