British Modern Remade - Style . Design . Glamour . Horror

BRITISH MODERN REMADE — STYLE . DESIGN . GLAMOUR . HORROR

British Modern Remade is an exhibition of artworks from the Arts Council Collection, taking place within the refurbished show apartments at Park Hill from the 4th May- 16th June 2012. The works featured span the six decades since the founding of the collection in 1946. This exhibition seeks to examine the anxieties and allure of British Modernism as typified by Park Hill itself and key artworks from the 1940s to the present day. Contemporary artists and designers are returning to Modernism and commandeering it with an uncanny resemblance. The signs and symbols remain intact, so what of the ideology?

Painting, sculpture, collage and film represent a contemporary and distinctly domestic revisiting of the British version of Modernism. The impulses of making and remaking are visible in the hand-crafted quality of the artworks, part of a British Arts and Crafts tradition as well Bauhaus. Park Hill, completed in 1961 is the most ambitious ‘streets in the sky’ Corbusier-inspired housing development in the UK. The utopian post-war vision of high density living, a democratization of avant-garde European design subsequently lost its sheen, fell out of favour and descended into a state of disrepair. Regeneration is the latest chapter in a history that mirrors the story of British society since World War 2.

British Modern Remade is an Arts Council Collection exhibition curated by Helen Kaplinsky, winner of their Select. ac curatorial competition for postgraduate students. Helen graduated from Goldsmiths College this year and draws on key works from the Arts Council Collection, ‘the largest loan collection of modern and contemporary British art in the world’.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Martin Boyce, John Carter, Lynn Chadwick, Keith Coventry, Alexandre da Cunha, Richard Forbes, Naum Gabo, Alan Green, Brian Griffiths, Robert Holyhead, Gareth Jones, Andrew Logan, Camilla Løw, Kenneth and Mary Martin, Simon Martin, Margaret Mellis, Bernard Meadows, and Toby Paterson, Susan Tebby, Joe Tilson, William Turnbull and Paule Vézelay .