Visit to the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022 Exhibition, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull

 Visit to the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2022 Exhibition, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull

Andre Williams, Room for Doubt, 2021, installation

Innovative new work 

I went to visit the New Contemporaries Exhibition currently showing at the Ferens Art Gallery, Hull.

Since 1949 new Contemporaries has presented an annual exhibition of emerging and early career artists. Including 47 artists, the show launched in Hull across the Humber Street Gallery and Ferens Art Gallery. As the Exhibition Guide states, "the 2022 exhibition demonstrates a rich diversity of voices and approaches to making". The exhibition will travel from Hull to the South London Gallery in December 2022.

Curation

To compliment the diversity of approaches, the exhibition was curated sympathetically with themes which reflected the concerns and interests of this generation of artists. Some of the themes explored included The Domestic and Home and Portraiture of Self and Others which I illustrate on this page. 

Meitao Qu,  Enter the Fortress: Play well, Eat well, Sleep well, 2021, installation (foreground) and

Abi Ola, Startled, 2021, (wall) oil, oil pastels, fabrics, and screen print on loose canvas 300 x 18 cm

Divya Sharma, There is this stupendous thing of beauty called Compassion; and therefore, the world exists, 2022, textiles

The work of the artists illustrated above

Andre Williams

Room For Doubt is an installation developed from Williams’s drawings of fantastical rooms. His playful use of unexpected materials draws the viewer into his world. Masks and mirrors are recurring motifs within the room. A pair of bespoke Flamingo and Woodpecker wallpapers flanks the room, intensifies the space and plays with perspective. I felt that the room had a "retro" feel and was very three dimensional.

Meitao Qu

Qu’s practice is concerned with how forms of visualisation operate as ‘props’ to stimulate imaginations. Currently, her research examines the visual economy of the cityscape as a symbol of progress. Using miniatures and ready-mades, her work considers the artifice of the built environment to explore the conditions of what is lost and gained in the processes of urbanisation. She contemplates the interplay between ideologies and realities. The installation shows a miniature replica of the Temple of Heaven constructed with building blocks. The sculpture is displayed on a rock-like formation decorated with other architectural models and artificial greenery. 

Abi Ola

Ola specialises in oil paint, fabric collage, installation, and photography. Her work focuses on family portraiture which allow the audience to place their own loved ones within the portraits.  The combination of tribal and modern-day patterns challenge assumptions about what ‘primitive’ art is, and whether there are many differences to the symbols used today in text messages and social media.

Divya Sharma

Sharma is a multidisciplinary artist and textile practitioner whose practice reflects her lived experience. At its heart is the idea of hybridity and the naive insistence that inter, and intra-nationalities can do more, they can make futures in which we are not opposites but "extensions, additions, alloys, alchemical integrations, and disjointed unifications".  As an immigrant within India and outside, her work draws upon the entanglements that a hybrid nation(ality) entail.

Conclusions

The New Contemporaries show was very different to the works by Winslow Homer at the National Gallery in London (see previous post). The Homer exhibition consisted solely of paintings which were displayed on gallery walls in a traditional, sequential setting. The subject matter of the Ferens exhibition was diverse, ranging from installations to tapestry. The works represented current issues which the artists were concerned with, and the curation was imaginative to reflect the different approaches. The Ferens approach encouraged the viewer to participate and interact with the ideas put forward by the individual artists. I could walk in and around the rooms and consider the works from different angles, experience a 3D effect and appreciate the perspective of, for example, Andre Williams's "Room".