12 Star Gallery
6 January 2008 to 23 January 2009
The 12 Star Gallery, situated at the European Commission's offices in London (8 Storey's Gate, SW1 map), is the venue for regular exhibitions which celebrate the creativity and cultural diversity that is the hallmark of the European Union. All exhibitions are open to the public from 10am-6pm, Monday to Friday and entry is free.
Czech Republic (Re)Visited
Images of the Czech landscape and Prague by Stanislav Pokorny and Dagmar Pavlikova
6 January – 30 January 2009
Czech Republic (Re)Visited presents views of the Czech landscape in its rich variety and natural beauty as well as the landmark sights of one of Europe's most popular capital cities, Prague. The exhibition celebrates the launch of the Czech Presidency of the EU Council (1-6/2009). The two photographers, Stanislav Pokorny and Dagmar Pavlikova, were selected by the APF, the Association of Professional Photographers, which represent over 200 professional Czech photographers.
Organised by:
in collaboration with Asociace profesionalnich fotografu Ceske republiky (www.asociacefotografu.com).
Delynyans Kernow - a Cornish Perspective
3 - 13 February 2009
The Gorsedh of Cornwall together with CERES [the Centre for European Research within Cornwall] have organised this exhibition of paintings by contemporary Cornish artists living and working in the Duchy. The work of nine artists will be represented and the event will mark a notable Cornish occasion, enabling aspects of Cornwall's art to be made known to an internationally-based public.
The exhibition will be opened by Cornwall's Grand Bard, Mrs Vanessa Beeman.
The Gorsedh of Cornwall is Cornwall's College of Bards and custodian of Cornish tradition and culture.
CERES is a voluntary sector group maintaining and developing heritage links between Cornwall and the wider Europe. It has long-standing working associations with relevant areas in the European Union - Commission and Parliament - and with the Council of Europe.
Gazing and Grazing
Works by Zena Flax and Judith Downie
3 - 13 March 2009
Peter Keizer
Paintings and sculptures
17 - 27 March 2009
‘‘Pure colour…you have to sacrifice everything for it. The Artist may transform as long as his transformations are expressive and beautiful." - Paul Gauguin
Peter Keizer (1961, Amsterdam) was trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, the National Academy for Visual Arts in Amsterdam and the Royal College of Art in London. Since the mid 1980’s he has exhibited in galleries in The Netherlands, Germany, Japan and elsewhere and at Art Fairs throughout Europe. Curiously, London has not been re-visited and this Exhibition gives a chance for British viewers to make their own assessment of his work.
Peter began his career as a painter. He views the world with an eye for the beauty in the things around him. Lush trees with their wild blossom make the observer a participant in the extraordinarily expressive manifestation of his intense experience of nature. The clear, colourful depictions almost literally sputter from the canvas. He seems to trowel his images on to the canvas in thick splodges. The paste-like, glutinous paintings are constructed layer over layer, colour over colour. They simmer with joie de vivre and are often very nearly three-dimensional.
Therefore, the step that Peter took not so long ago to sculpt appears to be a logical development. The manner in which he moulds and glazes his ceramic sculptures has a clear connection to his paintings. The rough treatment of the materials and the dazzling use of colour allow his fascination for the material with which he works to be expressed in a compelling manner. This decision to find what is exceptional in the everyday objects that surround him also receives the ultimate expression in his sculptures. He achieves this by taking body parts out of their context, by isolating them, literally freeing a fragment from the whole. Thereafter, the fragment is enlarged, so that an alienating effect is created. In this manner, and also because of the substance, structure and colour of the object, it acquires a value in itself.
www.peterkeizer.nlOrganised with the Royal Netherlands Embassy in the UK
Proverbs and other things
Works by Leonard Sash
31 March - 9 April 2009
Leonard Sash is a distinguished doctor and was official physiotherapist to Arsenal FC for over thirty years.
Sash began painting in 1960, when he first came to London from his native South Africa as a medical student and enrolled in night classes at Central School of Art. He developed a unique style, working with cut-outs and painting, creating vivid and colourful collages. They evolved through his frustration with traditional painting. Once working in the studio of his ex-patient Ivor Abrahams RA, Sash was expressing his disappointment with one of his paintings when Abrahams asked: "Aren't the any bits you like about it?" Sash picked out elements, and Abrahams suggested he cut them out.
Thus his work has developed and matured: the graphic figures and animals are represented in a subtle visual 'relief', frozen forever like a snap shot from a dream. There is an inherent theatricality to Sash's work, a sense of heightened comedy and drama created in part by the staging of the various parts to form the whole.
Leonard Sash is obviously a man of many talents, being a physician and an accomplished artist. His work overflows with joy and vitality...ready to jump out of the picture plane and run around in a riot of colour.
Ben Austin
Robert Priseman's 'Executions'
6 - 16 October 2009
The images are at first amiable, even alluring, in their cool, linear clarity. They invite you in. You settle into the comfortably padded chair, stretch out on that reassuring bed, as relaxed as in a sanatorium. You wouldn’t ever sense, as an animal might, the hosed-down, painted-over killings. You wouldn’t see death coming. Then the electric current would be snapped on, the needle inserted.
Once the eye has been trapped, the imagination will follow. Viewer becomes victim. Now the stark outlines of lethal injection chamber and electric chair fill out with soundless horror: the mass silence of suffocated screams. Now the cleanliness jolts into focus: the sanitized surfaces cover up death’s messy spatterings, as seamlessly as the neatly repointed brickwork at Dachau.
Distanced and deadly factual, Robert Priseman’s etchings reveal a world we know exists in our midst but steadfastly avoid thinking about. These sinister spaces are host to the most deadly concepts of time. Between the snap of a neck and actual extinction lie some twenty minutes of throttled half-life. Even a severed head, its eyelids still opening and closing, lingers on. By appearing to gloss over the barbarity of official killing, Priseman’s images allow its full horror to seep more vividly and more memorably through.
Michael Peppiatt
This exhibition marks 'European Day against the Death Penalty,' held annually on 10 October.