This Season at mima

30th May 2008

Type: Editors Picks

Categories: What's on

mima is a bold new gallery of modern and contemporary art. The gallery hosts temporary exhibitions of fine art and craft from 1900 to now. Featuring the work of internationally acclaimed artists, the programme includes painting, drawing, ceramics, jewellery design, sound, film, mixed media, photography and sculpture. Check out this season's exhibitions below.

Eric Bainbridge: Forward Thinking 1976 - 2008, 29 August - 16 November 2008

An exhibition by North East based Eric Bainbridge. For thirty years, he has worked across a range of different materials, including fake fur, to produce a remarkably diverse body of work. He is considered by many to be one of the most influential British Sculptors living today.

Eric Bainbridge was born in Consett, County Durham in 1955 and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1981. He has exhibited extensively on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1980s and 1990s including several highly acclaimed exhibitions. He is currently Professor of Fine Art at the University of Sunderland and a keen advocate of art in the North East.

The exhibition includes work produced in the early 1980s when Bainbridge began to make giant sculptures composed of objects taken from nature, modern design and everyday life. The objects are camouflaged with fake fur patterns and their scale and quality are a reflection of society’s appetite for all things mechanically reproduced. In more recent times Bainbridge has predominantly worked with melamine, a type of chipboard made from reclaimed stock, a further indication of his concerns with the status of objects and with recycling consumer waste.

The exhibition will include over 60 pieces, making it one of the artist’s and most significant exhibitions to date. mima is delighted to exhibit for the first time a set of forty drawings personally selected by the artist from his archive. This exhibition is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation.

The Naked and the Nude: works from the Tate Collection , 29 August - 16 November 2008

The Naked and the Nude brings together sixteen works from Tate's collection including two works by Lucian Freud. Girl with a White Dog, 1950-51, is one of his most important earlier works, and has helped to establish him among the greatest artists of nude portraiture.

The title of the exhibition is taken from a famous distinction made by art historian Kenneth Clark. It was his belief that nakedness arose from simply being deprived of clothing, whereas nudity signified the presence of art. This distinction has been challenged by later writers who have turned the tables on Clark’s definition; as John Berger has written “to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised from oneself”.

Nude portraiture is acknowledged as one of the classic genres of painting and sculpture, but has become more problematic over the course of the Twentieth century. Many artists have turned their back on classical approaches to the nude and rejected the conventions associated with it. The works in this exhibition feature the female form and represent a selection of different approaches to capturing this subject.

The exhibition has been organised through Tate Connects, which is Tate's programme to broaden and deepen UK-wide participation in the visual arts through local, national and international collaboration and exchange.

Printed Matter Presents 29 August - 16 November 2008

mima sound space will be showcasing a selection of sounds works in an exhibition titled Printed Matter Presents. Founded in 1976 Printed Matter, Inc is the world's largest non-profit organisation dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists. Recognised for years as an essential voice in the increasingly diversified world of artists' publications their mission is to foster their appreciation, dissemination, and understanding. In addition to artists' publications Printed Matter, Inc has an extensive collection of audio art from which James Hoff, Director of Development, Printed Matter, Inc. has made a tailored selection for mima sound space. For more information visit www.printedmatter.org.

Further Information

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