October Gallery celebrates the anniversary of 40 years of energetic activity in London with an exhibition of works by some of the Gallery’s major artists, including newly commissioned works. A special programme of events will run alongside the exhibition to mark the Gallery’s rich history.

Located in a 3-storey Victorian school building the Gallery opened, in 1979, with an exhibition of Gerald Wilde. From the beginning the Gallery’s aim was to discover a new visual sensibility: the Transvangarde, the cross-cultural avant-garde, exhibiting artists from around the planet.

The exhibition will include works by El Anatsui, William S. Burroughs, Paul Friedlander, Brion Gysin, Jukhee Kwon, Romuald Hazoumè, Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, LR Vandy, Gerald Wilde, Aubrey Williams and Kenji Yoshida.

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Following a sell-out debut at the 2018 edition of 1-54 London, LR Vandy’s highly anticipated exhibition features new works by the artist.

In the current Hull series, Vandy transforms model boat hulls into ‘masks’, animating them with various materials, including fishing floats, porcupine quills and acupuncture needles.
The hulls allude to the transportation of migrants as commodities. As masks they present a transformation of identity, drawing upon the tradition of talismans, charms and amulets. 

Her new work Railway also closely examines transport systems and their hidden human costs.  Vandy threads old model railway tracks across burnt wood of different depths, contained by brass borders.

Vandy continues to address the tension of opposing forms in her video work, ‘Landscapes’, in which two substances interact and mix in an extraordinary choreographic dance, forming a constantly shifting and changing visceral landscape.

The exhibition will include the sculpture series These Women, consisting of twenty-one individual sculptures to be cast in bronze or Jesmonite each one a different variation of bold geometric elements.

A large Jesmonite sculpture from the series Superhero Cog-Woman, specially made for the exhibition will be on display in October Gallery’s courtyard.

El Anatsui: Material Wonder marks the 40th anniversary of October Gallery and celebrates the vision and creative force of El Anatsui. The exhibition also coincides with the largest retrospective of the artist’s work to date, El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale, at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Moreover, in February 2019, TSIATSIA – searching for connection was installed in the atrium of Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. When this immense work first covered the façade of the Royal Academy, in 2013, the artist won the prestigious Charles Wollaston Award.

El Anatsui is undoubtedly one of the most influential artists of the present time. Throughout his long career, he has focused his many interests to examine a wide range of subjects and explored an extraordinary array of media from cement, ceramics and tropical hardwoods in his early years, to corrugated iron, cassava graters, milk-tin lids and bottle-tops in his later installations. Today, he is best known for his mesmerising works composed of many thousands of aluminium bottle-tops laboriously sewn together.

The metal wall sculptures in the exhibition are accompanied by a series of prints made in collaboration with Factum Arte, Madrid. El Anatsui has always been fascinated by the physical history of the materials he employs and the journeys they undergo. The basic materials for his ‘fabrics’ are made by a team of assistants, who cut and pierce the aluminium strips on tables and smaller wooden ‘flats.’ After years of repetitive pricking and piercing, these wooden worktops present a scored landscape of textured relief. Using Factum Arte’s cutting-edge, 3-D scanning and plate-making technologies, these scarred surfaces are translated into printing plates. Given Factum Arte’s expertise in traditional printmaking, the resulting prints encapsulate the hidden histories of the making of the aluminium works. In this way, the fabrication process itself is ‘recycled’ into a major new series of prints.

Present Moment brings together the works of selected artists from Asia including; Jukhee Kwon, Tian Wei, Huang Xu, Govinda Sah ‘Azad’, Kenji Yoshida and Xu Zhongmin. Present Moment brings together artists whose work creates a momentary stillness. Each piece captures a meditative moment of serene lightness.

Present Moment will debut striking new works by South Korean artist Jukhee Kwon. The artist creates works from the printed page. Using abandoned and disused books, she cuts and manipulates pages by hand to create magnificent sculptures.

Tian Wei’s large scale colourful paintings, both theoretically and formally, construct a bridge between things that appear as dyadic opposites, binary poles or complementary pairs through his inclusion of text.

Huang Xu, from China, focuses on a singular object, carefully staged to capture its ethereal beauty as opposed to its meaning within contemporary culture. In his Fragments series he creates large-scale C-prints that explore the fragile nature of the contemporary global economy.

Through painting, Nepalese artist Govinda Sah ‘Azad’ effortlessly balances traditional eastern metaphysical insights about the nature of reality with visual realisations that are in accord with the latest formulations of contemporary western science, Sah imagines a cosmos of boundless possibilities.

Kenji Yoshida’s monumental works consist of ethereal gold, silver and precious metals on canvas which unite a restrained tradition of Japanese appliqué work with that of an abstract modernist aesthetic.