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10/2/2014

Richard Hamilton

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

For decades the most continually innovative of British artists, Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) was widely regarded as a founding figure of pop art. The ICA presents two installations, Man, Machine and Motion (1955) and an Exhibit (1957) by Richard Hamilton to coincide with Tate Modern's retrospective. Almost six decades after the artist presented these works at the Institute's original location in Dover Street, they will be re-staged to reflect the artist's close relationship with the ICA throughout his career.

Hamilton's relationship with the ICA was established when he installed James Joyce: His Life and Work (1950) with Nigel Henderson and later The Wonder and Horror of the Human Head (1953); and curated Growth and Form (1951) at the Institute's original location in Dover Street. Hamilton was a key member of the Independent Group, took part in numerous public discussions and the networks afforded to him by the ICA greatly furthered his career.

Man, Machine and Motion consisted of thirty steel, open frames in which photographic images were clipped. The frames were double sided, and therefore housed over 200 separate images. Hamilton designed the exhibition to be flexible, so that the frames could be moved and placed in different configurations. For the original exhibition at the ICA the panels devoted to travel by sea were shown on five screens which were combined to make a block eight feet square by four feet high.

Richard Hamilton developed the flexible exhibition more fully with his next curated show, an Exhibit in 1957, with the abstract artist Victor Pasmore, again at the Hatton Gallery. The ICA exhibition will allow audiences the opportunity to engage with two of his most well known installations from the ICA's most formative period on Dover Street and celebrate this pivotal moment in the ICA's history. The exhibition will also include archival material which expands upon the previous incarnations of the exhibited work.

Richard Hamilton was born in London in 1922. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools and Slade School of Art, and went on to teach at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Hamilton was a key member of the Independent Group, who met at the ICA in the 1950s. He represented Britain in the 1993 Venice Biennale and his work is held in major public and private collections around the world.

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ICA Off-Site: Dover Street Market
11 Feb 2014 – 6 Apr 2014

The ICA returns to occupy its former home on Dover Street with an explosion of rarely seen archival material across all six floors.

Between 1950 and 1968, the Institute of Contemporary Arts was based at 17-18 Dover Street, before relocating to The Mall. It was in this building that Pop Art was born, as well as Op Art and Brutalist Architecture. It is where the Independent Group formed and regularly met, its members including artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, and architects Alison and Peter Smithson. This is where the ICA staged some of the most important shows in the history of post-war British art, including Growth and Form and Parallel Of Life and Art, as well as ground-breaking exhibitions by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock.

This project coincides with Richard Hamilton at the ICA and the publication of Institute of Contemporary Arts: 1946 - 1968 by Anne Massey and Gregor Muir.

ICA Off-Site: Dover Street Market
11 Feb – 6 Apr 2014
Free Exhibition
Dover Street Market, 17-18 Dover Street, London, W1S 4LT
Opening hours:
11am–6.30pm Monday to Wednesday
11am–7pm Thursday to Saturday
12pm–5pm Sunday

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Jane Drew (1911-1996)
An Introduction

11 Feb 2014 – 23 Mar 2014

Jane Drew (1911-1996) was a British architect and educator. Her work signaled a major shift from universal modernism to responsive and vernacular design. Drew was an instrumental agent across the projects and fields of urban and domestic design in which she worked, yet has remained unrecognised relative to her male contemporaries.

She began her career designing ergonomic kitchens and was responsible for the standard height of ovens that is still used today. A close ally of Paolozzi, Moore and Hepworth, Drew can be credited for securing the premises of the ICA (both at Dover Street in 1950 and The Mall in 1968) where she with others collectively re-designed the interiors including the fittings and furniture. Contemporary art was fundamental to her designing process and while working with her husband Maxwell Fry, she commissioned artworks as integral elements within building projects – which in the UK included social housing and public infrastructure in London and various New Towns.

During the 1950s, working in the partnership of Fry & Drew, she began designing buildings internationally in the newly independent states of India and Iran and the soon to be decolonised Nigeria. Drew was a galvanizing force who instigated ambitious international projects with often conflicting and jealous team members. Drew proposed to the Indian government that Le Corbusier be the mastermind behind the construction of the new capital of Punjab following partition. She was responsible for much of the low-income housing in Chandigarh and played an important role in re-housing the city’s existing residents and migrant workers.

Significantly, Drew and her partner Fry published books and taught ‘Tropical Architecture’ at the Architectural Association. A body of knowledge developed after significant experience in West and North Africa and India was formalised into architectural instruction, which incorporated traditional building methods into the modernist style. While such ideas remain problematic in a post-colonial context, this reappraisal of the vernacular presents a rupture within the modernist dogma instituted by the likes of Le Corbusier, which insisted on a progressive universal style.

Throughout her international career, Drew remained committed to contemporary artists and did not see her work in Africa and Asia as distinct from the public building and exhibition projects in the UK. Rather, her life and work demonstrates how the histories of Twentieth Century British art and architecture are intricately bound to developing global conditions emergent in the wake of the Second World War.

Jane Drew (1911-1996): An Introduction will include a selection of artworks, books and ephemera and will be accompanied by a related talks and events programme. Highlights include a collage by Eduardo Paolozzi from 1957 which is a study for a work commissioned by Drew and Fry for their offices. In addition a sculpture by Lynn Chadwick called Watcher VII from 1961 will be on display which was a maquette for a public sculpture commissioned for Harlow, which Drew worked on.

This exhibition is part of New Cities, a long-term research project initiated by Inheritance Projects as part of Vision Forum.

Inheritance Projects is an independent research-led curatorial group led by Claire Louise Staunton and Laura Guy. Initiated in 2007 as a vehicle to interrogate museological schemata, the narrations of history and personal and national heritage, Inheritance has developed into wider territories of investigation. Inheritance works with artists, architects and writers in collaboration with institutions to produce new art projects and to develop politically informed, critical discourses around particular topics or situations. These situations are often defined by their histories (museums and heritage spaces) or their relative newness (New Towns internationally) and are the contexts for long-term research projects. Recent projects include, Intentions - Strategies – Works at Tate Liverpool, Open Letter at Sarai New Delhi and Chandigarh, Ulterior Vistas Tris Vonna-Michell at BALTIC, Missing Houses Support Structure at Nottingham Contemporary and Community without Propinquity at MK Gallery. www.inheritanceprojects.org

The Fox Reading Room was made possible by the generous support of the Edwin Fox Foundation.


Image: Detail of an Exhibit (in association with Victor Pasmore and Lawrence Alloway), record of installation at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1957. Copyright Richard Hamilton Studio

Press Officer
Naomi Crowther Tel: 020 77661407 Email: naomi.crowther@ica.org.uk - press@ica.org.uk

Private view Tuesday 11 February, 6-9pm

ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall London SW1Y 5AH
open 11am – 6pm, except Thursday, 11am – 9pm. closed Mondays

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