Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Jessica Warboys, graduates from BA(Hons) Fine Art at Falmouth have been selected for the British Art Show 8, which has just opened in Leeds. The British Art Show is a touring exhibition that provides a vital overview of the most exciting contemporary art produced in this country and this year, it tours the work of over 40 artists to four cities across the UK.
Organised by Hayward Touring, this multi-venue exhibition is presented every five years in four different cities across the country. The curators of British Art Show 8, Anna Colin and Lydia Yee, have selected the work of 42 artists who have made a significant contribution to contemporary art in the UK over the past five years. The result is a wide-ranging exhibition that encompasses performance, film, sculpture, installation and painting and design. Twenty-six of the 42 artists have produced new works for the exhibition, making this the most ambitious British Art Show to date.
A central concern of British Art Show 8 is the changing role and status of the physical object in an increasingly digital age. While some artists engage with this question through traditional craft-based techniques, others experiment with modes of industrial production. As the curators comment, ‘We were particularly interested in the rereading of objects by artists and other contemporary thinkers as active agents, generative entities, mutating forms and networked realities.’
Opening in Leeds in October 2015, British Art Show 8 will tour to venues in Edinburgh, Norwich and Southampton over the course of 15 months.
Jessica Warboys graduated from Fine Art in 2009 and works across painting, performance, film and sculpture. In her series of Sea Paintings Warboys explores the connection between painting and performance. To make these large-scale works the artist submerges a damp, folded canvas scattered with coloured pigments into the sea, and allows the movement of the waves to ‘paint’ the canvas.
Jessica Warboys, Sea Painting, Dunwich, 2013. Copyright the artist, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Gaudel de Stampa, Paris. Photo: Stuart Whipps
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye graduated from BA Fine Art in 2004 and makes figurative oil paintings of characters drawn from her imagination and memory. The subjects of her paintings – seen in both intimate close-ups and larger groupings – are mostly black people, represented in timeless and dreamlike settings.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Firefly, 2011. Courtesy: Corvi-Mora, London and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Copyright the artist. Photography: Marcus Leith, London.
For further details please visit the British Art Show website: BAS8 and for Adrian Searle’s review of the show: here
Falmouth School of Art 