Output details

Construction and its Shadow

10th December 2010 - 10th September 2011

32 works including arts council loans, Leeds Art Gallery collections and direct loans from Carter, Cullinan Richards, Gillam, Kruip, Jones, Redo.

Construction and its Shadow was a curatorial outcome of Bick’s Henry Moore Fellowship award (2007-08). The exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery (LAG) offered an exemplar for examining the overlooked legacy of British Constructivism, and its engagement with the language of abstraction from the 1950's onwards. As curator, Bick focused on the irrational impulses in the Dada-Constructivist link as more centrally important to the development of modernism than the more usual coupling of Dada and Surrealism.

19 works loaned from collections, including those held by the Arts Council, Henry Moore Institute (HMI) and LAG, were exhibited alongside 13 others by younger contemporary artists to suggest visual dialogues between generations rather than mutually incompatible ideological differences. Two works by cross over Constructivist-Dada artist Anthony Hill and his alter ego Achill Redo were central here. Consequently, Hill’s Five Regions Relief [1961] was displayed in visual proximity to Redo’s 2 Kroton Fullerenes [1997], a readymade grid taken from an aluminium false ceiling light with two quarter-sized footballs stuffed inside. Although both utilised the grid for their formal structure, the Redo work opened up new Dadaist interventions and previously unrevealed connections between historical Constructivism and contemporary art practice that the exhibition highlighted, as represented by the neo-dada aspects of Adam Gillam or Cullinan Richards; the quasi systematic approaches of Gareth Jones; and the self conscious art history referencing of Germaine Kruip and Eva Berendes.

An accompanying seminar chaired by Bick at the HMI (11/05/11) provided an additional forum for debating the generative possibilities located within the practices of earlier artists of the Construction and Systems movements.