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Art exhibitions at ŷ������College

ŷ������has an established programme of exhibitions and artistic events which take place throughout the year and are framed by its modernist architecture, beautiful landscaped gardens and embedded into academic life.

Showcasing the work of both renowned international artists and innovative emerging artists, with the aim of stimulating reflection, discussion and debate, the art on show is enjoyed by both the academic and wider community. Our exhibitions are open to the general public and are visited by scholars, guests and visitors from around the world.

 

Viewing the exhibitions

Exhibitions are open to the public every Saturday and Sunday from 10.00 - 17.00.

Please note that exhibitions are occasionally unavailable, for instance during graduations.

It is advisable to contact the Porters' Lodge in advance of your visit (01223 335900).

Recent Exhibitions

2023-24

Ceramics in The Bernard Leach Tradition: A Selection from the Bradshaw-Bubier Collection

28 April - 19 May 2024

The Leach Pottery at St Ives in Cornwall, founded in 1920 by Bernard Leach (1887-1979) and Shoji Hamada (1894-1978), played a crucial role in the development of the Studio Pottery movement in Britain. All but one of the potters whose work is represented in this two-case display worked at the Leach Pottery for a time, or with Leach’s first pupil, Michael Cardew, at either Winchcombe in Somerset, or Wenford Bridge in Gloucestershire. Their work embodies Leach’s vision of pots that are handmade, functional, and aesthetically satisfying, while illustrating their individual interpretations of Oriental and English ceramic traditions.

One case displays stoneware by David Leach, his son, John Leach, William Marshall, Ray Finch, and Joe Finch, who was apprenticed to his father and did not work at St Ives. The other has porcelain by Derek Emms and Amanda Brier, and stoneware by Trevor Corser, Nic Harrison, Alan Brough, Joanna Wason, and an American, Jeff Oestreich. 

After News Before Bed - Enej Gala

28 January - 21 April 2024

The exhibition takes its name from an ongoing series of oil paintings ‘‘After news before bed’’ started in 2022 and includes sculptures from the series ‘‘Repaired objects’ started in 2017. The title originates from a time slot which in certain countries was designed for short cartoons or other childrens’ programs. Oddly enough, after the evening news where parents would gather rather distressed information about politics and different state affairs, children would get their turn to watch some short entertainment before going to sleep. It is not clear if the aim is for children to be ‘‘encouraged’’ to watch the news waiting for their cartoons, or if parents are meant to get some gratifying relaxation with their children after all the more ‘‘serious affairs’’. An interesting space opens up to be explored through imagery in between the two extremes, where serious business can get cartoonishly distorted, and cartoons just after the abundance of facts can produce some serious implications. 

The series of Repaired objects explores the functionality of everyday objects through a slow metamorphosis of their anatomy, taking the repair beyond itself as a dubious process that never returns pristine conditions to submitted objects. This series takes us away from usual assumptions, expanding possibilities of an individual evolution within each object, exploiting its symbolical and physical properties through a naive sci-fi scenario where the outcome is always unsure.

Paintings are restricted to the approximate measures of the TV set from the artist’s childhood. Their taking space in a university charged with serious knowledge developing programs makes a peculiar match that could open up a fun dispute about the seriousness of knowledge itself. The dialogue between two series and the space can present an intertwining mix of realities between facts and fictions, knowledge and ignorance, seriousness and triviality through thought and matter that keep questioning one another until exhausted after all the news and entertainment we can finally go to bed.

Enej Gala lives and works between London, Venice and Nova Gorica. In 2014 he was in an exchange at the William De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. In 2013 he accomplishes his B.A. and in 2015 his M.A. in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Graduated from Royal Academy Schools Postgraduate Programme in London 2019-2023. Last solo shows: The invention of footsteps at Almanac, Turin (IT) 2023, Saving chewing gums from mammoth’s hair at TJ Boulting, London (UK) 2023 and Nevereverevereverevereverever learn at Aplusa gallery, Venice (IT) 2022. Winner of Xenia residency award, Bow Arts Alcamantar RAW studio award, ŷ������College Cambridge RAS Graduate Prize andGilbert Bayes Scholarship Award – for sculpture 2023. 

His practice is based on an acute awareness of thinking through making as an attempt to grasp the experience of otherness. As a device that reveals its tricks while counter-intuitively enhancing their magic, puppetry is used as a lense to focus on materials as entities, expanding their potential by exposing and building on their intrinsic qualities. This process questions traditional perspectives on art, craftsmanship, installation, performance and different forms of production also through frequent collaborations and free improvisation. Stretching the limits of imagination by feeding on flaws of perception, his works ruminate metaphors, like an anomaly manifested through constant frustration over what is proposed to us in any form of convention. Gently probing fragile belongings to particular identities and persistently subverting conflictual rethorics, cryptic interweaves with mundane forming genuine dialogues through site responsive installations as welcoming traps for viewers to stumble upon.

How It Is - Tim Head

15 October 2023 - 21 January 2024

Tim Head won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1987 and is an artist of major significance who has exhibited internationally for several decades. Themes of fundamental importance can be traced throughout his long and consistently innovative career: a conflicted fascination with consumerism; a rage against exploitative big business and the armaments industries; his environmental and political activism; his revulsion against factory farming and his hostility to genetic modification. All these concerns seem remarkably prescient of concerns which are widespread today. So, too, is his dread of a nuclear Armageddon.

The formal qualities of Head’s art are similarly radical and often seem to reveal a psychic alienation, deliberately unsettling or disorientating the spectator.  Repulsion and attraction are enmeshed in complex ways, as can be seen in the ambivalence of his interest in signage, logos and packaging, which he often endows with sinister overtones, but also, sometimes, with an extraordinary grandeur and an undefinable spirituality.  Head experiments incessantly and obsessively.  He forensically scrutinises the everyday, then dissects, abstracts and re-presents it, so that its elements appear equivocally beautiful and disturbingly unfamiliar.

Curated by Professor Phillip Lindley.

Frangenberg Collection Artists’ Edition

15 October 2023 - 21 January 2024

In 2018, Andreas and Rita Frangenberg donated to ŷ������the bulk of the art collection accumulated by the late Dr Thomas Frangenberg. This brought to the College a fine collection of conceptual art which Thomas had acquired over nearly four decades. The bulk of the collection is by London-based artists: Thomas lived in London from 1981, when he came to England to write his PhD, and was well known to artists and art-dealers alike. When he first arrived, he purchased extensively from artists such as Tim Head, Amikam Toren, Keith Milow and others. Later, he frequented artists’ studios and graduation shows at some of London’s major art colleges, aiming to buy works as inexpensively as possible, before artists had gallery representation. He became exceptionally astute at judging who would be the stars of the future and it is one reason why so many Turner Prize winners and nominees are included in the collection. 

In 2020, I exhibited a first selection from the collection in the Combination Room and published an account of Thomas as a collector: Angle of Vision [a display copy is nearby]. Now, at the suggestion of one of the artists, Stuart Taylor, I shall publish a new version of the book, in an edition of 50, with a selection of nine art-works, each also in a limited edition of 50, by artists whose work Thomas collected. Eight of the works are shown here and the ninth, by Janette Parris, will be added when she has signed the copies in late November. Tim Head’s Dark Planet is directly related to his work of the same name currently on show in the Combination Room.

Artists represented: Keith Milow, Tim Head, Amikam Toren, Hannah Lister, Alicja Dubrocka, Simon Patterson, Nicky Hirst and Janette Parris.

Professor Phillip Lindley

 

2022-23

Patterns of Renewal - Gurpran Rau

30 April - 15 October 2023

This exhibition presents a series of new works by Gurpran Rau. Conceived and created between 2020 and 2023, they offer a profound insight into a period of extreme uncertainty – as individuals, families and communities were forced to completely re-think their relationships with each other and the world around them. As our isolation increased, we were forced to look closer, harder and for longer – at our immediate environment. In an ever-accelerating world, consumed with an intense search for the remote and exotic, we were compelled to pause, stop, consider and discover – the beauty in the mundane. As the world was thrown into the unknown territory of a global pandemic, many people found immense solace in nature on their doorstep, familiar trees on their street, or modest plants at roadsides or on windowsills.

Inspired by patterns made by sunlight filtering through trees in the forest, this series of paintings reflect both a period of great anxiety as well as being a testimony to the healing power of nature. They depict the underlying tensions of this period and the inherent conflict between light and dark, in all its manifestations; they are simultaneously colourful and bathed in muted shades of grey.

Characteristically, Gurpran captures not only the qualities of the natural world, but the over-riding mood of our times. The shapes and structures she employs in her art resist categorization; a circle is implied but never perfect, neither geometric nor amorphous; shapes fuse and melt across layers of colour with a dynamic quality that escapes definition, neither figurative nor entirely abstract.

A long time in the studio, these works are being exhibited to the public for the first time. Although there are familiar motifs – including a life-long fascination with the structure, creation and symbolism of the circle – this series of paintings present an exciting departure both in terms of process and practice. New methods, experimentation and innovation in how Gurpran applies and removes paint across the surface of many layers, reflects her interest in transience and transformation; both structures in the natural world and the nature of change; a world in constant flux and a search for balance born of a nomadic life-style.

I am delighted we are able to showcase this new series of paintings at ŷ������College. Gurpran’s message of respect for the environment, the power of nature to inspire, heal and unite, is a poignant reminder for our contemporary world.

Dr. Anna M. Dempster

The as a highlight from the Open Cambridge heritage events.

 

Gurpran Rau - Artist statement

These paintings were inspired by my walks in the woods of Cambridgeshire during the challenging days of lockdown. I was fascinated by the ephemeral dance of light and shadow on the forest floor, as sun-dappled patterns emerged and faded revealing nature's exquisite choreography. I felt a deep connection with my surrounding environment. These wanderings were transformative, bringing light into dark spaces in my mind – reassuring me that brighter days lay ahead. I felt nurtured and protected by some extraordinary fate.

Drawing from the repetitive and intricate patterns I observed underfoot - the harmonious intermingling of organic forms with shadows and sunlight, I combined layers of paint and other media creating a new and vibrant terrain. Using a reductive process, I let the paint reveal what lay beneath, echoing the wild and beautiful paths I traversed. For me, the forest floor is like a tapestry: highly patterned, alive, chaotic, mysterious, and beautiful all at the same time. I am in awe of the healing and regenerative power of nature and the wonder of existence.

As you walk past these works, I invite you to explore the changing palette of colours, the natural forms that unfurl and emotional resonance that might echo within. I hope this body of work will encourage you to connect spiritually with the natural world, treading more lightly on our fragile planet with a reverence and respect for all living things.

 

Biography

Gurpran Rau is a painter, print-maker and mixed-media artist. Born in the Indian Himalayas, she was constantly moving as a child and has remained inspired by her travels.

She studied Textile Design at the New Delhi Polytechnic and began her career in fashion design working with Indian multinationals designing evening-wear, including for Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman and creating hand-painted silks for Dior. This period was formative in her life-long fascination with colour and texture. She went on to live in France where she studied drawing at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and French Civilization at the Sorbonne. In 2000, she relocated to the US and completed an MA in Fine Arts at Purdue University before moving to California to begin a busy period of gallery and museum exhibitions across the US and UK. She moved to the UK in 2012 and work is held in public and private collections in the UK, USA, Europe and Asia.

Having lived in many countries and travelled the world, Rau is a truly international artist interested in exploring connections between people and cultures and what links us across time and place.

Richard Batterham stoneware: A Selection from the Bradshaw-Bubier Collection

17 September - 8 October 2023

Richard Batterham (1936 - 2021) was one of Britain’s most revered makers of hand-thrown stoneware in the tradition of the pioneer studio potters, Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew. Over sixty years he evolved an inimitable style of his own through the repetition of unostentatious functional forms with muted glazes which are quietly beautiful. ŷ������College is lucky to own sixty-one examples of Batterham’s work which form part of a collection of pottery in the ‘Leach tradition’ donated by Dr Harry Bradshaw and his wife, Dr Norma Bubier, to celebrate the College’s fiftieth anniversary in 2015.

Batterham attended Bryanston School in Dorset, where he learned potting techniques under the guidance of an inspirational art master, Donald Potter, and was already a competent thrower when he left in 1954. After National Service, he worked as an apprentice at the Leach Pottery in St Ives during 1957 and 1958. There he met his future wife, Dinah Dunn, and Atsuya Hamada (d. 1986), son of the great Japanese potter, Shogi Hamada. In 1959 he married Dinah and set up his own workshop at Durweston, Dorset, where he installed a Japanese-style kick wheel and built a climbing kiln. Unusually, he undertook all the manufacturing processes himself, from preparation of the clay stored in his garden, to stacking, and unloading the kiln. A more spacious workshop was built for him in 1966, and he constructed a larger climbing kiln, rebuilt in 1996. His first major exhibition at the British Crafts Centre in London in 1972 was greeted with critical acclaim.

In the Seventies art school-trained potters were turning against wheel-thrown pottery in favour of slab-building and slip-casting one-off objects, but Batterham was unaffected by fashion. He continued to live quietly in the country, throwing  functional pottery which he hoped would ‘communicate warmth and life’ to its users.

Most of Batterham’s pots are high-fired stoneware with integral decoration, such as faceting, fluting, incising and chattering, executed before the first firing. This was followed by the application of wood ash glazes which appear greyish- or bluish-green, amber or cream after a second firing. Other pots have rich brown glazes containing iron or manganese. He also made porcelain, and from 1978 salt-glazed stoneware, but these did not form a large part of his output and are not represented in Wolfson’s collection.

Curated by Dr Julia Poole.

Things Put Differently - Gavin Fry, including works by Anthony Green RA and Mary Cozens-Walker

30 April - 10 September 2023

Hand stitching is a slow rhythmic craft that describes both the functional and symbolic dimensions of joining and being attached, and as such it has become a daily social encounter for Gavin Fry.

In this exhibition Fry presents stitched works and the kernels of ideas including his sketchbooks and found objects. In these, the original ideas, are the sandwiched disparate elements and gleaned things that later get fixed together. Only then do the stories they hold get written; and because they are built ragbag, they can be neither purely realist nor linear.

The slow rhythms of hand-stitching allow the artist to carve out space for himself and make time for reflection. The embroidery is not rogue but is included throughout the making stages as a dialogic collage element to further add to both the narrative and the making process using his idiosyncratic imagery.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of having an art practice, is to use it as a trampoline to bounce around questions that might not otherwise get asked (of oneself and of others). By capturing initial information in journals and sketchbooks Fry can then marry ideas into questions, and compositions from accidental discoveries and quiet collisions. It is these that then grow into assemblages/bricolages, the complete process from find to end becoming a device to activate further inquiries.

The themes explored in these works are identity, labelling, and the narrative associations of stitch. The artist’s material choices are deliberate: they enable him to play himself because his identity is partially constructed through making with stitch and thread, bits and bobs, and in turn, this has become a device to activate further inquiries.

Roland Barthes in his essay The World as Object, discusses the transformation of things (and materials), and in line with this logical alchemy Fry is “taking refuge within attributes”. For forty years the attributes of embroidery have become a productive epistemic practice enabling him to occupy both a personal and a historic social space because immersion in the craft is not an isolating encounter.

This work develops certain monstrosities (as well as pleasures) to make social ornaments and signs. It does so by using materials familiar to the artist so as not to inhibit but make easier both the documentation and making processes. These forms and material choices support and contextualize Fry’s ideas. In these works, embroidery surpasses its functional attributes because it is used here as a material practice that signifies metaphors of collaboration and separation.

Dr Gavin Fry thanks the University of Brighton for their support of this exhibition.

 

Artist biographies

Dr Gavin Fry MA RCA (b.1963, UK) studied Fine Art Textiles at Goldsmiths College under Eirian Short, Audrey Walker and Constance Howard. He later attained a postgraduate degree from the Royal College of Art in Embroidery after working in ecclesiastical textile conservation, and internationally as a textile designer for fashion whilst maintaining his art practice. He graduated from Kings College London as a Project 2000 Mental Health nurse. And completed a doctorate at the University of Brighton in 2019. This is his first solo show, and his work has been included in group exhibitions at The Mall Galleries, RIBA and with the Textile Study Group and The 62 Group of Textile Artists.

Anthony Green RA (1939-2023, UK) was a figurative painter and printmaker, whose works drew on his domestic life, including featuring his wife, Mary Cozens-Walker in many of his paintings. He was a Senior Royal Academician and an Honorary Fellow of ŷ������College.

Mary Cozens-Walker (1938-2020, UK) was a multi-media textile artist. She was educated at North London Collegiate School, The Slade School of Art and Goldsmiths, University of London where she specialised in embroidery and textiles. She exhibited in the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States.

Signs for the Living - Hannah Lister 

29 January - 23 April 2023

Winner of the ŷ������College Cambridge Royal Academy Schools Graduate Prize 2023, Hannah Lister’s photographs are complex, subtle, multi-layered works.

They invite the viewer to engage with the questions they pose about representational image-making in general and the nature of photography in particular, but they also raise larger symbolic and spiritual concerns, about our position in time, our embodied relationship to landscapes and to the environment, and about our connections with others. 

Hannah uses analogue photography and printing to cultivate chance and intuitively sifts its potential.  Her emphasis on the materiality of the photograph, which she sometimes enhances by deliberately embracing potential flaws in the process of print-making, is in subtle dialogue with her photographs’ representational functions. We contemplate the quizzical glance or equivocal gesture in a portrait, the evocative landscape with its evidence of presence and distance simultaneously, the mundane object freighted with unexpected and enigmatic symbolism. The photograph is never objectively, transparently recording: it is an image, a selection, an artifice; but it is also weighty and mysterious, pregnant with some undefined meaning, elusive and allusive simultaneously.

Out of Order - Simon Patterson

6 November 2022 - 22 January 2023

Simon Patterson’s art wittily subverts scientific taxonomies and graphical systems of knowledge: diagrams, maps and charts, lists, instruction-manuals, encyclopaedias, the systems we use to classify and organise our materials rationally.  Frequently his work is trans-systemic, taking one schema for ordering knowledge and inserting into it materials from a wholly different system or systems. The disruptions thus caused are humorous and demanding simultaneously, because Patterson’s art-works require a knowledge of the graphical or text-based schemata he playfully collides with one another.  They also demand the spectator’s familiarity with the sources he deploys – ranging from the Seven Rishis to contemporary football formations, from eighteenth-century novels to twentieth-century films and television. 

Patterson’s disruptive reorderings of knowledge systems are often monumental and possess a poetic grandeur, qualities which are strikingly evident in his name-paintings - the works which first brought him to national and international attention - where names ‘substitute’ for representational portraits.

Simon Patterson (b.1967) is one of a new generation of contemporary artists in Britain. He studied at Goldsmiths’ College in London, and took part in the seminal ‘Freeze’ exhibition of 1988. In 1992 he made his best-known work to date, The Great Bear, a reworking of Harry Beck’s classic London Underground map. In 1993 he showed a pair of Last Suppers at the Aperto of the Venice Biennale, in which the disciples took the formations of football team, with Jesus Christ in goal. He was nominated for the Turner prize in 1996. He has made numerous permanent and temporary works and has exhibited at major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunsthaus Zurich; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, The Hayward Gallery, London; and Tate Britain, Liverpool and Modern.

 

Find out more about previous art exhibitions.