Exhibitions

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The Making of an Englishman: Fred Uhlman, A Retrospective, Burgh House, London and the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 2018  

The Making of an Englishman was the first UK retrospective of Uhlman’s work in 50 years and the first exhibition of the artist’s work in Hampstead, where he lived for many years and was so influential in establishing a refugee community. The exhibition brought together paintings and drawings dating from 1928 to 1971, most notably a selection of early Mediterranean scenes, a number of drawings executed whilst in internment on the Isle of Man during the Second World War, loaned from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the later Welsh landscapes for which he became well known, many of which have never been exhibited. The exhibition also included previously unseen archival material and objects of personal collection including a number of items from Uhlman’s seventy-two-piece collection of African sculpture, the majority of which is now on permanent display at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, as well as representations of the artist by celebrated Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters, fellow Hampstead resident, Milein Cosman, Polish-Jewish painter and printmaker, Jankel Adler and sculptress of luminaries, Karin Jonzen.

The exhibition sought not only to celebrate Uhlman’s life and work and his unique contribution to Hampstead’s cultural and political history, but also to reflect on one of the most turbulent periods in British and European history, as well as the universally relevant themes of migration and identity. 

Czech Routes: Selected Czechoslovak Artists from the Ben Uri and Private Collections, Ben Uri Gallery, London, 2019

Featuring the work of 21 painters, printmakers and sculptors, many of whom fled to Britain as racial and political refugees from National Socialism, Czech Routes marked the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of “rump” Czechoslovakia on 15th March 1939 - the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia’s northern frontier, having already ceded to Germany under the Munich Agreement of 29th September 1938.    

The exhibition showcased works drawn primarily from the Ben Uri Collection alongside external loans from important private collections, and previously unseen archival material, celebrating the contribution of selected Czechoslovak émigré artists to British culture. Portraitist and pioneering printmaker Emil Orlik made his first trip to Britain in 1898, however, the majority of Czechoslovak artists exhibited, including Franta Bĕlský, Jacob Bornfriend, Dorrit Epstein, Bedřich Feigl and Walter Trier, along with Austrian expressionist (and Czechoslovak citizen), Oskar Kokoschka, and German photomontagist, John Heartfield, made forced journeys to the UK immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. These also include sculptor Anita Mandl and painter-printmaker Käthe Strenitz, just two of the 669 Kindertransportees rescued by British humanitarian Nicholas Winton. 

Also represented were works by subsequent generations of Czechoslovak artists including Irena Sedlecká, who fled her country’s totalitarian Communist regime in the 1960s, as well as those who, between the 1970s and 1990s, have made the positive decision to immigrate to Britain to study and develop professionally, namely contemporary multidisciplinary artists Tereza Bušková, Mila Fürstová and Tereza Stehliková. 

Becoming Gustav Metzger: Uncovering the Early Years- 1945-59, in collaboration with The Gustav Metzger Foundation, Ben Uri Gallery, London, 2021

Becoming Gustav Metzger: Uncovering the Early Years (1945–59) was the first museum exhibition to exclusively examine the little-known formative years of refugee artist and activist Gustav Metzger (Nuremberg, Germany 1926 – London, England 2017) prior to the  development of the later radical Auto-Destructive practice for which he is better known. The exhibition showcased rarely seen drawings and paintings from this crucial early period - the majority never previously exhibited - together with related archival material.  

while a more extensive offering was also be available online at benuri.org designed to showcase the breadth of Metzger’s early work executed on conventional as well as unusual found supports including paper, canvas and board as well as cardboard, plastic and sheets of mild steel. 

Both the physical and the online exhibitions charted Metzger’s artistic journey from figuration to abstraction, while simultaneously uncovering an intriguing episode in the artist’s own personal narrative. The works included were selected from a large hoard of works that, for reasons unknown, Metzger hid from public view in the north London attic of a relative for 45 years, and re-discovered in 2009 on the eve of his solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, before retrieving in November 2010. 

The exhibition also included important contextual works by pioneering modernists Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and David Bomberg (drawn from the Ben Uri Collection), all important early influences upon Metzger. Bomberg mentored Metzger – a favoured pupil at his revolutionary Borough Polytechnic evening classes, and, in 1948, encouraged him to exhibit at both Ben Uri Art Gallery and the London Group. Metzger later paid tribute to Bomberg as arguably ‘the biggest influence on me’.

Knots: Jonny Briggs x Burgh House - Contemporary Interventions into an Historic House, Burgh House, London, 2021-2022

Knots was an experimental, site-specific exhibition of the photographic work of young British artist Jonny Briggs at Burgh House, London. Taking its title from psychiatrist and mental health campaigner, R. D. Laing’s book of collected poetry, as well as referring to psychological knots and double binds, the exhibition featured multi-media interventions, interacting with the exterior and interior of Burgh House, encouraging visitors to reinterpret their surroundings and reconsider the roles of familiar objects. Reflecting not only on Briggs’ own familial history, but also on the human history of Burgh House, as well as in generating new perspectives on Burgh House and its collection, Knots made connections with the cultural history of the local area, and, more specifically, Hampstead’s significant place within the developmental history of psychoanalysis and Surrealism. A new work commissioned by and created within Burgh House included in the exhibition was added to the museum’s permanent collection. 

'The line is an unreal thing': Dorothy Mead and Edna Mann, Borough Road Gallery, London South Bank University, London, 2024

The Borough Road Gallery at London South Bank University is delighted to present an exhibition of the work of Dorothy Mead and Edna Mann, former alumnae of the institution – then known as the Borough Polytechnic – and two of the few female artists to have attended the classes of artist-educator, David Bomberg (1890-1957). In showcasing important yet little-known paintings and drawings dating from the 1940s to the 1970s drawn from The Sarah Rose Collection – itself representative of a key moment in the University’s history –, the exhibition seeks to highlight the individual nature of both women’s undercelebrated achievements.

Full exhibition texts can be read here.