Art exhibitions at Wolfson College
Wolfson has a vibrant and exciting programme of exhibitions curated by Fellows, students and the Arts Committee. Works are displayed in the Dining Hall and the Gallery, as well as the Combination Room. We typically have an opening event for each exhibition that is advertised on the College Events page.
Current exhibitions
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.
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.
Patterns of Renewal - Gurpran Rau
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, Wolfson College, Cambridge 2023
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.
Recent exhibitions
Signs for the Living - Hannah Lister
Wolfson College Cambridge Royal Academy Schools Graduate Prize 2023
29 January - 23 April 2023
Opening Times: Saturdays and Sundays 10.00-17.00. It is advisable to contact the Porters' Lodge in advance of your visit (01223 335900). Please do not visit the college if you are unwell or have any COVID-19 symptoms. Thank you.
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.
Simon Patterson: Out of Order
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.
Kill or Cure
15 May - 9 October 2022.
Opening Times: Saturdays and Sundays 10.00-17.00. It is advisable to contact the Porters' Lodge in advance of your visit (01223 335900). Please do not visit the college if you are unwell or have any COVID-19 symptoms. Thank you.
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.
Visitors to the exhibition are warmly welcomed. We would kindly appreciate if you leave a comment and/or sign the Visitors Book.
https://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/about/events/art-exhibition-kill-or-cure
About Wolfson College and the exhibition:
Wolfson College, Cambridge, is renowned for its academic excellence as an international and inclusive community of scholarship with a vibrant intellectual and cultural life. The College 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. The art on show will be enjoyed by both the academic and wider community. Exhibitions are open to the general public, enjoyed with the students and Fellows and visited by eminent scholars and visitors from around the world. Wolfson has an established art exhibition programme which has showcased the work of both renowned international artists and innovative emerging artists with the aim of stimulating reflection, discussion and debate. This exhibition is curated by Dr. Anna M Dempster, Fellow, Wolfson College.
This exhibition forms a key part of Wolfson Explores: Growth, the annual guiding theme which aims to stimulate rich, productive dialogue across interdisciplinary and cultural borders. Kill or Cure runs alongside many fascinating events, talks and complement the work of the College’s interdisciplinary Research Hubs on Sustainability, Gender and Global Health as well as wider research community.
The Made and the Unmade: John Atkin
27 March - 1 May 2022
Opening Times: Saturdays and Sundays 10.00-17.00. It is advisable to contact the Porters' Lodge in advance of your visit (01223 335900). Please do not visit the college if you are unwell or have any COVID-19 symptoms. Thank you.
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
Opening Times: Saturdays and Sundays 10.00-17.00. It is advisable to contact the Porters' Lodge in advance of your visit (01223 335900). Please do not visit the college if you are unwell or have any COVID-19 symptoms. Thank you.
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
Wolfson College Cambridge Royal Academy Schools Graduate Prize 2021
24 October 2021 - 9 January 2022
Opening Times: Saturdays and Sundays 10.00-17.00. It is advisable to contact the Porters' Lodge in advance of your visit (01223 335900). Please do not visit the college if you are unwell or have any COVID-19 symptoms. Thank you.
The Combination Show
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. The Combination Show is her first solo exhibition in the U.K.
Amikam Toren - Representation as a Matter of Fact (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.
Simon Quadrat - Recent Paintings (15 March to 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
The Frangenberg Collection (19 January to 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
Time is Money - Débora Delmar (Wolfson College Cambridge - Royal Academy Schools Graduate Prize 2019; 20 October 2019 to 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.
Delmar now lives and works in London. She exhibits regularly with solo and group shows in the UK, Europe and the Americas.
Tszwai So: Emotional Architecture transforming responses to space (30 June to 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 to 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 |.
You can also access details about earlier exhibitions; the Wolfson collection of oil paintings can be found on the ArtUK website.
