2019/20 programme highlights

This summer Camden Arts Centre opens two exhibitions: a survey of paintings, drawings and prints by pioneering American painter Elizabeth Murray, and a new exhibition of digital animations and large-scale sculptures by Hong Kong based artist Wong Ping. In the autumn, Greek Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou will take over all of our spaces, bringing together works made over the last 10 years, alongside a number of new site-specific commissions. In the new year we will be joined by Jesse Darling, Freelands Lomax Ceramic Fellow, and American artist Walter Price, both of whom will be undertaking residencies with us, whilst Guatemalan-based painter Vivian Suter will present her first solo show in London. Alongside her exhibition, Greek British artist Athanasios Argianas will show new work in ceramic, sculpture, sound and video, developed during his recent residency at Camden. In the spring we open a major trans-generational group exhibition, The Vegetable Mind, exploring the encoded intelligence inherent in plants and plant forms, as expressed through music, art and ritual. For more information and invitations to openings and events sign up now at camdenartscentre.org

Exhibitions

Elizabeth Murray, Flying Bye
July 5–September 15, 2019

Flying Bye is the first exhibition in the UK of pioneering American painter Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940, Chicago, d. 2007). Drawing on works made through the 1980s and early 1990s, this landmark exhibition highlights a decade that saw her work grow in both scale and significance within the bourgeoning New York art scene. Though her art and life had a profound influence on several generations of artists both in the United States and beyond, Murray’s work has rarely been seen in Europe and her impact here is still too little-known. 

Wong Ping, Heart Digger
July 5–September 15, 2019

Wong Ping (b. 1984, Hong Kong) is the recipient of the inaugural Camden Arts Centre Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze. Working in digital animation, sculpture and installation, his absurd and darkly humorous works present twisted but seductive fantasises that often disguise a deeper social critique of technological modernity. The exhibition is installed across our galleries, garden and at temporary off-site space on Mayfair’s Cork Street.

Christodoulos Panayiotou
September 27, 2019–January 5, 2020

Informed by his interest in architecture, anthropology, archaeology and cultural histories, Greek Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou (b. 1978, Limassol) will activate and re-imagine all of Camden Arts Centre’s galleries with a series of poetic and subtle interventions. The exhibition will include new commissions, as well as a carefully selected group of sculptural works, many of which have not previously been shown in the UK. This will be Panyiotou’s first institutional solo exhibition in the UK. 

Vivian Suter
January 16–April 5, 2020

Vivian Suter’s (b. 1949, Buenos Aires) paintings are born from the terrain and habitat that surrounds their making. Working amid the wilderness of her lakeside studio in Guatemala, her large, unstretched canvases are hung outdoors to absorb the traces of falling leaves, rain, passing animals and mud. Presenting the finished works as an immersive cacophony—suspended, overlapping and environmental—Suter’s streaked and soaked canvases, swathed in colour, form a permeable membrane between nature and civilization.

Athanasios Argianas
January 16–April 5, 2020 

Athanasios Argianas’ (b. 1976, Athens) exhibition will include new film, sculpture and musical works, developed during his residency at Camden Arts Centre in 2018-19. Emerging from his interest in the social and historical specificity of acoustic forms and visual aesthetics, these new works include modular ceramic sculptures that trace the nuanced shifts from the curves of art nouveau to 1930s modernism, as well as casts and replicas of acoustic technologies, including the Ondes Resonator—a prototypical instrument that tilts and bends sound, treating it as a tactile material.

The Vegetable Mind
April 16–June 28, 2020

This trans-generational thematic group exhibition investigates the subjectivity and being of plants: their significance to knowledge-forms and wisdom-traditions, and how we engage with and activate them in culture, counter-culture, art and music. Bringing together a broad and diverse group of contemporary international artists—alongside ethnographic artefacts, ancient manuscripts, and works by surrealist and modernist artists—it situates the plant as a way to think, imagine and access other states of being and knowing, represented and enacted across many cultures and thousands of years of history. 

Residencies

Jesse Darling 
Freelands Lomax Ceramic Fellow

Jesse Darling (b. 1981) lives and works in Berlin. Darling works across, sculpture, installation, film, drawing, sound and performance. Drawing on personal narrative as well as history and counter histories, their work considers what it means to be a body in the world. They are currently participating in May You Live in Interesting Times, 58th Venice Biennale, Venice (2019). Recent solo shows include La Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille (2019), Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2018), Chapter Gallery, New York (2018) and Galerie Sultana, Paris (2017). 

Walter Price
Studio Residency

Walter Price (b. 1989, Macon, Georgia) lives and works in New York. His paintings and drawings have recently been concerned with the environments he has travelled and his attempts to reconcile formalist rules of painting. Price has been included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial with recent solo shows at Aspen Art Museum (2019), MoMA PS1, New York (2018), The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2018) and Karma, New York (2016). Recent group exhibitions include The Practice of Everyday Life, SLAG Gallery, New York (2019), Techniques of the Observer at Greene Naftali (2019), Fictions, The Studio Museum Harlem, New York (2017).