Arts Council CollectionNew Acquisitions 2012—13

The Arts Council Collection is based at Southbank Centre, London and at Longside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield. For further information about the Arts Council Collection please visit artscouncilcollection.org.uk

Loans from the Collection are generally free of charge. Where exceptional curatorial or technical support is required a small fee may be charged to cover administration, preparation and installation costs.

To enquire about borrowing work from the Arts Council Collection, email loans@southbankcentre.co.uk

Cover: Duncan Campbell, Falls Burns Malone Fiddles, 2003 (still). Image Courtesy Belfast Exposed

All images © the artist

Chair of the Acquisitions CommitteeCaroline Douglas

The external members of the Acquisitions Committee 2012–13:Mary GriffithsJennifer HiggieJohn StezakerJonathan Watkins

Arts Council CollectionNew Acquisitions 2012—13

A slow and rigorous production process is a distinguishing feature of Tomma Abts’ work. Although she follows a fixed method in her painting, applying purely geometrical shapes to a standard 48 x 38 cm portrait format, in layer after layer of oil and acrylic paint, Heit 2011 marks a departure in splitting the canvas in two, creating a vertiginous crevasse that adds further complexity to the spatial play of the painted composition. The individuality of each of her paintings, which all have rare first names as titles, can, instead, be attributed to a production process where each image is shaped by continual questioning, and by constant construction and deconstruction.

Tomma Abts

acrylic and oil on canvas, two parts total: 48 x 38cm

“real cutting is made with metal, cardboard, plywood, paints and fillers – I am often preoccupied with using a material atypically- with paint not quite adhering to the surface, metal appearing very light and flimsy. The work is made with slim metal rods and shards of aluminium cut from larger painted sheets (the title refers directly to these processes). It is in sections, bolted and glued together simply, its construction forming a kind of Meccano. Unadorned rods are functionally assembled, but fail in their attempts at right angles, as the unyielding shapes fail under their own weight. The slightness of the metal rod, means that the rectangles droop and sag almost animatedly.”

Sara Barker

Sara Barker

real cutting, 2012 stainless steel round bar, aluminium sheet, various paints, 140 x 52 x 26cm

We are grateful for the generous support of

Glencoe Rally, 2012video, 15 minutes

“Glencoe Rally is a video following Pollok & Thornliebank Republican Flute Band as they take part in the Annual Glencoe Commemoration Rally in the Scottish Highlands.

In 2004 the municipal art gallery in my home city of Glasgow invited me to engage with their biennial social justice programme and to tackle the subject ‘Sectarianism’. Identity politics in Scotland is often attached to whether you’re perceived to have, or consciously project, a Roman Catholic or Protestant identity. Scotland is a modern multicultural country. However the legacy of population shifts, due to the demand for workers in Scottish cities during the industrial revolution, saw the arrival of many Catholic families from Ireland. Glasgow being the

Roddy Buchananmost populous city with the largest demand for labour, many working class communities today maintain a pride in their roots and celebrate their different heritages. Events regarded as Catholic celebrations or Protestant parades can lead to tension between communities. However, despite the rude health of Scottish Protestant and Loyalist culture and the continued support for Irish Republicanism in Glasgow many leaders of civic society; business people, teachers, churchmen, politicians and journalists would like these expressions of identity to disappear.”

Roddy Buchanan

Falls Burns Malone Fiddles is a film about 1970’s and 80’s youth culture in Belfast. The film pieces together photographs of young working class people and depressed neighbourhoods taken in Belfast during the Troubles. Far from being the iconic representations of violence and political unrest that come to mind, these images make place for everyday existence; the hairstyles, fashions and aspirations of the moment. Campbell’s work is constructed from two community photographic archives in Belfast: Belfast Exposed and Community Visual Images. Campbell comments “Both organisations were set up to intervene in the field of  representation, to counteract the all persuasive view of life in Belfast as seen through the prism of media clichés

Duncan Campbell

Falls Burns Malone Fiddles, 2003 16mm fim and analogue video transferred to digital video, 34 mins. Image courtesy Belfast Exposed

about the political conflict. My film is an homage to this process that looks at the production of alternative narratives, along with the terms on which they are narrated.”

Pavel Büchler describes what he does as ‘making nothing happen’. His job as an artist, he says, is to incite curiosity and draw attention to the obvious but unnoticed connections in the viewer’s experience, perceptions and cultural knowledge, to things and circumstances in the world which ought not to be confined to the identities they have in our daily lives. His practice reflects a long-standing interest in the discoveries and legacy of conceptual art and the avant-garde canon of modern European culture and critical thought.

Text courtesy Paul Hamlyn Foundation

Pavel BÜchler

American Irish, 2011/12  letterpress on Arches 88 paper, 34 x 50cm

Nothing More, 2012 letterpress on Arches 88 paper, 34 x 50cm

Alice Channer’s work elaborates a complex of ideas across a variety of media and formal strategies. Central to her project for some time has been a negotiation of the body, and its relation to dress as display and personal adornment. In Channer’s solo exhibition ‘Alice Channer: Out of Body’ at South London Gallery in 2012 Channer expanded this investigation beyond 20th century and contemporary fashion, to incorporate images of classical drapery into her lexicon. Smooth Metal Body, 2012 carries the partial image of a classical sculpture in the British Museum printed onto silk crepe and hangs the full height of the gallery, expanding to super-human size the image of limbs encased, and revealed, by stone drapery. The floor-based work

Alice ChannerAmphibians, 2012 combines polished stainless steel forms strapped under tension with wide bands of coloured elastic, aluminium casts of cheap jersey clothing, and rods of marble carved with the profiles of parts of the artist’s own body - her knee or arm. The wall based work Maxi, mini, midi, midi, midi (Mauve and Cream), 2012 takes the waistbands of leggings and casts them in aluminium to hang on simple pegs on the wall as abstract forms; it is one of a series of works that are a constant throughout exhibitions in recent years. This last work completes the grouping, demonstrating the important engagement with architectural space that is also a characteristic of Channer’s work which has been described as ‘clothing the gallery space’.

Amphibians, 2012 mirror polished steel, cast aluminium and marble, 54.5 x 141 x 455cm

Smooth Metal Body, 2012, crepe de chine, chrome bar, 300 x 136 x 3cm

Maxi, Mini, Midi, Midi, Midi (Mauve and Cream), 2012  cast and powder coated aluminium, 70 x 38 x 47cm

Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund and The Henry Moore Foundation.

“Typical of my current practice, Manlet 3 consists of a plaster sculptural form contextualised by a decorative element and furniture-like bases made from walnut and screen-printed panels. I am interested in the way different primitivist traditions, here appearing as organic abstraction on the one hand, and print pattern and decoration on the other, can be combined in order to reflect and perhaps interrogate one another. Further relationships such as that between sculpture and furniture or applied arts also interest me. Principally these interests revolve around the paradox of a sculpture’s autonomy. This autonomy is on the one hand necessary in order for the sculpture to generate its own terms of engagement, yet it also remains an impossible dream, considering the absolute interconnectedness of all orders of form, especially when viewed through the prism of an artwork.”

Nick Evans

Nick Evans

Manlet 3, 2011 fibre reinforced plaster, screenprinted board, walnut base, 196 x 55 x 40cm

Donna Huddleston’s universe is all about ritual and gesture, and eclectically echoes the serpentine vocabulary of fin-de-siècle poster design, 1920s fashion illustration, as well as William Morris’s Arts & Crafts-aesthetics. The artist emphatically employs an integrated arts practice, in which elements of graphic and stage design, performance, drawing, and sculpture are to be understood as equal parts of a greater whole.

Text courtesy Juliette Jongma

Donna Huddleston

Untitled, 2010 watercolour on paper, 83 x 63cm

Colour has always been an essential element of Gary Hume’s work and so it is understandable that he has taken the rainbow as the subject of a new series of works. He has divided the rainbow into its seven colour sections, and the fragmented arcs of different shapes and sizes are displayed high above eye level as if in a joyful dance around the gallery walls. Like many of Hume’s paintings, this work is both abstract and representational.

Gary Hume gave Fragment of a Rainbow VI, 2011 to the Collection following his exhibition Gary Hume: Flashback which during 2012 toured to Leeds, Wolverhampton, Hastings and Aberdeen.

gary hume

Fragment of a Rainbow VI, 2011 gloss paint on aluminium, 7 parts dimensions variable Gift of the artist 2012

In 2011, Roger Hiorns gifted his 2008 Artangel/Jerwood commission Seizure to the Arts Council Collection. The work was created using 75,000 litres of liquid copper sulphate, pumped into a former Southwark council flat to create a strangely beautiful crystalline growth on the walls, floor, ceiling and bath of the abandoned dwelling. Adam Khan Architects have created a new enclosure for the work which, in Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s historic Bothy Garden, offers a strikingly different context for this cult work, accessible again for the first time since 2010.

Seizure, 2008/2013 was donated to the Arts Council Collection by the artist, Artangel and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation through the Art Fund, with the support of The Henry Moore Foundation.

ROGER HIORNS

Seizure on exhibition in London, 2008copper sulphate, steel and wood, 227 x 495 x 666cm

Poppy, 2010 watercolour and gouache on paper, 45 x 60cm

Sarah Lucas’ series of work entitled NUDS consist of pairs of tan nylon tights which have been stuffed with fluff and fashioned in ambiguous, biomorphic forms, which rest on stacks of breeze blocks set atop simple wooden pedestals. While these sculptures bear some formal resemblance to the artist’s 1997 work Bunny Gets Snookered, in which sagging hosiery summoned up a woman’s splayed legs, they are not so securely gendered. Resembling at once hot flesh and cold stone, they are not quite male, or female, or even quite human.

Tom Morton, British Art Show 7

sarah lucas

NUD CYCLADIC 7, 2010tights, fluff, wire, sculpture: 21.5 x 21.5 x 43cm, plinth: 100 x 43 x 43cm Purchased with the assistance of the Art Fund

Taking the legacies of both minimalism and conceptualism as her departure points MacKillop invests a quiet precision in her often disarmingly modest and deceptively informal gestures. Using found materials that typically have some relationship to the hand (e.g. pens, suspension files, balls of string etc.) MacKillop applies her own particular logic to re-purposing these objects as art. Staged together in a kind of mise-en-scene or quasi-theatrical tableau, there is a dead-pan – or even tragic-comic – humour at play in these gestures. Attracted to increasingly anachronistic objects, MacKillop’s work evinces a form of melancholia, if not exactly nostalgia, for an entire category of once useful products. Mackillop’s process might perhaps be thought of as a kind of informal formalism, her goal a gentle subversion of norms, the result of which is to create works that – despite their barely-there-ness – maintain an uncanny presence.

Matthew Higgs

Sara Mackillop

Postcards from Envelopes, 2009laser print mounted on cardboard, dimensions variable

10 in 12, 2003record with cardboard record sleeve, 31 x 31 x 0.4cm

Picture Sections, 2006book pages, cardboard, picture frame, 40 x 50cm

“I don’t consider my work to be abstract; it all comes from my own life, the arc of which is the narrative. It’s a metaphysical space, peopled, full of furniture, personal stories and locations, which I use as a fuel cell to generate new meaning for myself. It works best if I ignore the possibility of the audience; a reverse suspension of disbelief. When I’m working I don’t consider what the reaction to the work might be.

All objects are more or less found; even a sheet of paper is a product. I am interested in what happens to materials after they’ve entered my zone of influence. I like to work in a free space where things can come together. Every idea and object has a history, which describes its provenance and tells you what its doing there. But you don’t need to know the history of an object or a person to have an insight into them, because everything is available at the moment when things are seen. There’s no point trying to tell every little thing because everyone reads things differently. The presence of an observer unavoidably influences the meaning of all objects.”

Christina Mackie

The Judges II, 2011-12, watercolours, ceramics, inkjet prints, minerals, red cedar, tulip wood, walnut, drawers with tissue and watercolour paper, polyurethane, Perspex, dimensions variable

CHRISTINA MACKIE

‘When I started making art I started with performance. Performance always raises the question of documentation and, indeed, very early on in the Fire performances I decided to make a film of one of them. I wasn’t a filmmaker, so I set about learning how to do it. Landscape for Fire, 1972, was more-or-less my first film, and by the time I finished it I had learnt to cut and edit. I felt very comfortable with the medium. When I began to show the film I was struck by the paradox of showing a record of something that was not, for me, the primary event. The primary event was the performance, which was now in the past. So the question I began to ask was something like ‘if you were to make a film that was only a film what would it look like? ‘Only’ meaning that it did not refer to a past time and past place, but existed only at the moment it was being watched, at the moment of projection. My answer to that question was Line Describing a Cone.

Landscape for Fire II was performed to a small audience at dusk on August 27, 1973 on a disused airfield in North Weald. The execution of the tasks required to realise the performance and the filming of those actions, took place simultaneously and I made no attempt to separate the two, or to hide the processes of filming from the processes of performing.’

From an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones, 2007.

Anthony McCall

Landscape for Fire, 197216mm film transferred to DVD, sound, 7 minutes, Gift of the artist and Sprüth Magers Gallery, London

Landscape for Fire: Score for Eternal Condition, 1973, ink, pencil and photograph on paper, 44.7 x 56.5cm

“As I started painting Northern Ritual I didn’t premeditate its content, and as the painting progressed so did its narratives, or at least my understanding of them. It then became less of a kind of “short-hand” painting process, and more precise as an idea a group of women, possibly mothers, bonded through the trials of living and raising others, arriving at a venue, discussing others, but themselves practising some form of ritual. Not dancing per se, but being part of some form of dance. On a stage themselves, but in a performance they hadn’t rehearsed.”

Ryan Mosley

Ryan Mosley

Northern Ritual, 2011oil on canvas, 230 x 195cm

Within the old industrial heart of Birmingham, discarded, utilitarian objects were collected as if they were trophies of an ignored parallel world - a dark, abject monument. M6 acts as an invocation of the highways and their concrete islands, memorialising their past production and the shifting economies of spent resources.

On the occasion of the exhibition M6 by Mike Nelson, Eastside Projects produced a new print edition of eight silk-screen prints.

MIKE NELSON

M6, 2013, 8 prints, silk screen on newsprint, each 63cm x 97cm

Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close, 2012

The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, 2012

#Lamentation, 2012

The Upper Class at Bay, 2012

The Adoration of the Cage Fighters, 2012

The Agony in the Car Park, 2012

In The Vanity of Small Differences Grayson Perry explores his fascination with taste and the visual narrative. This suite of six tapestries was created alongside the Channel 4 television series, All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry. It is the first joint acquisition by the Arts Council Collection and the British Council. Grayson Perry comments: “The tapestries tell the story of class mobility, for I think nothing has as strong an influence on our aesthetic taste as the social class in which we grow up. I am interested in the politics of consumerism and the history of popular design but for this project I focus on the emotional investment we make in the things we choose to live with, wear, eat, read or drive. Class and taste run deep in our character – we care. This emotional charge is what draws me to a subject”.

Grayson Perry

The Vanity of Small Differences, 2012All wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk tapestry, 200 x 400cm

Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre London and British Council. Gift of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery with the support of Channel 4 Television, the Art Fund and Sfumato Foundation with additional support from AlixPartners

“Over the years my 1976 film The Girl Chewing Gum has gradually acquired an extra layer of meaning - a work that originally documented the present day looks now, especially to the young, like an archaic record of a long-lost world. Acknowledging this transition, The Man Phoning Mum combines the original film with contemporary footage shot in the same locations, retracing the film’s camera movements and enabling chance encounters between the black and white passers-by of 1976 and their colourful 2011 counterparts.”

John Smith

John Smith

John Panting was born in New Zealand in 1940, and came to the UK to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1964. He very quickly established a reputation and a career for himself as both a sculptor and a teacher, and when he died in a road accident in 1974, he was already Principal Lecturer in Sculpture at Central School of Art, and his work sufficiently recognised to be included in such shows as British Sculptors ‘72 at the Royal Academy During his tragically short career Panting gained a reputation as a tireless and obsessive worker. He produced a very large number of sculptures in a variety of idioms, moving through a sequence of contemporary issues current in the sculpture of the sixties before finding his own striking style in the early seventies.

John Panting

Untitled, 1968Ten screenprints each: 76 x 76cmGift of the estate of the artist and Poussin Gallery 2012

The Man Phoning Mum, 1976-2011 high definition digital video, 11 minutes 36 seconds Commissioned by PEER

Daniel Sinsel’s Untitled, 2012 is the most recent work in a long-term series of trompe l’oeil oil paintings which depict floating and meandering ribbons. Here, the broad grey material which loops and ripples in front of a sulphurous yellow ground, strikes a new note of ambiguity. Whereas previous paintings have portrayed ribbons furling weightlessly - sometimes against latticework backdrops or intertwined with objects suspended in mid-air - this image suggests a denser material, a coiled belt that is simultaneously resisting and succumbing

DANIEL SINSEL

Untitled, 2012, oil on linen, 80.3 x 80.3 x 3.5 cm

to gravity. The grey material appears, at points, to loop and ripple with Baroque dynamism and complexity, while elsewhere it slumps heavily back on itself. All the while, the monochrome yellow resists any perception of spatial depth. Indeed, the depthlessness and material surface of the picture are subjects which Sinsel regularly addresses: he veers in his use of materials between opacity and transparency, puncturing the surfaces of his works, or (in his paintings) depicting illusionistic perforations redolent of Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases.

“Head of Leaves, 2012 features a portrait-bust form, centrally placed. I intended to hint at both diagrammatic and sculptural languages, as well as aim for this head to communicate its own energy: the sensation of a head, its animation or presence, rather than a record of a particular person. Flecked white on the dark purple head structure gives a sense of something solid, like black marble, while violet and magenta leaf shapes, concealing the face front, lightly touch and precariously project. Multiple shoulder outlines and sequential neck-trunks tentatively mimic an x-ray.

When I made Sleeper, 2012 I was thinking of how it feels to lie opposite someone, looking at them sleeping: how their shut-eyes and facial expression mean their body is with you but their mind is not. I wanted this painting to have something about watching a person have a relationship with themselves: their life in their mind. This painting is not of anyone specific but the sensation of looking in that situation.” Phoebe Unwin

Phoebe Unwin

Head of Leaves, 2012 oil on linen, 50.5 x 40.5cm

Sleeper, 2012 oil on linen, 50 x 76cm

Passing By, 2013 oil on canvas, 80 x 100cm

“My work is a reflection of an internal world, where images function metaphorically and symbolically, as in dreams, memory and the unconscious. There are recurring motifs of landscape, vegetation, human and animal forms, as well as abstract paint forms. I see the work as an exploration of the fluid and permeable nature of perception. An ongoing theme of investigation, both in the form and the content of the work, is the idea that the natural always exists as a construct. There is an awareness of the impossibility of pure nature, coupled with a longing for it. There is a desire, knowingly unattainable, for a direct connection to origin and authenticity.”

Mimei Thompson

Mimei Thompson

Liquid Portrait 4, 2008 Ink on paper, 71 x 50cm

Liquid Portrait 5, 2008 Ink on paper, 71 x 50cm

OLYMPIC PRINTSTo coincide with the Olympic and Paralympic Games, London 2012 commissioned twelve leading contemporary artists to create official prints to commemorate the games.

Tracey Emin, Birds 2012, 2011.Lithograph 76 x 60cm

Anthea Hamilton, Divers, 2011.13 colour screen print 76 x 60cm

Bridget Riley, Rose Rose, 2011.15 colour screen print 87 x 69.5cm

Fiona Banner, Superhuman Nude, 2011. Inkjet with one colour screen print and one glaze 76 x 60cm

Chris Ofili, For the Unknown Runner, 2011. Inkjet with one colour screen print and one glaze 76 x 60cm

Rachel Whiteread, LOndOn 2O12, 2011. Six colour screen print 76 x 60cm

Sarah Morris, Big Ben 2012, 2011.Six colour screen print with one glaze 76 x 60cm

Bob and Roberta Smith, Love, 2011.Six colour screen print 76 x 60cm

Michael Craig-Martin, GO, 2011.Six colour screen print 76 x 60cm

Martin Creed, Work No. 1273, 2011.Lithograph 76 x 60cm

Howard Hodgkin, Swimming, 2011.12 colour screen print using ‘L.Cornelisson’ ground light-fast pigments 76 x 60cm

Gary Hume, Capital, 2011. 13 colour screen print 76 x 60cm