Rough Seas, a survey of Susan Hiller's Rough Seas works, opens at Lisson Gallery from March 14 – April 15

504 West 24th Street, New York

The exhibition tracks Hiller’s investigation into a particular cultural artifact, the ‘rough sea’ tourist postcard, which she began in the early 1970s and continued until her death in 2019. Rough Seas represents the influential artist’s third exhibition with the gallery and first in New York since 2017.

Having moved to the UK in the late ‘60s, the US-born Susan Hiller was in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare when she came across an old Edwardian postcard bearing the image of waves crashing against the shore and the legend ‘rough sea’. Soon she began collecting similar postcards from junk stores in other coastal towns, recognizing them both as a form of collective portrait, a representation of Britain as an island nation, obsessed with the weather; and also as a domesticated, miniaturized version of the Romantic tradition of the sublime. Her first work to make use of this collection was the multi-panel installation, Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972-76), one of the best-known British conceptual works of the period (Tate collection). Positioning herself as curator, Hiller treated the postcards as miniature artworks, products of a previously unacknowledged artistic tradition in which anonymous workers, typically women, were employed to add hand-tinted effects and painted details to photographic images.

Carolyn Thompson is showing work in the group show 'Re-readings' at Eagle gallery, which runs until 17 March.

'Re-readings' brings together three U.K. artists whose work could be described as a form re-reading. Their art investigates source material that contains different kinds of language, re-fashioning it into new forms and altering narratives.

Pictured: Carolyn Thompson, Black Mirror (2011) - a print sequence based on Truman Capote’s short story Music for Chameleons.

Jordan Baseman will be showing his video work Gigantic (2019) in the group show We lived happily during the war at Cross Lane Projects.

25 March – 22 April 2023
Opening: Friday 24 March, 6-8pm

We lived happily during the war brings together a group of artists to explore themes of war, notions of dislocated landscape, and supernatural fictional narratives. Curated by Denise Hawrysio, the exhibition features work by Michael Allgoewer, Jordan Baseman, Denise Hawrysio, Marc Hulson, Rebecca Scott, and Stanislav Turina.

Michael Curran features in Conciërgerie, a show of work in a disused concierge apartment in Antwerp.

The Foundling Museum have acquired Joyful News by represented artist Nicola Bealing.

The 18th-century ballad 'Joyful News for Bachelors and Maids' poked fun at the Foundling Hospital, suggesting it would encourage promiscuity. Bealing took inspiration from this bawdy song for the painting, now on display at the museum.

The Guardian has written a feature on represented artist Mike Nelson ahead of his solo show at the Hayward Gallery.

The article includes a section on 'The Book of Spells (a speculative fiction)' at Matt's Gallery:

A few days after we speak, I go to see The Book of Spells, an installation by Nelson that he made in a single room of a terraced house for Matt’s Gallery in London. It was briefly open during the pandemic, and will be so again this spring alongside the Hayward show. There’s a single iron bed frame covered over with a Turkish textile, and a sash window, boarded up from the outside. The room is lined with shelves which are covered in travel books – Lonely Planets, Rough Guides, the occasional Blue or AA guide. Some of them are duplicates; it feels as though an obsessive, perhaps desperate mind has put together this collection. They immediately put you out of time, these books. They were once such a touchstone of travel and adventure, and are now obsolescent in the face of the internet. Each marks a moment of history that in many cases is now unreachable: you won’t be holidaying in Moscow any time soon, nor in Aleppo. The room is tiny, claustrophobic, and there’s a strong reminder of the confinement wrought by Covid-19, but at the same time it feels like some kind of unwritten short story. (It reminds me, in fact, of Borges’ The Aleph, in which the narrator encounters, in a cellar beneath a bourgeois Buenos Aires dining room, a device from which it is possible to see every other point on Earth). It is intensely simple in its way and yet heavy with layers of association, and immensely eerie. Like all Nelson’s work, it creates a place and offers an invitation. The rest is up to you.

Melanie Jackson's work Deeper in the Pyramid is included in an upcoming exhibition Milk at the Wellcome Collection, and a new publication Microbiopolitics of Milk, edited by INLAND as part of Documenta Fifteen.

Imogen Stidworthy is one of the recipients of the Radical Therapies Mellon Fellowship for Arts Practice & Scholarship, awarded By The Richard And Mary L. Gray Center For Arts And Inquiry, University Of Chicago.

Jordan Baseman has been selected as one of three artists taking part in the Holocaust Centre North's inaugural Memorial Gestures Residency Programme, supported by the Iby Knill Bursaries.

Represented artist Mike Nelson is exhibiting his works in a solo show at the Hayward Gallery, from 22 February - 7 May. Extinction Beckons is the first major survey of work by Mike Nelson, who has shown at Matt's Gallery on 6 occasions since 1996. For more information and to book, visit the Hayward Gallery website.

Michael Curran collaborates with Marie-Sophie Beinke at Moonstreet Projects, Antwerp.

19 December 2022 – 4 February 2023

Swedenborg Film Festival 2022 is taking place on Saturday 10 December, from 6-9:30PM. Free entry, book tickets via the Swedenborg Society website.

DUST welcomes you to the first of a series of DUST-DUST Gatherings to celebrate the West Penwith launch of 'Widowhood', Bronwen Buckeridge's artist book published by Matt's Gallery in 2021. Join us at Dust 4pm Saturday 10th December for readings, sound and a glass of something warming.

In Taiwan, Lindsay Seers' work is on show as part of Making Worlds: An Imagineering Project at MoCA Taipei. Curated by Wang Han-Fang, the group exhibition also features works by Joyce Ho, Kosta Tonev, Ericka Beckman, Chang Yun-Han and Chang Wen-Hsuan.

In Entangled4 (Theatre IV) Lindsay Seers returns to androgynous themes present in her 2009 work It has to be this way at Matt's Gallery. The Renaissance 'theatre of the world' motif of this previous work is bastardised by Seers into vaudeville. For Seers this theatrical genre (vaudeville) presents a series of segments in which the artifice of the staging is absurdly evident and failure is omnipresent. Entangled2 presents the Victorian music hall legends Hetty King and Vesta Tilly (both male impersonators), performed by contemporary actors. Both Tilly and King performed in Mile End at the Paragon Theatre, now the Genesis Cinema.

Biography plays a key role in Seers’ work, but is rarely used in an ordinary or straight sense. Stories and lives are used as a more complex narrative vehicle in which coincidence, chance and chaos seem far more at play than any singular notion of freewill or determinism. Entangled2 mirrors Seers’ on-going investigation towards the synthesising of classic dichotomies between self/other, male/female, truth/lies.

Seers treats the past as a myth made of parts that seem to make a coherent whole, of which every element is true, but a fiction is created in the collaging of these fragments as a misconstrued totality.

Context is everything in these works. The gallery is transformed into a hybrid theatre set, a booth, a cinema of sorts, a show case, a shop window, a viewing room. It is work about mutiplicities to be seen by two people through two windows in two rooms on two screens but this twinning is not simplistic as each entitiy carries a myriad of other associations and identities – nothing is singular. The ephemeral screens are inflated balls. They take on different guises such as eyeballs, beach balls and platonic forms. Enfolded in curtains, their shifting connotations pass across their plastic surfaces, creating a meeting point where expression and form commingle.

As usual we enter in the midst of things. The evolution of Seers’ subjects and structures are buffeted on a restless sea, of which she has limited control as the story writes itself and is as fractured and as incoherent as any real event. The forms of her structures arise in the making – each part modifies the other. The very creation of the work evolves from a collection of on-going associations that divide and grow like fractals in an ever-burgeoning pattern.

On Friday 9 December, join Forma Arts and Media for the official launch party of Presse Books at Forma HQ, where Benedict Drew will be presenting a site-specific commission from 6PM.

Benedict Drew will take over Presse Books with a tri-part commission that includes Music for Bookshops, a new “bibliophonic” musical composition that uses books and printed matter as source material; a new film for the bookshop monitor, Some Suggestions Concerning Commerce(in the style of Henry Flynt); and a double-sided poster edition titled All Firings Will Now Be On Mondays.

Adding to the evening festivities, Benedict Drew will present a live performance with collaborators Arianne Churchman and Natalie Kynigopoulou.

6.00 pm
Edition launch and drinks

7.30 pm
Live performance by Arianne Churchman, Benedict Drew and Natalie Kynigopoulou.

Followed by festive celebrations

Presse Books at FormaHQ
Peveril Garden Studios
140 Great Dover Street
SE1 4GW
London

24 November 2022 - 25 January 2023
Moon Grove, Manchester
PV Wednesday 23 November, 6-9PM

Several artists who have worked with Matt's Gallery over the years feature in The Horror Show!, a major exhibition now open at Somerset House. Including works by Anne Bean, Lucy Gunning, Susan Hiller, Harminder Judge, Tina Keane, Lindsey Mendick, Tai Shani and Suzanne Treister among many others; The Horror Show! celebrates our greatest cultural provocateurs and visionaries, examining how ideas rooted in horror have informed the last 50 years of creative rebellion in Britain.

The Horror Show! is co-curated by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard and Claire Catterall, who also conceived the idea.

Two paintings by Nicola Bealing are included in the exhibition Head to Head, at GBS Fine Art until 26 November.

Due to travel disruption, this event has been moved from Saturday 5 November 2022.

Work by Anne Bean will be included in The Horror Show! A Twisted Tale of Modern Britain at Somerset House, open 27 Oct 2022 – 19 Feb 2023.

Work by Lindsay Seers will be in included in the exhibition Making Worlds: An Imagineering Project at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, 5 November 2022 - 29 January 2023.

Jordan Baseman's film, A River in Reverse, will be screened 30 October 8pm, as part of the UNTV Drive-in Cinema in the heart of Western lutruwita/Tasmania, produced by cultural organisation The Unconformity.

Jordan Baseman's film, A Different Kind of Different, will be screened 27 October in Eugene, Oregon, as part of the Oregon Independent Film Festival. The film has been awared Best Short Film at the festival.

Cold Light by Lindsay Seers and Keith Sargent opens at Turner Contemporary, 22 October 2022 - 8 January 2023. Cold Light, a new video installation and virtual reality work, was first shown at Matt's Gallery earlier this year and was developed in partnership with Turner Contemporary and E-WERK Luckenwalde.

A solo presentation of Anne Bean's work, with England & Co, London, will be part of the Spotlight section at Frieze Masters, 12-16 October 2022.

Alison Turnbull has recently completed a commission for Peterhouse Technology Park in Cambridge. Taking inspiration from the surrounding architecture, and the microchips being designed inside, Those tiny little sparks borrows its title from a song by Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp.

Melanie Jackson's work is included in Brewers Towner International at Towner Eastbourne, 15 October 2022 - 22 January 2023. Melanie will be showing a new 10 minute single screen edit of Spekyng Rybawdy and a selection of ceramic and plywood sculptures

An exhibition of a new body of work by Willie Doherty opens at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 15 October - 19 November.

An article on Alison Turnbull's work 'ATX 2012 Apple Varieties' has been published by Apples & People. Read the article here.

Brian Catling (1948-2022)

Work by Hayley Newman and Anne Bean is included in Out of the Margins at Whitechapel Gallery, 30 August 2022 – 15 January 2023.

Work by Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen is included in MOUTHPIECE at the New Media Gallery, Vancouver, October 1 - December 11, 2022.

The 5th edition of the Middlesbrough Art Weekender invites over 75 artists to explore the theme 'power POWER'. This is the fourth consecutive year that Matt's Gallery has worked with Middlesbrough Art Weekender, who are presenting Overlay by Leah Capaldi at their Auxiliary Project Space.

LICHTEKOOI, TWHYLIGHT: an evening with Michael Curran & film screening of Jacques Rivette's 1976 Masterpiece DUELLE, 24.09.2022 at 8 pm, part of 'Zomer in de kloostertuin' at Extra City.

Cold Light by Lindsay Seers & Keith Sargent in collaboration with Performance Electrics opens 17 September at E-WERK Luckenwalde. Cold Light was first shown here at Matt's Gallery 29 April – 17 July 2022, and was produced through a collaboration between E-WERK, Turner Contemporary and Matt's Gallery.

Spekyng Rybawdy, a run of silk scarves by Melanie Jackson, will be exhibited and available to purchase at SupaVenezia from August 31st at A plus A Gallery. You can also purchase a scarf at the Matt's Gallery online shop here.

Work by Nicola Bealing is included in ‘Like there is hope and I can dream of another world’ at Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row, until 14th September. Work from the exhibition will be auctioned in aid of Hospital Rooms, hosted by Bonhams, with online bidding from 8th September.

Jordan Baseman has selected 5 films each by a different filmmaker, available to watch on demand, for Cryptofiction.

An exhibition of the work of Jo Bruton and Rosa Lee will open at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, 20 August-1 October.

Leah Capaldi has shared some writing on her time at the New Contemporaries British School at Rome Residency, which took place in November 2021.

High on Hope, 23 July – 24 September 2022 at Cross Lanes Project, has been conceived as a memorial exhibition for the artist Gerard Hemsworth (1945-2021). It brings together a selection of Hemsworth’s canvases with that the work by eight other artists whom he taught, on the Master’s programme at Goldsmiths College, London, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Next at Matt's Gallery:
Nathaniel Mellors
Estate
25 Sept - 18 Dec 2022

Work by Lindsay Seers and Keith Sargent will be included in the Mayor of London Liberty Festival, 22 – 24 July.

Work by Lucy Gunning and Annie Whiles will be included in Host & Guest / Nick Stewart & Friends, opening at PALFREY 9 July 2-8pm.

Jordan Baseman's film gendersick will be shown at Whitechapel Gallery as part of the London Open 2022, 30 June - 4 September.

David Osbaldeston will be taking part in the Art Car Boot Sale at SWG3 in Glasgow, 25 and 26 June.

Director Lucile Hadzihalilovic discusses her new film based on Brian Catling's novella Earwig in Diabolique Magazine.

Nicola Bealing's work will be included in Dowch i Brestatyn Heulog (Come to Sunny Prestatyn) at ArcadeCampfa, Cardiff, 2nd July - 20th August.

Newt Tank by Nicola Bealing has been selected by Stephen Chambers RA for inclusion in this year's Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, 21 June — 21 August 2022.

Last chance to see the exhibition A A TO T V (CLADINORO) GIORGIO SADOTTI at No Show Space, closing 11 June.

Work by Jennet Thomas will be included in this year's Whitstable Biennale, 11 June-19 June.

RIVA GALLERY, 72B Southgate Rd, N1 3JF

Oona Grimes has been awarded the Bryan Robertson Award.

Nicola Bealing will be showing in the group exhibition ‘A Modern Capricho’ at Cross Lane Projects, London, opening 28 May, 6-8pm.

The first staff pick for our new shop is ‘Dark is The Night’ by Jordan Baseman, selected by Tuna El-Salihie, Stanley Picker Trainee.

Brian Catling's novella 'Earwig' has been adapted into a film, directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, in cinemas June 10. Click here watch the trailer.

Matt's Gallery congratulates writer and curator Gilane Tawadros on her appointment as Director of Whitechapel Gallery. Tawadros was a Matt's Gallery Trustee between 2014 and 2016. She will take up her post in October 2022.

Jarosław Kozłowski's Archive of Ideas is exhibiting Robin Klassnik work in the archival exhibition NEO-DADA. IRONIA. KONTESTACJA in Poznan, Poland. Klassnik's works in the exhibition are a collection of postcards and rubber stamps he sent to Kozlowski in 1975. Kozlowski's gallery Akumulatory 2 (1972-1990) was the inspiration for Klassnik's establishing of Matt's Gallery in 1979.

Anne Bean will be Performing the Wormhole Contract at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle on 14th May at 7pm.

Graham Fagen RSA and Edward Summerton RSA are exhibiting their piece, Social Housing (For the Strict Nature Reserve) in the RSA’s 196th Annual Exhibition. The show is on Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 12-5pm until 12 June.

Graham Fagen has released a limited edition giclée print ‘Nancy, Bell, Roselle (The ships that Robert Burns booked passages to Jamaica on) (2022) for the National Galleries of Scotland.

Jordan Baseman film A Different Kind of Different has won the People's Choice Award in the Animation category at Humboldt Int'l Film Festival.

Alison Turnbull is featured in Sorting Britain: The Power of Postcodes at The Postal Museum. This exhibition celebrates the story of a postal innovation that changed life in Britain. From the price of your house to range of health care you can access, postcodes impact people daily. They developed in the mid-20th century to help sort and process the post. Since then, they have become much more than that.

Alison Turnbull presents a new site-specific work, Rhododendron Jazz Band as part of Rhododendrons: Riddle, Obsession, Threat at Edinburgh's Inverleith House. Coinciding with the peak flowering period of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s rhododendrons, the exhibition reveals the organisations’ significant history of collecting, researching and cultivating this unique plant.

Frances Scott's Aureole commissioned by Matt's Gallery for MattFlix, will screen in 'Diffraction of Language' at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, 2-8 May 2022 - with Apichatpong Weerasethakul retrospective and Dara Birnbaum carte blanche.

A massive thank you to everyone who came to the opening of Matt's Gallery, Nine Elms.

Block 336 is very pleased to be showing Spekyng Rybawdy, the latest and most ambitious incarnation of Melanie Jackson’s ongoing project exploring the transgressive narratives and explicit symbolism of Medieval pilgrim bawdy badges. Through a carnival of colourful, erotically charged characters, Spekyng Rybawdy encourages us to re-examine not only our ideas about who took part in the production and circulation of imagery in the medieval period – but also how this might enable us to reconsider the origins of dissenting representations, sexual politics and our attitudes and behaviours today.

Read Michael Curran in conversation with Chris Valentine. Curran explores the themes and dreams of Valentine Lyons. Trish Lyons is a long term collaborator of Curran's. The two performed Karaoke Macbeth at the Macbeth public house in Hoxton St in 1999. Lyons consequently appeared in both Love in A Cold Climate and most notably singing in Curran's Look What The Done To My Song at Matt's Gallery in 2007. Lyons also wrote the text St. Cecilia for the show's notes.