Sigismund’s Watch: A Tiny Catastrophe. Artist Barbara Loftus at the Freud Museum.

Sigismund’s Watch: A Tiny Catastrophe is an exhibition of paintings and images on paper by Barbara Loftus,
curated by Monica Bohm-Duchen at the Freud Museum in London. It will be on from 5th October - 13th November 2011.

We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is the major events which have the most decisive influence on us. We are more deeply and more continuously moved by the tiny catastrophes that make up daily life

Siegfried Kracauer The Salaried Masses 1929

Sigismund’s Watch: A Tiny Catastrophe is a cycle of artworks prompted by the recollections of the artist’s mother Hildegard, who fled from Germany to England as a Jewish refugee in 1939. The story is told through a series of oil paintings and works on paper, vividly contextualised by documentary images and quotations from the Weimar period. Sigismund’s Watch narrates a ‘primal scene’ from the early 1920s, recalled by Hildegard in old age, when, as a small child, she witnessed, unseen by her parents, a bitter marital row. The cause was her father Sigismund’s bankruptcy, which inflicted sudden impoverishment on their comfortable bourgeois way of life. Hidden under the table, she saw her mother tear her father’s gold pocket watch from his waistcoat pocket, stamp on it and smash it.

The smashing of the watch becomes for Loftus a potent and poignant symbol – standing for the chaos into which Hildegard’s family and many others were plunged overnight. The ensuing climate of fear, suspicion and destabilization in the collective psyche dealt a fatal blow to the fragile concept of the German-Jewish symbiosis. The historic equation of the Jew and money re-emerged as the scapegoat for the failing mark, and the brutalising effects of hyperinflation helped undermine the Weimar Republic and lay the foundations for the Third Reich and the rise of Hitler.

Loftus’s working methods are complex and distinctive: her mother’s spoken (and recorded) testimony, combined with detailed archival research, enabled her to instruct professional actors to recreate the scenes she imagined in her mind’s eye. Photographs and film of this re-enactment formed the basis for a dramatic sequence of drawings and cut-out silhouettes, which in turn gave rise to a series of oil paintings, which although naturalistic in style, pare the narrative down to its eloquent essentials. Transcending its historical sources, Sigismund’s Watch is a subtle and sophisticated meditation on the meshing of time and memory, gender, marriage and money, power, history and the act of bearing witness.

For further information, images or interviews with the artist please contact Penny Sychrava at 0796 791 5339 or pennysychrava@hotmail.com

BIOG:

Born in London in 1946, the daughter of a German-Jewish refugee (who until 1994 spoke very little about her past) and an Anglo-Irish communist, Barbara Loftus trained first at Harrow School of Art and then at Brighton College of Art. Since 1970 she has exhibited widely with exhibitions at the Serpentine, Barbican and ICA. Sigismund’s Watch is the third in what the artists sees as a trilogy of on-going projects dealing with aspects of her mother’s history: the other two are A Confiscation of Porcelain (1994) and German Landscape with Wandervogel (1998).

• The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Philip Wilson, with essays by art historian Monica Bohm-Duchen and Esther Leslie, Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London.
• There will be a guided tour of the exhibition by the artist on Sunday 16th October at 3pm
• Barbara Loftus and Monica Bohm-Duchen will be “In Conversation” on Wednesday 26th October at 7pm.

VENUE DETAILS:

• Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX, tel: 020 7435 2002
• Opening hours: Wednesday - Sunday 12 – 5
• Admission: Adults £6.00; Senior Citizens £4.50; Concessions £3.00; Children under 12 free

text taken from press release

A great variety of art. Not a great variety of artists.

An image from the Hackney Hoard show at Galerie 8

This year I have written in celebration of the Max Mara Art Prize for women, showcased at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The Whitechapel has an excellent track record in supporting women artists: its comeback show after months of restoration featured the work of Goshka Macuga and Isa Genzken, amongst others. Even the thinking behind the Turner Prize, notorious within the art world for being awarded to such a small number of women artists over the long duration of its history, has transformed in the last ten years, with a marked increase in women shortlistees and women winners. This is all to the credit of the art world, which has been quicker on its feet than the literary and classical music worlds when it comes to crediting women for our creativity and intellect. Recent major exhibitions and retrospectives in the UK have given cultural space to Maria Lassnig, Polly Morgan, photographer Dorothy Bohm (at Manchester Art Gallery), Marina Ambramovich, Fiona Banner, Nancy Spero, Annette Messager, Eva Rothschild, Tracey Emin (currently on at the Hayward) and Susan Hiller and I have every hope that this trend will continue. In the last few years Emin and Barbara Kruger have represented Britain and America respectively at the Venice Biennale (Emin being only the 2nd female artist ever to do so) and I hope their presence counteracts somewhat the utterly damning art world statistics given on the Guerilla Girls' brilliant posters, which I saw at the 2005 Biennale.

It's heartening to see an entire international industry and a great and grand discipline with centuries of history change in so short a time. I feel hopeful...until I read Brian Sewell's openly misogynistic ripdowns of Tracey Emin and Susan Hiller, until I realise that only one of the major newspapers picked up on the Women Make Sculpture show at the Pangolin Gallery - and until I get a press release like the below:

Hackney Hoard
Opening celebration: Thursday 21 July 2011 / 6 - 9 PM
With a special performance by Doug Fishbone

GALERIE8 proudly presents Hackney Hoard, a project initiated by celebrated artist and amateur London historian Adam Dant. The exhibition takes the discovery and narrative surrounding the find of the “Hackney Hoard” as a starting point and what follows, is an inquiry of the value and status placed on contemporary art objects.

Including an introduction by finder Terence Castle, and artworks by Adam Dant, Le Gun artists, Matthew Killick, Annabel Tilley, and Gavin Turk.

The Hackney Hoard exhibition is part of GALERIE8's summer opening series of events entitled Launching Pad to begin its residency within the Arthaus building. This diverse exhibition, both visual and interactive, engaging and reflective, will include a series based on events, sound and performance art, a publishing fair, film screenings and theatre evenings.

Le Gun are a collective of illustrators whose work is exciting, fresh and original. The collective is made up of 8 men and 1 woman. Of the rest of the named artists invited to participate in Hackney Hoard, there are 4 men (Adam Dant, Matthew Killick, Gavin Turk and Doug Fishbone) and 1 woman, Annabel Tilley. I am sure that all are excellent - as well as Le Gun, I love Gavin Turk's work. But don't tell me that a grand total of 12 men and 2 women participants is anything like a free and fair representation of all the possible creativity, genius, artistry, insight, history, performance, collaboration, energy and thinking that the show's organisers could have accessed. The PRs for these exhibitions are always, of course, female. I wonder how they feel, working so hard to support projects whose perks and credit go only to the men in power. I have run out of interest in perpetrators' excuses, lies and victim-blaming ("it's women's fault - women are scarce - shy - small - unpushy - having babies - emotional - absent - less bothered about success/fame/money/career"). Don't tell me that it's just a funny and sad coincidence that all the really really great work is done by men and all the really really shit work is done by women and, hey, that's just how it is. I mean, the current Galerie 8 show features a woman artist, Mary Yacoob, so they obviously know some. The audience for all cultural events in all disciplines from dance to music to literature to art to design to theatre is always at least half and usually majority female. We deserve better. Turn it around.

Women Make Sculpture

Christie Brown, Lost and Found

The Pangolin Gallery in London (Kings Place, 90 York Way, N1 9AG) is launching Women Make Sculpture, which will run from 19th May until 18th June.


Despite the huge success of a handful of sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink and Louise Bourgeois, women are still under-represented in major art shows, galleries and museums and under-valued on the art sales market. The Royal Academy’s current exhibition Modern British Sculpture which has received so much criticism for leaving out established male sculptors such as Antony Gormley (ha!) and Anish Kapoor. But what about the women? Is such a meagre selection really representative of the current state of British sculpture? Pangolin London thinks not.

Coinciding with the centenary year of International Women’s Day, Pangolin London will celebrate female achievement in sculpture with the exhibition Women Make Sculpture, an all female show highlighting the diversity and creativity of women sculptors today. The exhibition will bring into the spotlight a number of established female artists including Sarah Lucas, Dorothy Cross, Ann Christopher and Alison Wilding as well as emerging names such as Polly Morgan, Abigail Fallis, Rose Gibbs and Briony Marshall.

Women Make Sculpture provides an opportunity to focus on a selection of sculpture inspired by topical issues that concern women today such as war, mental health, sex, childbirth and science. Director of Pangolin London, Polly Bielecka, notes: “The exhibition is not intended to tackle gender superiority; rather it hopes to question whether female artists bring something different to contemporary British sculpture.”

The exhibition will include an eclectic mix of work in a variety of media ranging from Almuth Tebbenhoff’s powerful yet intricate steel wall pieces to Polly Morgan’s taxidermy constructions, and from Deborah van der Beek’s emotive horse head Collateral made from the detritus of war to Rose Gibbs’ controversial Mountain of figures and penises violently expelling bodily fluids.

Pangolin London is well-placed to do a survey show of this kind thanks to its unique affiliation with Europe’s largest sculpture foundry Pangolin Editions and its remit to promote sculpture in all its forms. Pangolin London will also host a panel discussion to coincide with the exhibition on Monday 23rd May at Kings Place. This will include both artists exhibiting in the show and guest speakers to encourage a lively debate.

To book tickets please click here.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
The Pangolin Gallery is open Tues - Saturday 10am-6pm




This text is taken from the Pangolin's press release.