Grundy Art Gallery Spring Programme 2022

Grundy Art Gallery is delighted to announce details of its upcoming spring 2022 programme.

Spring season at Grundy Art Gallery is always a time for celebrating the ‘new’, new ideas, new artworks, and new experiments as well as an invitation to our visitors to come and see things in new ways.
 
Cllr Kathryn Benson, Cabinet Member for Community Engagement, Aspiration and Community Assets, said: ‘’With its focus on new discoveries, spring is always an exciting time at Grundy Art Gallery. With its range of new exhibitions and artworks being presented both inside and outside the gallery, I am looking forward to seeing what this consistently exciting art gallery has to offer.”
 
EXHIBITIONS:
 
RACHEL GOODYEAR : STIRRINGS
26 March – 11 June 2022
Grundy Art Gallery : Ground Floor Galleries 2, 3 + 4
 
This spring Grundy Art Gallery will launch ‘Stirrings’ by the internationally recognised, north-west based artist Rachel Goodyear. ‘Stirrings’ will be the first major solo exhibition by the artist in a north-west museum and art gallery. It has been co-commissioned by Grundy Art Gallery and the University of Salford Art Collection and will include new large-scale drawings and a new animation. While the animation shows Goodyear experimenting with structure and sound, the new works on paper see the artist working at a scale larger than ever before. Elements from the exhibition will be jointly acquired into the permanent collections of Grundy Art Gallery and the University of Salford Art Collection. The exhibition will also tour to Salford Museum and Art Gallery from 15 July 2022.
 
Over her 20-year career, Goodyear has retained a core commitment to the act of drawing, as well as a commitment to the expansion of drawing as a medium. Throughout her practice, her drawings have found their way onto bus tickets, diary pages and envelopes; as well as onto more conventional sources of paper; while her experiments with drawing as a form, have seen her works take shape as sculpture, animation, performance and installation. For this new exhibition, Goodyear has experimented with scale, making her largest and most detailed drawing to date. With heightened detail, bodies contort, a wolf-pack is tangled into a single entity of snarls and fur and figures explore sensations that hold an ambiguous balance of pleasure and discomfort.
 
Goodyear often describes her drawings as ‘fragments’ – like glimpses from a half remembered dream or a distorted memory – frozen in a moment. For ‘Stirrings’, alongside new works on paper, Goodyear has also developed a major new installation. With nods to  mythological journeys into the Underworld, Dante’s levels of Hell and our continuous scrolling through social media, Goodyear’s animation takes the form of a never-ending descent. With a specially commissioned soundtrack by Matt Wand, Goodyear’s frozen moments are locked in time to be repeated forever.
 
COLLECTION SPOTLIGHT: PATTI MAYOR Part Two
26 March – 11 June
Grundy Art Gallery – Ground Floor Gallery 1
 
Collection Spotlight exhibitions are an opportunity for Grundy Art Gallery to highlight individual artists or showcase a specific selection of works from the Grundy’s collection. In 2022, Grundy Art Gallery is marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Preston born artist and suffragist, Patti Mayor, with a Collection Spotlight exhibition presented in two parts. While Part One previously focused on Patti’s painted portraits, Part Two takes us behind the scenes. Along with the 28+ paintings by Patti, Grundy Art Gallery also holds a large number of the artists’ works on paper. These works in pen, pencil and watercolour fill numerous sketchbooks, loose pieces of paper and torn out diary pages and show the artist at play, testing out different subject matters and materials. Presented together for the first time here at Grundy Art Gallery, these pieces show how drawing was central to the artist’s practice as a way to record observations, capture ideas and to refine her technique.
 
WE’RE STILL HERE! : Stuart Linden Rhodes
14 February – 11 June
Grundy Art Gallery exterior – Forecourt Commission
 
Continuing Grundy Art Gallery’s forecourt exhibition series is a solo exhibition of the work of Stuart Linden Rhodes. The exhibition is presented as part of a project called We’re Still Here! developed by Blackpool based artists, Garth Gratrix and Harry Clayton-Wright. We’re Still Here!  seeks to create a visual and oral histories archive of LGBTQIA+ communities in Blackpool. To celebrate LGBT History Month, We’re Still Here! has commissioned Stuart Linden Rhodes to present a selection of archival photographic studies of 90’s LGBTQIA+ nightlife culture in Blackpool to coincide with the launch of the artists’ new publication.
 
Coming soon….
 
BLACKPOOL STANDS BETWEEN US AND REVOLUTION: TOM IRELAND
Grundy Art Gallery exterior
 
Blackpool Stands Between Us and Revolution, is an illuminated text-based artwork for Blackpool’s civic space. The work is a large-scale rendering of a quote from the 1920s that underlines Blackpool’s vital role within the lives of working people as a site for recreation and release. The work is the result of a 2019 open commission opportunity led by Blackpool Council’s Arts Service to provide Blackpool with a number of new permanent and temporary public realm art works. Tom Ireland is a Blackpool based artist and curator, whose work has been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally.
 
 
WORKSHOPS / TALKS AND EVENTS:
 
The spring programme will be supported by a range of activities and events that will provide opportunities to find out more about the art and artists on display, as well as exploring and developing the participants’ own creativity. Sign up to the Grundy newsletter via the Grundy website www.thegrundy.org and keep an eye on the website and watch out for posts via Grundy’s social media channels to find out more.