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CURRENT EXHIBITION

EL ANATSUI: TimeSpace

11 October 2023 – 13 January 2024

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.

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FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION

TRANSVANGARDE: Free Style Cipher

18 January – 2 March 2024

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, and Romuald Hazoumè, amongst others. 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.’

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RECENT EXHIBITIONS

ZANA MASOMBUKA: Nges’rhodlweni: A Portal for Black Joy

5 – 30 September, 2023

October Gallery presents Nges’rhodlweni: A Portal for Black Joy, by South African artist Zana Masombuka, also known as ‘Ndebele Superhero’. In her first solo exhibition in London, Masombuka explores the intersection of identity and culture in a mix of mediums that include photography, film, sculpture and performance. From these diverse materials, she weaves inspiring visual narratives of arresting aesthetic subtlety, drawing inspiration from her upbringing in a small rural town in the Ndebele homeland in South Africa. Place is central to Masombuka’s work, and her practice is imbued with traditional Ndebele lore, which the artist employs to bring about a radical re-examination of the individual’s position within the wider community.

Nges’rhodlweni: A Portal for Black Joy showcases a body of work which has been developing over the last three years. The title refers to a special space in the Ndebele household, where people of all ages gather to share in the communion of art, creating a site of expression for the entire community. This sacred space encourages connection to the Enas (spirit), which permits manifestations of a heightened sense of joy. This euphoria is recognised as creative energy and is a prerequisite for the exchange of essential knowledge. Masombuka describes how being present and open to one's community in this preserved space facilitates the growth of knowledge within each individual, something fundamental to the evolution of culture. For the Ndebele community such transmission is not considered linear but instead is imagined as being cyclical, hence infinite and unbounded.

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Aubrey Williams: Future Conscious

15 June – 29 July, 2023

October Gallery presents Future Conscious, a solo exhibition comprising a selection of recently rediscovered paintings and works on paper by Aubrey Williams. The exhibition spans three decades — from the 1960s to the 1980s — and highlights Williams’ prescient understanding of, and concerns regarding, the mounting problems impacting environmental and ecological stability.

Williams, a visionary painter, often cited as being ahead of his time, trained as an Agricultural Officer in Guyana in the early 1940s. Williams was finely attuned to the complexities of these interactive systems in ways that anticipated, by decades, our own recent awakening to the urgency and seriousness of the environmental crises now looming over humanity.

Williams’ work can be viewed as a uniquely evolved expression of abstraction and as a powerful contribution to a post-war artistic sensibility. The works exhibited in Future Conscious show a striking and comprehensive use of colour, with a complex blend of abstraction and petroglyphic iconography.

There has recently been a major renewal of interest in Williams’ work as shown by his increasing prominence in significant international survey exhibitions, such as the seminal Fragments of Epic Memory at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945–1965 at the Barbican, London, a timely reassessment of an artist whose distinctive body of work has frequently defied mainstream art conventions. Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now at Tate Britain (2021–2022) positioned Williams’ work as a critical point of focus for the exhibition, juxtaposing seminal canvases alongside less familiar paintings. In another major exhibition, The Earth Will Open Its Mouth, Williams’ work was used as a revelatory counterweight, providing contrast and context alongside pieces by the surrealist, impressionist artist Erna Rosenstein at Museum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland.
Tate Britain has recently dedicated a room to Williams’ paintings, which is on display until 12th May, 2024.

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