<h2>RACHID KORAÏCHI: CELESTIAL BLUE<br>
7 MARCH – 13 APRIL 2024</h2>
<h2>RACHID KORAÏCHI: CELESTIAL BLUE<br>
7 MARCH – 13 APRIL 2024</h2>
<h2>RACHID KORAÏCHI: CELESTIAL BLUE<br>
7 MARCH – 13 APRIL 2024</h2>
<h2>LR VANDY: TWIST<br>
18 APRIL – 25 MAY 2024</h2>
<h2>LR VANDY: TWIST<br>
18 APRIL – 25 MAY 2024</h2>
<h2>Aubrey Williams: Cosmological Abstractions, 1973–85<br>23 May 2023 – 12 May 2024 at
Tate Britain, London</h2>Photo: © Tate (Madeleine Buddo)<h2>DREAM NO SMALL DREAM: The Story of October Gallery<br>Available from our Book Store, £40 + P&P</h2>304 pages, full colour plates throughout. Edited by Gerard Houghton.<h2>EDDY KAMUANGA ILLUNGA<br>Available from our Book Store, £45.95 + P&P</h2>248 pages, 200 full colour plates throughout. Published by Rizzoli.
 

CURRENT EXHIBITION

7 March – 13 April 2024
Rachid Koraïchi, from the series Les Vigilants (ii), 2020.
Steel, 176 x 128 x 45 cm.
Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith
Rachid Koraïchi, Les ailes bleues des Anges, 2022.
Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 150 cm.
Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith
October Gallery presents Celestial Blue, a solo exhibition of new works by the renowned artist Rachid Koraïchi. Born in the Aurès mountains of Algeria, Koraïchi’s creative explorations have employed an impressive range of media, which include paintings on canvas, paper and silk, bronze, wood and steel sculptures, ceramics and textiles. Koraïchi’s abiding fascination with signs of all kinds is the unwavering constant informing his conscious and finely detailed work.

In accordance with Koraïchi’s predilection for the magical number 7 – considered significant in all the major traditions – Celestial Blue celebrates the artist’s 77th year. This exhibition includes canvas works interspersed with statuesque steel sculptures, in his characteristically figurative forms. The works on canvas are inspired by the nasibs that the 12th century Sufi mystic and writer, Ibn ‘Arabi, set down in his book of love poems, The Interpreter of Desires (1215). Each large, square canvas presents an original design produced in white on an indigo blue ground that improvises upon one of the original poems. Rather than being a direct translation, each work becomes a sustained reflection on the profundity of Ibn ‘Arabi’s original vision, offering a visual correlative to the ideas expressed in a modified, entirely contemporary form.
 

FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION

18 April – 25 May 2024
LR Vandy, Transmitter, 2023.
Wood, aluminium, plastic, 47 x 19 x 14 cm.
LR Vandy, Dancing in Time: Copper Bottomr, 2023.
Coir rope, copper, wood, jute, brass, 66 x 15 x 14 cm.
October Gallery is delighted to present Twist, the second solo exhibition by LR Vandy, which features a new series of sculptures created from a variety of ropes and other materials; one large-scale rope work, several smaller rope sculptures, a collection of photographic prints and further new works from the artist’s signature Hull series. The exhibition follows last year’s display of Vandy’s large-scale installation, Dancing in Time: The Ties That Bind Us, a five-meter-high rope sculpture commissioned for the International Slavery Museum’s Martin Luther King celebrations at Liverpool’s Canning Dock waterfront.

In 2022, Vandy relocated her studio to a site adjacent to the Ropery at Chatham Historic Dock Yard – an establishment which has preserved traditional rope-making, still using original machinery from the 19th century, of which the oldest dates back to 1811. This led the artist to explore the matter and properties of rope, as she began to delve into the material’s historical importance and symbolic implications.

This series of rope sculptures was inspired by Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, ‘Dancing in the streets’, which locates the phenomenon of ‘collective joy’ as central to the origins of dance. Other contributing sources can be found in hunting rituals and the African spirit dances that transformed into carnival masquerades in the African diaspora. The vital, energetic forms are composed by shaping and hand-sewing sections of rope together, before tying off and binding the loose ends with twine or copper wire. Other rope sculptures subtly integrate incongruous found objects: cogs, pipes, washers skipping-rope handles, etc. Vandy’s vivacious curvilinear sculptures challenge the typical representation of the female form –historically subjected to the male gaze – to provide a more positive depiction that associates female abstraction with empowerment.

Alongside these sculptures, a new selection of Vandy’s striking Hull series will be shown, exploring the trade significance of indigo. The artist draws upon traditional talismans, amulets and charms to transform these model boats into ‘masks’ adorned and animated with various materials including rope, fishing floats and feathers. By continuously experimenting with different materials, LR Vandy’s remarkable assemblages, on close examination, animate the field of contemporary sculpture with haunting echoes laden with insight into issues of continuing relevance today.
 

 

RECENT EXHIBITIONS

18 January – 2 March 2024
Romuald Hazoumè, Aïchâtte, 2023.
Found objects, 38 x 22 x 13 cm
Alexis Peskine, Ebandeli, 2023.
Purple Japanese oxidised silver leaf, nails, black pigment and red hibiscus on wood, 120 x 120 cm.
October Gallery presents Transvangarde: Free Style Cipher, an exhibition of new works by Sokari Douglas Camp CBE, Alexis Peskine and Govinda Sah ‘Azad’, with selected works by Susanne Kessler, Tian Wei, Golnaz Fathi, Jukhee Kwon, Elisabeth Lalouschek, Romuald Hazoumè, Benji Reid and Zana Masombuka. Based on the hip-hop notion of an interactive, freewheeling exchange of contrasting ideas and styles, the exhibited works will focus on the visual language particular to each artist, helping to decode the various layers of meaning and shed revealing light on each artist’s individual practice in conversation with and in relation to their peers.

Highlights will include new steel sculptures by Sokari Douglas Camp that continue in the vein of her recent Jonkonnu Masquerade series. These poignant yet playful works focus on the significance of feathers, examining that material’s links to colonial wealth and power, as they combine imaginative elements of carnival masquerades and festival processions. New ‘nail portraits’ by Alexis Peskine, will also be shown. These powerful works made by hammering nails of different sizes into wooden boards focus on the Black experience and questions of identity as they map the spread of the African diaspora. Exhibited will be paintings by Govinda Sah whose work comprises interwoven layers of acrylic traces and marks that build into what Sah describes as a ‘long unfolding conversation between the canvas and myself.’
 
11 October 2023 – 13 January 2024
El Anatsui, Clouds gathering over the city, 2023.
Aluminium and copper wire, 386 x 282 cm.
Photos: Jonathan Greet
El Anatsui, Royal Slumber, 2023.
Aluminium and copper wire, 358 x 475 cm.
October Gallery will present TimeSpace, a solo exhibition of works by El Anatsui commencing during Frieze Week. Over a dazzling career spanning more than five decades, El Anatsui has become one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists of our time. His sculptures employing an extraordinary range of media and many uncommon materials have investigated a broad array of different subjects. As the new century dawned, his early explorations in clay and tropical hardwoods gradually gave way to inventive, new strategies designed to repurpose various found materials: iron graters, milk-tin lids and — most famously — aluminium bottle-tops. Today, El Anatsui is best known for his mesmerising metallic installations, composed of tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of individual bottle-tops fastened together with copper wire. Over the past two decades, these shape-shifting sculptural forms have graced the inner and, more recently, the outer walls of an increasing number of major art institutions around the world.

The exhibition at October Gallery will be an intimate show of new works alongside examples of earlier works that give insight, add context and help explain the development of this hugely influential artist. TimeSpace combines new bottle-top wall sculptures together with several earlier works engaging with other materials and different processes.

This exhibition of predominately contemporary works explores the artist’s innovative and experimental approach to tools, processes and materials. Taking a long-perspective view of his extraordinary career, TimeSpace examines the way El Anatsui has, for decades, developed surprising and novel directions that have brought about an unexpected synthesis between African and Western practices. In so doing he has reshaped and profoundly affected the direction of contemporary sculpture, as acknowledged by the Golden Lion awarded to him in 2015 for his lifetime of achievement in the arts. El Anatsui’s sophisticated and deftly organised sculptures represent an original and unique synthesis of the diverse histories of African art with selected influences appropriated from the paradigms of contemporary Western practice.

El Anatsui is this year’s artist for the Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which will open to the public 10th October.