THE BEDROOM ART GUIDE 2017-2018 THEHOSPITALCLUB.COM/EXHIBITIONS
WE ARE PROUD TO HOST & CELEBRATE THESE WONDERFUL ARTISTS WHO HAVE TOUCHED A CHORD WITH US Front Cover: Ralph Anderson Gesture & Narrative All other images courtesy of the artists. Photos of rooms and corridors Richard Booth
CURATOR S INTRODUCTION It is my pleasure to welcome you to The Hospital Club and wish you a very comfortable stay. Each bedroom is uniquely styled including the artwork you see hanging in your room. We are proud to host and celebrate these wonderful artists who have touched a chord with us, either by embodying the spirit of the Club or reflecting the character and interests of our members. It s also our way of giving support to creatives whose work we admire and whose endeavours we wish to pay tribute to. Over the years this has been a huge source of pride and brought a vibrancy to the Club due to the originality and purpose of the creative minds behind the work. We run an art programme throughout the year showcasing artists in both public exhibitions and residencies within our member spaces. We also have a partnership with Eurostar lounges and will be expanding our programme to LA when the new Club opens in 2018. All the works are available for purchase so please do contact me directly should you require further information. Please drop me an e-mail on AliH@thehospitalclub.com ALI HILLMAN CURATOR
ONE: RALPH ANDERSON Challenging preconceived ideas about painting, Anderson is interested in developing new ways of investigating the subject. Installations from his Cut-Out series can be seen throughout the Club. By stripping the artwork back to just the brush marks, which make up the structure of the image, Anderson opens the painting up to its surroundings. This is enhanced further by the works hanging away from the wall and casting shadows of the brush marks, drips and runs. The reverse of each work has been painted with fluorescent paint, giving a backlit glow and colouring the shadows, thus turning the supportive wall into a temporal background for each image. Born in Glasgow, Anderson now lives and works in London and has recently completed an MA in Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art, UAL. He regularly exhibits his work in group shows in London and around the UK.
TWO: DAVID ELLINGSEN Ellingsen focuses his camera on our fragile world, drawing attention to its transience and temporality. His images are performative and surrealist, meticulous and archival, and are marked by simplicity and empathy. In his Future Imperfect series, the naked and distinctly organic human body is seen repeated in wild open space. The effect is a play of opposites, equally animal and mineral, flotsam and jetsam, newborn and dead, intimate and expansive. In his series, The Last Stand, simple tree stumps evoke a theatre, a morgue, a pantheon of gods, the tragic hopes of industry and the fierce resilience of nature. Using his camera, Ellingsen becomes a storyteller and historian. The son of one of the first pioneering families on a far flung island in Canada s Pacific Northwest, Ellingsen expresses the artist s responsibility for home: an environment that his ancestors have sometimes nurtured, and sometimes harmed. Ellingsen is represented by Baldwin Gallery.
THREE: ALEXANDRA ROUSSOPOULOS Roussopoulos s pastel abstractions, mobile forms, and monochrome geometries are at once minimal, expansive and luminous. They are exuberant and refined meditations on psycho-geography, political space and personhood. Roussopoulos explores the free and mobile body abstracted to pure presence, at once changeable, responsive and creative that dwells in the urban landscape or the distilled geometries of space. Of Swiss and Greek descent, Roussopoulos was raised in the creative and political nexus of the counterculture of Paris 68- her mother was a well-known feminist filmmaker and activist; her father, a physicist, activist, painter and creator of architectonic kites, both of whom continue to inform her work. She dwells and paints in the same sky-lit modernist house where she was raised. Roussopoulos is represented by Baldwin Gallery.
FOUR: VERONIQUE ELLENA Véronique Ellena was born in Bourg en Bresse. A graduate of the National Superior of Arts Visuals school of La Cambre, Brussels and of Fine Arts in Nantes, she was nominated for the Young Belgian Painting Award and exhibited at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1996. Since then, she has joined the Gallery Alain Gutharc in Paris and participated in many exhibitions in France and abroad. Her work belongs to collections, both public and private, in Centre Georges Pompidou, CNAP, Museum Paul Dini, and Bank Neuflize. In 2015, she received a public Commission for the realization of a stained glass window for the Millennium of the Cathedral of Strasbourg. Ellena was resident at the Villa Médicis (Rome Prize) in 2007/2008 and is currently Artist in Residence in our Eurostar Paris premier lounge.
FIVE: MARCO SANGES Marco Sanges is an innovative photographer from Rome who has exhibited worldwide. He has worked for Vogue Italia and Dolce&Gabbana, and published in several art and fashion magazines including Sunday Times, Esquire, Elle, Wonderland, and Aesthetica magazine. His iconic photography has been inspired by the sequential nature of cinema, in particular the luminous black and white films of the silent era. Every sequence tells a highly personal and multi layered story. Seeking inspiration from Surrealism and the Visual Performing Arts of the 20s and 30s, Sanges work traces a narrative of imagination and desire. There is an enchanting yet dark side to his photography with a depth that highlights the drama of life. Sanges has collaborated with Gunther Von Hagen and Munich Opera and his work is in the permanent collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, U.S.A. His new body of work, Wunderkamera, is inspired by Max Ernst and the Surrealist movement.
SIX: IVAN MOSCOVICH Ivan is a 91 year old survivor of four concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and of the death marches before liberation. In his extraordinary life he went on to become the founding director of the Museum of Science and Technology, Tel Aviv and award-winning inventor of educational games, with more than 100 to his credit in all. He is also the author of more than 50 books of games and puzzles and is still writing in his retirement most recently published are The Puzzle Universe and his best-selling title The Big Book of Brain Games, which remains a best seller for its category on Amazon. He is currently working on a book on creativity, a subject he considers the most important force in his life. The Harmonograms, which are all unique drawings, were exhibited the world over including the ICA, London; the International Design Centre, Berlin; the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City; the Didacta Exhibitions in Basel and Hannover; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
SEVEN: LYN BALZER & TONY PERKINS Balzer & Perkins are a creative partnership that spans over a decade. An immersive solo show at the Australian Design Centre in Sydney (where they even created a special scent diffused through the galleries) opened to universal acclaim. Since then they have been commissioned to create work for Perrier-Jouet, among others. Balzer & Perkins have participated in many group exhibitions over the years, primarily in their native Australia, but also at Colette in Paris and major European art-cities like London and Berlin. Their fascination with the beauty and extremes of the Australian landscape stemmed from their upbringing near the idyllic rainforests and beaches of Byron Bay, and to this day they return there regularly for inspiration.
EIGHT: ALICE WILSON Wilson considers the way we look - contemplating how we remember and how we anticipate places that are familiar to us and places that are not. She reflects on this through her own experiences, contemplating their authenticity whilst trying to distinguish between what has been learnt and what can be un-learnt in this process. Wilson uses collage, painting and photography to pull together fragments of imagery sourced from the Scottish highlands. Interrelating and multilayered image-objects depict a landscape acting as a repository for our culture and identity. Her visual language, which is thoroughly honed and born out of rigorous experimentation, confronts and questions our relationship with the mediated landscape.
NINE: SIMON BRANN THORPE Toy Soldiers, the first solo exhibition by Club member Simon Brann Thorpe, was on display at The Hospital Club Gallery as part of the 2017 Photo London VIP Programme. It was also a first solo showing for Toy Soldiers as a body of work, an important dialogue on war and conflict through conceptual art in this critical time of socio-economic conflict and upheaval. Recently receiving two nominations for the Prix Pictet Award, Toy Soldiers is a unique collaboration between a military commander and Thorpe in the creation of a unique allegory of modern warfare. The series stages real soldiers, posed as toy soldiers, in this investigation into the impact, legacy and dehumanising effects of war. Toy Soldiers is a powerful conceptual project on war and conflict that blurs the boundaries between documentary photography and art.
TEN: ANN GRIM Ann Grim had an international upbringing and now lives between Paris and London. Grim explores the possibility of different future outcomes via the materialisation and dematerialisation of human consciousness. The complexity of human nature is at the heart of her work and is inspired by the socio-economic structures and cycles that shape modern society. She uses each of her artworks as a means of exploring the inner working of the modern condition and social, cultural, and urban issues.
ELEVEN: OLIVER SCHWARZWALD Schwarzwald is a storyteller, telling tales through his images. These could be inspired by many things - experiences, memories, important and less important observations - and are expressed through a variety of techniques. As he himself says: different messages need different executions and his often fantastical and surreal tales are composed with a precise and meticulous attention to detail. His work Hurdle was exhibited at the Courtauld Institute of Art s prestigious East Wing Biennial throughout 2016 and his series Animals vs Jewellery won first runner-up in the World Photography Awards Professional: Still-Life category.
TWELVE: HELEN PRITCHARD Pritchard constructs sculptural work that plays with form and found object. The work is intimate and hand rendered, often expressing a kind of wry humour about the provenance of the materials gathered to make her pieces. In her practice, Pritchard explores various materials and media, confidently drawing on her strength and ease with wrangling both heavy and delicate work. Her creative process tends to group works in suites that relate to one another, as binary opposites or symbiotic couplings. The Hospital Club Gallery looks forward to presenting a solo exhibition in 2018. From 2009 to 2011, she completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London and received the Stanley Spencer Scholarship. Pritchard is the first ever winner of the Evening Standard Contemporary Art Prize.
THIRTEEN: JILL FURMANOVSKY Jill Furmanovsky is one of the UK s best known and most respected music photographers who during her celebrated career has shot many of the biggest names in rock music. Jill is also founder of Rockarchive.com, a photographers collective, whose work includes some of the best rock photography from the last 50 years. Be it capturing the vital energy of a live show, behind the scenes in recording studios or helping future icons invent themselves visually, Jill and the rest of Rockarchive s contributors, work on the front line to capture the timeless spirit of rock n roll.
FOURTEEN: CHRIS KING King s photography practice primarily encompasses two distinct bodies of work: landscapes and interiors that are deliciously devoid of human presence, and portraits that capture the very essence of the individual. Compositions are characterised by the artist s distinctive framing and focus, either straight on like a window into another dimension, or a moment that s been frozen in time with laser-like concentration on a singular point. The artist writes of his work: Borders, barriers, transitions, and divisions are fundamental to the universe. Life began when primitive structures developed that separated inside from outside. Gravity shapes galaxies and gives us up vs down. Natural and artificial distinguish between what we affect and what we have yet to influence. Interfaces and intersections are everywhere.
FIFTEEN: ROSANNA DEAN Led by an interest in iconoclasm, Dean s practice addresses conflicting ideologies surrounding representations of the divine. Seeking to establish connections between the ways in which societies have depicted religious belief, she combines the features of divergent practices from East to West to create work with a contemporary spiritualism. Dean explores the grotesque, beauty and repulsion intermingle in her canvases. Figures become decontextualized, ambiguous, anonymous forms that hover in space. The body stripped of its individual identity becomes a vehicle for exploring shared fears and experiences. Using ecclesiastic paintings as her point of departure, Dean s work focuses on using light and patterning, and old master oil painting techniques to retell ecclesiastic narratives that encompass female and eastern viewpoints and question what it is we will choose to leave behind.
IN THE CORRIDOR
NORMAN SEEFF Seeff s skills as a communicator and his ability to create an environment for artists and innovators to reveal how they function creatively, is unprecedented in the world of Fine Art Photography. Since 1968, he has developed an expansive portfolio of ground breaking and iconic images documenting hundreds of sessions with musicians, film directors, writers, actors, comedians, athletes, entrepreneurs, scientists and more. The artists are infinitely distant from us, yet Seeff has the gift of showing them as people like us. That sounds so easy, yet no one else has achieved this as successfully. Thomas Schirmbock, Director of Photography, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Mannheim.
DALE CHIHULY Chihuly is an American artist whose work in glass sculpture often presented in complex and dynamic public projects has led to a resurgence of interest in that medium. He studied Interior Design at the University of Washington, Seattle and received an M.S. in Sculpture from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied glassblowing. Today, his work is included in more than 200 museum collections worldwide and he has been the recipient of numerous awards. Chihuly s vibrantly coloured, organic glass creations are immediately recognisable. His technical innovations enabled the production of a tremendous range of patterns, colours, and textures. Commenting on his work, Chihuly says: I want people to be overwhelmed with light and colour in a way they have never experienced.
RUSSELL SAGE STUDIO Russell Stage Studio created the dramatic corridor installation for The Hospital Club Hotel Rooms. Their inspiration came from the former use of the building as a Hospital, but with a magical twist allowing for dramatic views along the longer corridor sections of beautifully cast clinical items in metallic finishes. The repetitive nature of the individual units create a subtle rhythm as guests walk along the corridors, however the unusual details of the Solomun and Wu commission quickly show the individual detail of each unit, both in the items cast and the colours used create a unique experience. As well as the corridor installation, Russell Sage Studio also designed the fourth floor in the Club, including the Oak Room, which hosts live music and shows. Russell Sage Studio s designs have been described as A riot of colour, style and eclectic quirkiness, and once you sink into one of the cosy sofas you just won t want to leave.
If you are interested in purchasing any of the artworks or want more information about our Art Programme please contact The Hospital Club s Curator Ali Hillman on AliH@thehospitalclub.com BUY ARTWORK ONLINE THEHOSPITALCLUB.COM/EXHIBITIONS