Previous Exhibitions

Previous fine art exhibitions

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 Wolfson 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 BBC featured 'Patterns of Renewal' 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. Wolfson 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 Wolfson 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 Wolfson 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.

 

2021-22

Kill or Cure

15 May - 9 October 2022

Kill or Cure showcases 36 contemporary artworks and 2 displays across a range of media – digital art, video, painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and collage. The exhibition presents art and artists from the UK, Europe and around the world, including, Argentina, Bulgaria, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Iran, Korea, Mongolia, USA and Zimbabwe, amongst others.

Leading international artists, including Mat Collishaw, Charlotte Verity, Tom Ellis, Julieta Hanono and Adrien Missika, have loaned major works to Wolfson College, with a number of artists and artworks displayed for the first time in Cambridge and the UK.

An Open Call responding to the theme of Kill or Cure, also attracted a large number of submissions from professional artists as well as students, alumni and academics from across Cambridge and internationally. Following a competitive process, a selection of these works are on displayed.

Kill or Cure seeks to discover and explore how substances from the natural world – in particular plants – but also animals, gases, chemicals and minerals – have been used in, inspired or informed the medical sciences. How substances and properties which are both potentially lethal and/or life-giving and the fine boundary between the potential to ‘Kill’ and/or ‘Cure’, depending on applications, dose and usage. This exhibition aims to stimulate discussion and debate and explore the fascinating relationship between art, modern medicine and the natural world.

The Made and the Unmade - John Atkin

27 March - 1 May 2022

The Made and the Unmade is born out of an earlier series of wall-based artworks entitled The Pendulum Reliefs, which have been exhibited throughout North America.

These artworks have developed from John Atkin’s interest in pattern-blocks (tailors’ patterns), which at one and the same time are elegant abstract forms as well as found-objects that allude to human identity. The human figure is at its core to, as is the objet-trouvé tradition in Modern and Contemporary Fine Art practice

The overwhelming majority of this work is hand-wrought, using traditional skills such as découpage, drawing, and painting which have led to the juxtaposition of digital methods as seen in this exhibition.

Also on display are a series of drawings, sketchbook pages, and ceramic sculptures, derived from Atkin’s research into C14th plumb bobs. These measuring instruments have been used ever since ancient Egypt and pinpoint the nadir; the downward-facing point of a specific location as dictated by gravity. This description is almost human, and Atkin’s interest in this historic variety of plumb bobs is their figurative references, as well as his interest in found objects and their resonance to the human figure.

The Art of Great Bardfield - The visual legacy of a small Essex village

23 January - 20 March 2022

From the early 1930s until the end of the twentieth century, a significant number of professional artists were drawn to the small north west Essex village of Great Bardfield and its surroundings. Working across various media, they made a substantial contribution to twentieth-century visual culture in Britain.

The artists never constituted a ‘school’ or movement, and they had diverse styles and interests. However, they have inevitably become known as the ‘Bardfield Artists’. Many of them were skilled printmakers, producing both limited edition art prints and inexpensive lithographs for wider circulation, often pioneering new methods. Most of them needed to earn their living, and as well as teaching they undertook a wide range of commercial work.

This exhibition displays a cross-section of the contribution these artists made to twentieth-century visual culture in Britain, and is drawn from the extensive North West Essex Collection of art housed in the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden, a public art gallery run entirely by volunteers. All works are from the Collection, except where stated, and grateful thanks are extended to the Trustees for the loan of these items. The exhibition has been curated by senior member Peter Donovan.

The Combination Show - Irini Bachlitzanaki

24 October 2021 - 9 January 2022

Borrowing its title from the name of the room, The Combination Show brings together a selection of older and more recent works that employ various embroidery techniques to create different versions of everyday objects we share our lives with. Images seemingly protrude out of their flat backgrounds and three-dimensional objects sink back into them as the works oscillate between image and object. A play on opposites that come together, the utilitarian and the decorative, the prop and the real, soft and hard, these works attempt to imaginatively feel around the space as well as the material world. They simultaneously explore the relationship of sculpture to other forms of representation and the relationship of making works of art to other forms of production, artefacts and commodities.

The framed embroidered pieces, hanging tapestries, upholstered and smaller sculptures, along with research material and preparatory work are part of an ongoing body of work that flirts with several different processes and draws inspiration from craft and design practices. These pieces Illustrate a strong pull towards materiality and an interest in practical skills, traditional or otherwise, whilst also allowing for material experimentation.

Irini Bachlitzanaki was born in Athens, Greece in 1984 and now lives and works in London. She studied History of Art at UCL and Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Arts and most recently the Royal Academy Schools. She has participated in group exhibitions in Greece, the U.K. and elsewhere and has had two solo shows in her native Athens. Winner of the Wolfson College Cambridge Royal Academy Schools Graduate Prize 2021, The Combination Show is her first solo exhibition in the U.K.

 

2020-21

Representation as a Matter of Fact - Amikam Toren

13 June - 19 September 2021

Since the late 1960s, the Israeli-born artist Amikam Toren has been producing extraordinary artworks which are frequently the result of appropriation, destruction and re-construction.  All his works reveal a rigorous investigation of materials and materiality.  Toren’s programmatic interrogation and transmutation of the physical media with which he works destroy the boundaries between painting and sculpture: even the apparently two-dimensional is revealed to possess a physical three-dimensionality and the three-dimensional object is co-opted to become its own two-dimensional representation.

Toren’s work challenges the spectator’s perception of the possible and renders strange the everyday object and the familiar media of art.  The products of ‘Sunday-afternoon’ figurative painters are cut through or sliced up and partially liquidised; or their paintings are carefully removed from the stretchers, the artists’ signatures on the corners of their canvases cut out, unfolded, flattened and preserved, pseudo-archaeologically, the appropriated segment revivified as a new work.

Several distinctive interests are evidenced throughout Toren’s distinguished career. They include the exploration of the nature and definition of representation; an interest in reflection and in mirrored reduction; a long-term fascination with the fragment and with destruction and its partial converse - the creative metamorphosis of the broken and smashed; a delight in the co-option and manipulation of graphic signs as art; the interrogation of the relationship between texts and figurative imagery; and an abiding interest in materiality and media.

This exhibition will include several works by Toren from Wolfson College’s Frangenberg Collection. The late Dr Thomas Frangenberg owned the largest collection of Toren’s work in the world. After Thomas’s death, several major works by Toren were bequeathed to Tate, and to Leeds and Manchester Art Galleries, but a nucleus of important works came with the rest of the collection to Wolfson.

 

2019-2020

Simon Quadrat - Recent Paintings

15 March - 14 June 2020

Simon Quadrat was born in London in May 1946, the son of Jewish parents who had separately fled Germany in the 1930s and then met and settled in England. He had the advantage of a very cosmopolitan and cultured childhood, where both music and art played a large part. During his school years he painted factories and desolate urban landscapes. Reading about art and visiting art galleries became one of his major interests from his early teenage years and he developed a particular love of Old Master paintings with an interest in 20th century art coming much later. However he had no thought of becoming an artist, instead he read Law at university and went on to establish himself as a criminal barrister in the Temple in London and then from 1985, in Bristol.  In his mid-thirties he felt compelled to try to teach himself to paint “I succumbed to a strong urge to paint professionally and so gave up the Bar to become a full time artist."

Since then he has been regularly invited to exhibit his work in galleries and his work is now widely collected. In 2004 he was elected an Academician of the Royal West of England Academy where he went on to serve both as Academicians Chairman and President. In 2015 he was elected a member of the New English Art Club. Simon is married and lives and paints (accompanied always by his cat) in Wiltshire. He is also a classical pianist.

Simon is represented by Panter & Hall Gallery, London.

“All the paintings in this exhibition were created in my studio based largely on imagination with occasional help from drawings and photos where needed. I can never plan a painting too precisely as they never turn out as expected. As subject matter I draw on early memories or anything however mundane and trivial or even imagined which is important or interesting enough for me at the time to need to paint it. Viewers of my work tend to describe me as a storyteller, if so they are imperfect stories having neither beginning nor ending.

Painting the way I do means you never really know what you are after. I only know that mere pictorial representation isn’t enough for me. And so I quote Edward Hopper quoting Renoir: “The important element of a picture cannot be defined; cannot be explained perhaps is better”.  A painter may look at Piero Della Francesca, El Greco, Velasquez or Rembrandt or indeed Picasso and wonder why he bothers, but you carry on because in your own small way you think you have something to add which the viewer may find more than superficial or transient.

To my mind painting often works best using the simplest of motifs or commonplace subjects. In his monologue Fra Lippo Lippi Browning wrote this passage, putting these words in the mouth of the painter “For, we’re made so that we love first when we see them painted, things we have passed perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; and so they are better painted.”

Simon Quadrat, 2020

This exhibition formed part of WOLFSON EXPLORES Borders.

The Frangenberg Collection

19 January - 8 March 2020

Dr Thomas Frangenberg (1957-2018), a distinguished historian of Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture, was also a well-known collector of contemporary art. Between the early 1980s, when he arrived in England from Germany, and his death in London in 2018, Thomas amassed a substantial art-collection. The collection predominantly comprises ideas-based, ‘conceptual’ art-works, produced in London from the mid-1970s until a few months before Thomas’s death. He left several important works to Tate and the Contemporary Art Society also received a number of bequests, as did friends and family. However, the vast bulk of this important collection, numbering more than 750 works, has been generously donated to Wolfson College by Thomas’s executors, his brother Andreas and sister-in-law Rita Frangenberg. Several Turner-Prize winners, many nominees and a host of other internationally and nationally celebrated artists are represented in the collection. This exhibition presents a first selection from the works now in store in the college.

Thomas’s acquisitions reflect his intimate knowledge of the London art scene during the decades when the capital became, for the first time, the most exciting centre of art-production in the world. The pieces he selected typically probed the definition of art, problematised its production, challenged media boundaries and hierarchies, critiqued the art market and almost always foregrounded the participation of the viewer in generating meaning. Of course, all art works involve the beholder’s participation to a greater or lesser degree, but in their overt requirements for a dynamic intellectual and aesthetic engagement, the works Thomas collected place a very great emphasis on the spectator’s active participation in the construction of meaning. This exhibition, then, is not just about painted or sculpted forms, prints, photographs, drawings, or indeed about objects of any kind, but also about the ideas and interpretations the works will stimulate in the viewer’s mind.

Professor Phillip Lindley

This exhibition formed part of WOLFSON EXPLORES Borders.

Time is Money - Débora Delmar

20 October 2019 - 12 January 2020

Débora Delmar’s work investigates the effects of globalisation on everyday life in relationship to consumer culture and aspirational aesthetics. She is particularly focused on the societal effects of globalisation such as issues of class and cultural hegemony, as well as the homogenisation of corporate aesthetics. Delmar creates multi-sensory installations that are commonly composed of different elements, these include fabricated and appropriated objects.

The L.U.X.U.R.Y Time series (clocks) are a playful appropriation and re-presentation of aspects of our everyday realities through the use of international brands and things associated with habits of consumption. These works directly bring together object form, image and time. Through this efficient assemblage they present diverse temporalities and realities, and it is through their repetition and insistence they come to speak of scheduling, timetabling, the anxieties of time (and ageing), and situations of labour as well as perceptions of aspiration, value and ownership.

The clocks are juxtaposed with works from the Canto (Mayfair Businessmen) series, composed of off-cut fabrics that Delmar has collected from Saville Row tailors. These are sewn and stretched and come to resemble Barnett Newman's Canto series of paintings. These investigate certain power relations, hierarchies and networks.

Winner of the Wolfson College Cambridge Royal Academy Schools Graduate Prize 2019, Delmar now lives and works in London. She exhibits regularly with solo and group shows in the UK, Europe and the Americas.

 

2018-2019

Emotional Architecture transforming responses to space - Tszwai So

30 June - 22 September 2019

The exhibition of the work of this young architect highlights his responses, in his buildings and the spaces he creates, to the attachments of people to places. So first found acclaim for his installation Remembering Chernobyl, part of the London Festival of Architecture 2016. He is probably best known, however, for his prize-winning Belarusian Memorial Chapel (2017), the first wooden church to be built in London since the Great Fire of 1666 and a poetic memorial to all those who have lost their lives in Belarus since the foundation of the state in 1918.

In this show we trace his interest in people from his earliest sketches through his Urban Hermitage series and Remembering Chernobyl to his designs for Jean Rey Square, Brussels, An Echo in Time. This was selected by the European Parliament to be the first  Pan-European Memorial for all victims of Totalitarianism in the 20th century.  The drawings for the memorial subsequently won the RIBA annual International Drawing Competition - the RIBAJ Eye Line Award 2018.

The exhibition formed part of WOLFSON EXPLORES Transformation.

Joseph Joseph: The Making of Functional Design

28 April - 16 June 2019

Since 2003, Joseph Joseph has built an enviable reputation for producing some of the world’s most innovative and distinctive housewares products. Founded by twin brothers Antony and Richard Joseph, the company has grown rapidly to become an award-winning international housewares brand, sold in over 110 countries across the globe. Their most recent accolades include receiving two prestigious Queen’s Awards for Enterprise - in International Trade and Innovation. The company operates from modern, open-plan headquarters in central London and also has offices in New York, Paris, Tokyo, Dusseldorf, Hong Kong and Shanghai. This exhibition explores their process of invention through a series of curated displays that feature original sketches, prototypes, testing rigs and photographs. Either working closely with leading product designers, or developing products in-house via their talented design team, the exhibition showcases their unique, problem-solving approach, rigorous process of refinement and attention to detail. Joseph Joseph's ultimate mission is to create desirable products that enhance everyday life and stay true to their philosophy of creating Brilliantly Useful Design.

In 1998 Richard took the Advanced Course in Design, Manufacture and Management at the Department of Engineering's Institute for Manufacturing (IfM), spending a year at Wolfson. The Fine Arts Committee is delighted to welcome back Richard Joseph to Wolfson College.

The exhibition formed part of WOLFSON EXPLORES Transformation.

Approaches to Abstraction - Jonathan Meuli

19 January - 17 March 2019

Jonathan Meuli is a Glasgow-based painter, trained at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford, from which he graduated in 1982. The exhibition at Wolfson is a selection of works spanning nearly four decades.  Some of Meuli’s most important abstract studies in watercolour or gouache as well as a number of significant oil paintings are on show, many for the first time. The goal of this exhibition is to trace the origins of Meuli’s profound interest in abstraction and the routes through which the artist has come to produce his current large, chromatically intense, abstract oil paintings. Meuli’s wide-ranging interests in other art-forms, such as opera and dance, poetry and prose, are often evident in his paintings. For the past four years, he has developed large, often turbulent, oil paintings which have a metaphorical connection with scientific research. Other works have a meditative stillness and balance.

At Your Service - Mark Corfield-Moore

2 October - 16 December 2018

We are delighted to present works by Mark Corfield-Moore, the first winner of The Wolfson College Cambridge – Royal Academy Schools Graduate Prize. The prize is awarded annually to an outstanding graduate of the RA Schools and is designed to provide emerging artists with a significant exhibition at a crucial point in their careers. Their work, in turn, plays a critical role in fostering meaningful connections between the arts and other disciplines both within the University and beyond.

Mark Corfield-Moore’s exhibition, ‘At Your Service’, will be on view until 16 December 2018. His multi-media works respond directly to the environment of the College, particularly the challenge of exhibiting in a space that is very different, both visually and conceptually, from a contemporary art gallery. All of the works in this show engage with the multipurpose nature of the Combination Room, at once a site for display and a functional space. For Corfield-Moore, the champagne glasses, ashtray, and napkins that feature in these works allude to the experience of service and being served. The meditated complexity of the works captures elements of performance and display that define, for the artist, events such as the typically ‘Oxbridge’ Formal Hall.

Dance of Light: Living Matter and Rhythm - Rhea Quien

22 September to 18 November 2018

Stimulated by her immersion in nature, the artist has conjured up the underlying motion of organic growth. In this series, originally called ‘Living Matter in Rhythm’ and painted in 1999 and 2001, Rhea Quien captures energy and light to bring forth subtle shapes. Out of the saturated colour of the background emerge suggestions of translucent insect wings, muscle or bone, flames, wispy clouds or flowing water, while others draw one to imagine apparitions from outer space.

With a particular gift – synaesthesia, which she seems to have inherited from her mother Clara Quien, also a synaesthetic artist – Rhea responds to nature by ‘seeing’ light and shapes which she attempts to capture in her paintings.  She says that the process of painting ‘Living Matter in Rhythm’, although challenging at the beginning, was instructive and exciting. “Slowly I learned to trust the process in a spontaneous, yet sensitive way. Turning the so-called ‘finished’ painting upside down and contemplating it, revealed a great deal that might be improved.”  

Read more about Rhea Quien and her work on her websites: rq-art.com and rq-lightart.com.

Watch a talk on synaesthesia that Rhea gave at Wolfson College's Lee Hall.

 

2017-18

Political Satire at Wolfson

1 September - 30 September 2018

This exhibition in the Combination Room features 21 prints by four of the most important satirists of the period – Isaac Cruikshank (1764 -1811), William Heath (1794-1840), Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), and Charles Williams (1796-1830). Three subjects dominate the satires: the Duke of York’s affair with Mrs Mary Anne Clarke; George IV’s efforts to divorce Caroline of Brunswick; and Napoleon’s ambitions in Europe. All of the satires are hand-coloured etchings and would have been sold by one of London’s many print publishers.

The law features prominently in the prints which provide an overview of political satire produced in Britain during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The satires are on loan from The Right Honourable Lord Collins of Mapesbury, Fellow of Wolfson since 1975, who was appointed a High Court Judge in 2000 and has also served as Lord Justice of Appeal, Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and, most recently, Justice of the Supreme Court.

Curated by Dr Meredith Hale.

Dualities - Christopher LeBrun

6 May - 26 August 2018

Shown for the first time at Wolfson College, this new series of paintings is a continuation from Christopher Le Brun's most recent series of prints, Composer, which explores the musical form of distinct yet related movements and the essentially layered structure of both painting and music. Using a unique technique working directly onto the woodcut proofs, these remarkable oil paintings extend Le Brun’s lifelong preoccupation with colour – ‘experiencing rather than seeing’, as he describes it, ‘a property of the world we delight in for itself’ – and testing approaches to the juxtaposition of colour, tone, transparency and form.

The exhibition considers the theme of ‘doubles’ and dualities through a series of remarkable diptych paintings, the result of the artist’s long standing aesthetic, literary and philosophical interest in the idea of ‘the double’ - with parallels in the sciences and across human endeavour and scholarship. For Le Brun, the process of painting itself involves an intrinsic duality: ‘cover and uncover, reveal and hide, this goes to the heart of what painting is and does. It can’t be made without covering, and without reducing the original light of the ground.’ The implications of this approach form a connecting thread throughout Le Brun’s work, whether figurative or non-figurative. Combining two different paintings in a diptych allows Le Brun to ‘dramatise this duality’.

A fully illustrated book, Doubles, published by Ridinghouse accompanies the exhibition. It features an essay on the multi-disciplinary subject of Dualities by the exhibition curator Dr Anna M Dempster.

About the artist

Christopher Le Brun is a painter, sculptor and printmaker. Born in Portsmouth and trained at the Slade and Chelsea Schools of Art in London, he is an internationally acclaimed artist. His work has been exhibited worldwide and can be found in major museum and public collections including those of Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; British Museum, London; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; The Whitworth, Manchester and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven amongst many others, as well as in leading private and corporate collections nationally and internationally.

Contributing his ideas and expertise to the direction of a number of the United Kingdom’s leading arts organisations, and leading them through times of growth and change, Le Brun served as a Trustee of Tate 1990-1995, The National Gallery 1996-2003 and Dulwich Picture Gallery 2000-2005. He was a Founding Trustee of the Royal Drawing School between 2000-2016 and is currently a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, Since 2011 Christopher Le Brun has been President of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. the 26th President since Sir Joshua Reynolds and the youngest since Lord Leighton, in 1878. He has overseen the Royal Academy at a time of extraordinary innovation and growth, including in education, and guiding it to its 250th anniversary year in 2018.

Curated by Dr Anna M. Dempster.

Political Satire at Wolfson

20 January to 6 May 2018

This exhibition in the Combination Room features 21 prints by four of the most important satirists of the period – Isaac Cruikshank (1764 -1811), William Heath (1794-1840), Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), and Charles Williams (1796-1830). Three subjects dominate the satires: the Duke of York’s affair with Mrs Mary Anne Clarke; George IV’s efforts to divorce Caroline of Brunswick; and Napoleon’s ambitions in Europe. All of the satires are hand-coloured etchings and would have been sold by one of London’s many print publishers.

The law features prominently in the prints which provide an overview of political satire produced in Britain during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The satires are on loan from The Right Honourable Lord Collins of Mapesbury, Fellow of Wolfson since 1975, who was appointed a High Court Judge in 2000 and has also served as Lord Justice of Appeal, Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and, most recently, Justice of the Supreme Court.

Curated by Dr Meredith Hale.

Wolfson Places 2017

14 April - 6 May 2018

Wolfson Places 2017 is an exhibition of a selection of the photographs submitted by College members to the competition of this name run in the Michaelmas term of this year. It includes the winner, runners-up, highly commended entries and a selection of other images taken around the College.

Illuminated Movement - Henryk Hetflaisz

14 April - 6 May 2018

An exhibition of dance images by Henryk Hetflaisz (b.1978) a Polish-born photographic artist, working in London

Hetflaisz is pre-occupied “with finding a way to set movement free using a medium that traditionally ‘captures’ motion. Imagine”, he says, “that the dancer’s body is a paint brush and the photographic paper is the canvas. First, I paint the bodies of my dance collaborators. Then, they dance expressively in near darkness, while I take a series of long exposures.”

The result is the magical, ethereal bodies that emerge from an incandescence of light against a black background in these photographs. What is important is that “in an age of digital manipulation, […] these images are the result of direct photographic exposure. No digital trickery interferes with the alchemy of photons propelled into movement.”

The Diasporic Brush: Modern Singaporean Art

20 January - 1 April 2018

This exhibition combined paintings from the Lee Seng Tee Collection of Wolfson College with the works of six young artists of the Siaw-Tao Chinese Seal-Carving, Calligraphy and Painting Society. The exhibition explored changing meanings of ink and identity in Singapore. The term ‘diaspora’ may be dated, but Sinophone scholars such as Shih Shu-mei have contended that participating in cultural projections forms a link with China that maintains a sort of diasporas identity. In a medium with as much cultural baggage as Chinese ink, successive generations of Singaporean artists had done just that, resolving a dialectic between citizenship and diaspora. This exhibition presented the Nanyang flavour of Singaporean Modern Art in this light, with the Nanyangs of two generations put into sharp contrast.

Wolfson Fine Arts presented this exhibition in association with The Siaw-Tao Chinese Seal-Carving, Calligraphy and Painting Society, and acknowledges the support of Leicestershire County Council for the loan of Paysage Chinois by Cheong Soo Pieng from their permanent Collection.

Representing Partition: India and Pakistan

14 October - 9 December 2017

Falling in the 70th year since India and Pakistan were rendered independent nation states, the series will explore the visual character of this moment, and understand how visual culture was used to facilitate, and articulate this transformation for global audiences.

The show offers an original contribution to understanding the visual significance of Partition and includes sketches made at the precise moment of the hand-over in 1947, photojournalism and illustrated adverts. Bringing together loans from the Imperial War Museum, London Library, Royal Academy, Centre of South Asian Studies and Royal Asiatic Society for the first time, the exhibition is an opportunity to experience the political use of representation during this challenging process. In parallel an exhibition of the work of contemporary Kashmiri artist Prashast Kachru examines the impact of this critical moment.

 

2016-17

Richard Sorrell

27 May - 24 September 2017

Richard Sorrell (b.1948) is a painter of invented people ‘doing things’. He works in oil, acrylic and watercolour. His career started as a predominantly landscape, portrait and still-life painter – by instinct a draughtsman, and interested in the appearance of things, particularly plants and animals – an objective painter. His subjective painting – the invented compositions – have come to greater prominence since the 1990s.

A Woman’s Skin - Eileen Cooper RA

6 May - 24 September 2017

A selection of paintings, collages and bronzes, including works specially made for the exhibition, by Eileen Cooper OBE RA, Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools since 2010. Eileen Cooper trained at Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art. Her works can be found in museums, galleries and private collections from Birmingham and Manchester to Nuremberg and New Haven. Cooper became a Royal Academician in 2000 and in 2010 was elected Keeper of the Royal Academy of Arts, the first woman to hold the post since the Academy's foundation in 1768. As Keeper she is responsible for guiding the next generation of artists admitted to the Royal Academy Schools, the oldest established art school in Britain.

Valley of Vision

21 January - 16 April 2017

Works depicting the vibrant industrial mining culture of the Rhondda Valley by George Chapman, Josef Herman, Ernest Zobole, Jack Crabtree, Nicholas Evans and others. Kim Howells, former Welsh Labour Party MP for Pontypridd, gave an engaging talk to mark the opening of the exhibition - read the text here. Read more in the brochure.

Counterpoints - Contemporary Russian Art at Wolfson College

9 October 2016 - 19 February 2017

Showcasing the dynamic work of Alexei Lantsev, a graduate member of the Moscow Artists' Union. The exhibition featured many works that were created especially for the space. Read more in the brochure.

Reimagining the City - Kettle's Yard in new places and spaces

29 October 2016 - 8 January 2017

Celebrating 50 years as part of the University of Cambridge - Reimagining the City brought together works from the Kettle's Yard Collection that captured artists’ interpretations of the city, both real and imaginary cities that spanned several decades. As well as artworks by modern European and British artists such as Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson, the exhibition contained an example of the glassware that Jim Ede collected that is usually displayed in the Kettle’s Yard house, providing an imaginative interpretation of the city through the eyes of Ede, after he described it as appearing to him to be like ‘a golden city’.

Curated by Kyle Percy, Kettle’s Yard.

 

2015-16

Founders, Presidents, Benefactors and Personalities

1 March - 30 September 2016

Works from the College's own art collection that represented some of the key people involved in the founding and ongoing development of the College.

Pottery in the Bernard Leach Tradition

1 March - 30 September 2016

The jugs, caddies and vases from the Bradshaw-Bubier collection. All the potters represented worked for part of their career at the St Ives Pottery in Cornwall, which was founded by Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada in 1920.

A selection of Batik Orchid Paintings from the Lee Collection - Ramsay Ong

1 May - 30 September 2016

An award-winning batik artist from Sarawak, Ramsay Ong had originally trained as a draughtsman, but decided to work in batik in the 1970s. These orchid paintings date from that time and demonstrate his achievement of rich textures and three-dimensionality. The paintings were purchased by Dr Lee Seng Tee and they form part of a collection of 55 paintings that Dr Lee donated to Wolfson College in 1992. Further small exhibitions of parts of the Lee Collection will follow.

Where Do Ideas Come From - Kate Green

16 January - 20 March 2016

In the mixed-media works Kate Green chose for this exhibition, she explores the language of childhood; the stitched pieces contain elements of silence and are about the need to re-create stillness and beauty in her life. As stillness has grown within her, Kate's language has become more direct and speedy. Her watercolours reflect this development.

Henry Moore and Photography

9 October 2015 - 28 February 2016

The exhibition considered the little-examined subject of the role of photography in Henry Moore’s creative process. A selection of 20 photographs from The Henry Moore Foundation Archive and two maquettes for monumental works, Three Standing Figures (1945) and Reclining Figure (1969), explored Moore’s use of photography to study light, texture and form and to help site his large-scale sculptures.

 

2014-15

This is where ideas come from - Richard Deacon

July - September 2015

An informative and beautifully crafted catalogue was produced for this exhibition. At the official launch event on 16 July the exhibition's curator, Phillip Lindley, discussed the show with the sculptor.

The Royal Academy at Wolfson

31 January - 19 December 2015

A rotating exhibition of Royal Academicians, curated by Honorary Fellow Anthony Green RA, included paintings, prints and drawings, all of which had been lent to the College by the artists. Many works had never been exhibited before. An illustrated leaflet (pdf) accompanied the exhibition.

A Retrospective - Ben Levene RA

November 2014 - January 2015

Ben Levene (1938–2010) was a master of still life, which he saw as an art form within an art form, the recreation within a painted composition of a selection and arrangement of real objects combined with abstract design. He taught generations of artists from 1963 until 1998 at Camberwell School of Art, the Royal Academy Schools and as a tutor for City and Guilds. He served as curator in the Royal Academy Schools from 1995 and exhibited regularly throughout the UK and abroad.

 

2013-14

Myths, Memories & Mysteries - how artists respond to the past

June - November 2014

This exhibition by a group of contemporary Greek, Australian, British and Chinese artists explored the influence of the past upon artists' work. The exhibition and related activities were shared across two venues: Wolfson College and the Museum of Classical Archaeology.

The Peter Brookes Gallery

May 2024

Peter Brookes is political cartoonist on The Times. He describes the daily anxiety of the political cartoonist as the deadline approaches, “The Idea behind the cartoon is the tricky bit and what I wrestle with for the best part of the day”. The drawing he describes as “just mechanics!” The cartoons in this Gallery are all topical and date from 2010-2014.

Brookes’ awards include British Press Awards Cartoonist of the Year 2002, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012; What the Papers Say Cartoonist of the Year 2005; Political Cartoon Society Cartoonist of the Year 2006, 2009, 2011; and five Cartoon Art Trust Cartoonist of the Year awards. We were privileged to have the originals on show in the exhibition in May 2014.

Bredon House: the first 100 years

April 2014 - January 2015

In 1965, this College was founded by the University of Cambridge with a single building, Bredon House, which has been at the heart of the College since its earliest days, and remains central to the College as it is today, and to its future.The house was built in 1914 for John Stanley Gardiner (1872-1946), Professor of Zoology, and he and his family lived there until his death in 1946, when it passed to the University under the terms of his will.

Wolfson Gardens through the Lens

Lent and Easter 2014

Twelve photographs by Head Gardener, Phil Stigwood, display the beauty of the College Gardens through the seasons as seen by one who knows them best.

Collaboration: the Print Studio and Kip Gresham

Michaelmas 2013

Twenty-six prints by a range of contemporary artists, each a collaborative work between the artist and members of the Print Studio. The exhibition was accompanied by a discussion with Kip Gresham of the Print Studio.

 

2012-13

Edward Bawden

Summer 2013

Nine linocuts of Aesop's Fables were on loan from Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden throughout the summer.

Anthony Green RA

Easter 2013

Unusual paintings and prints by the distinguished realist painter and printmaker Anthony Green RA, curated by Senior Member Frank Whitford with generous assistance of the artist.

Coast

Lent 2013

Photographic prints by John Naughton, Jane Goodall and Jane Stockdale. A workshop on how to take better landscape photographs was run by Jane Goodall.

London Markets

Michaelmas 2012

Edward Bawden CBE RA was commissioned by Herbert Simon, Managing Director of the Curwen Press, to produce a series of six London Markets as limited editions in 1967, to be printed by the Curwen Studio, then based just off Tottenham Court Road in London.

Edward Bawden

Fry Art Gallery Saffron Walden is generously lending six scenes of London Markets by Edward Bawden to the College for its first exhibition being held during the Michaelmas Term 2012.

Edward Bawden CBE RA was commissioned by Herbert Simon, Managing Director of the Curwen Press, to produce a series of six London Markets as limited editions in 1967, to be printed by the Curwen Studio, then based just off Tottenham Court Road in London. The Curwen Press had engaged Bawden to work for them on many projects since the early 1920s, producing a wide range of images for advertisements, book-jackets, wallpapers and pattern papers.

The prints of Covent Garden Fruit Market, Covent Garden Flower Market, Billingsgate, Borough, Leadenhall and Smithfield Markets were originated as linocuts which were then made into lithographic plates by Stanley Jones. The main edition was seventy-five copies of each.

Bawden would travel down to London from Great Bardfield very early in the morning with the local butcher. Bawden's long-term interest in the structural detail of large-span working buildings, evident in his depictions of railway stations and other structures, is also expressed in these prints, juxtaposed against the human activity and the market produce.

Details about the Wolfson collection of oil paintings can be found on the ArtUK website.