The Engine

Damien Hirst Thursday 5 April – Sunday 9 September 2012 Press release: 3 March 2011 Press Release 3 March 2011 Damien Hirst 5 April – 9 September 2012 (Press view: 3 April 2012) Sponsored by the Qatar Museums Authority Tate Modern Open every day from 10.00 – 18.00 and late until 22.00 on Friday and Saturday For public information number please print 020 7887 8888 In 2012, Tate Modern will present the first substantial survey of Damien Hirst’s work ever held in the UK. Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today and has created some of the most iconic works in recent history. This exhibition will provide a journey through two decades of Hirst’s inventive practice. Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated Freeze, an exhibition of his own work and that of his friends and fellow Goldsmiths College students, staged in a disused London warehouse. In the nearly quarter of a century since that pivotal show, Hir...

Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye Press release: 4 March 2011 Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye is a major exhibition which will radically reassess the work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944). It will propose a ground breaking dialogue between the artist’s paintings and drawings made in the first half of the 20th century and his often overlooked interest in the rise of other media during that time, including photography, film and the re-birth of stage production. Few other modern artists are better known and yet less understood than Munch. He is often presented primarily as a 19th century painter, a Symbolist or a pre-Expressionist, but this exhibition will aim to show instead how he emphatically engaged with 20th century concerns that were thoroughly representative of the modernity of the age. It will feature around sixty carefully-selected paintings and fifty photographs, alongside his lesser-known filmic work. These will reveal Munch’s interest in current affairs and how his paint...

Watercolour Tate Britain Linbury Galleries Wednesday 16 February – Sunday 21 August 2011 Admission £12.70/£14.00 with Gift Aid ( £10.90/£12.00 with Gift Aid concessions) Public information number: 020 7887 8888. Press release: 14 February 2011  Tate Britain presents a fresh assessment of the history of watercolour painting in Britain from the Middle Ages through to the present day. This major exhibition shows over 200 works including pieces by historic artists such as William Blake, Thomas Girtin and JMW Turner, through to modern and contemporary artists including Patrick Heron, Peter Doig and Tracey Emin. Spanning 800 years and celebrating the variety of ways watercolour has been used, it shows how important the medium is within British art. Drawing out a grand history which traces the origins of watercolour back to medieval illuminated manuscripts, the exhibition reassesses the commonly held belief that the medium first flourished during a ‘golden age’ of British watercolo...

Joan Miro: THE LADDER OF ESCAPE: Tate Modern: April 2011  Joan Miro (1893-1983) is the least known of Spain’s twentieth-century triumvirate of great artists: Picasso, Dali, Miro. This is the first retrospective of Miro in London since 1964, quite a long time then since any notable interest in Miro’s work, but now he is clearly a part of history rather than making it. Miro’s career straddled two centuries, born in the late 19th century but living into the latter part of the twentieth, he witnessed the great conflagration of the Spanish Civil War but also the Great War and WW2.  The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and Miro’s response to it shaped his career as it did Picasso’s and Dali’s to a lesser extent. Furthermore his career went on after the fall of the Republic and his subsequent exile. Miro’s approach to art was to dissolve his own formal constraints once he had attained them, therefore his work passed through a kind of negative evolution from complexity to utter si...

SUSAN HILLER AT THE TATE BRITAIN, March 2011 Susan Hiller (born Florida, USA, 1940) is an American artist who relocated to London some thirty years ago after a brief flirtation with academia, leaving a PhD thesis on anthropology unfinished. Hiller possibly found academe too constricting, too rational for the purposes of creativity. Hiller’s work is concerned with the unconscious which was purportedly discovered by Sigmund Freud, but also seeks to relate the unconscious to art & creativity, religion, magic, the paranormal and other modes of modern discourse that perhaps exists now in an era of uncertainty when religious precepts are being overturned yet not quite convincingly replaced by the next thing. In this sense her work hardly seems more informed than does the poetry of W.B.Yeats, informed as it was by all sorts of Occult experiments, alternate, esoteric wisdom and experiments.  Items such as planchettes, ouija boards all referenced by Hiller in the various installati...

NORTHERN STAR by STEWART PARKER at the Finsborough theatre, London directed by Caitlin McLeod with Jonathan Harden, Clare McMahon, Michael Byers, Sean Pol McGreevy, Adam Best, Helen Belbin, Gemma-Leah Devereux, Mark Edel-Hunt, Anthony Delaney The Finsborough theatre is an intimate venue meaning a miniature theatre set above a wine bar and restaurant in the Kensington & Chelsea area of London. The theatre specialises in re-discovering neglected masterpieces, this is the first revival of this play in ten years, so it comes as no surprise that a late Stewart Parker play is being re-examined here in the context of Ireland's recent bankruptcy. For we can also suppose that the default will trigger another great exodus of Irish people (but where?). The play deals with the life and times of Henry Joy McCracken (1767-1798), sometime member of the United Irishmen, revolutionist, nationalist in an era before Nationalism. Firstly its obvious that the minimal resources of the theatr...

ROMEO AND JULIET AT THE ASHCROFT THEATRE, FAIRFIELD HALL, CROYDON   This production of Romeo and Juliet at the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, attempted to contextualise Shakespeare's great romantic tragedy within relevant, contemporary themes of knife crime and gang violence in south London. Using pop music and back projected newspaper excerpts, the director attempted to bring the play up to date, to emphasize its completely constant relevance. It largely followed in the footsteps of Baz Luhrmann's film version of 1996 but also stopped short of the baroque excesses and occasional silliness of that production. The director seemed to fail to pursue the contemporary themes throughout the play, leaving them to dangle in space at the very beginning. After this initially successful sequence the production reverted to an old-fashioned interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, thus making the bare, sparse mise en scene and contemporary dress a bit purposeless. Unlike Double Falsehood the po...