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February 19, 2015 – Review
Ian Breakwell’s “Important Works from the ’60s and ’70s”
Colin Perry
Ian Breakwell was an iconic figure of London’s counter-culture in the 1960s and ’70s whose bleak and laconic text-works, films, performances, and photo-collages explored motifs of alienation, desire, and bathos. Always something more than a gallery artist, Breakwell worked with organizations such as the London Filmmakers’ Co-op (LFMC), the Artist Placement Group, and (in the 1980s) Channel 4 television in the UK. This exhibition centers on Breakwell’s early works from the 1960s and 1970s, and is organized in-house, between gallerist Anthony Reynolds and Jacqui Davies, who has produced works for Random Acts, Channel 4’s strand of experimental short films and videos. Given this backdrop, it seems odd that this exhibition does not include any of Breakwell’s moving-image works. This show is therefore partial—a small fragment rather than a full retrospective of his work during this period.
Thankfully, the two-dimensional works shown here do much to reveal and celebrate Breakwell’s convulsive and anarchic imagination. Most of the pieces are covered in dense webs of handwritten notes, so the exhibition demands a great deal of reading. The Kill (1969) is composed of two panels: on the right is a jaunty illustration, presumably sampled from a children’s storybook, of workmen delivering furniture to a …