The Connor Brothers
‘I Can Resist Everything Except Temptation’

Public Preview Evening Thursday 13th February 5pm to 8pm
Exhibition runs daily from Monday 17th February to Friday 13th March 2020

For our first exhibition of 2020 Private & Public Space will be showcasing recent paintings by the artist duo The Connor Brothers who have become some of the most sought after and collectable artists of their generation. Internationally acclaimed these art world superstars have gained a huge following who admire their well-crafted witty paintings which combine 1950’s ‘pulp fiction’ imagery and satirical text.

Twins Franklyn and Brendan Connor were brought up within a secretive and highly controversial cult known as ‘The Family’. Born out of the hippy movement in 1968 and founded by David Berg ‘The Family’ was an extreme Christian cult whose members believed in something called ‘The System’. Other children brought up within the cult include the Actors River and Joaquin Phoenix. As children the twins were deprived of access to information from outside of their commune. Without access to mainstream media their knowledge of the world was limited to the teachings and interactions they gained from other cult members.

At sixteen the boys turned their backs on The Family and ran away from home. After several years riding the freight trains they settled in the Brooklyn area of New York. Having been starved of information for so many years Franklyn and Brendan were initially overwhelmed by the outside world but soon developed an insatiable curiosity and a remark- able appetite to learn. They developed a system whereby each of them would read, watch and discover things independently and then share them with one another via a series of notebooks and sketchpads.

This interaction developed into making art together, a process they describe as ‘trying to make sense of the world.’ Their often humorous work is steeped in references to both historical and popular culture and presents an almost anthropological view of contemporary western society.
Now in their early twenties the twins split their time between New York and Missouri. The Connor Brothers are fictional characters created by the artists known as the Connor Brothers.

“I Can Resist Everything Except Temptation” is one of their largest exhibitions to date, and the first time they have exhibited in the Channel Islands. The title of the show refers to the social-media obsessed and post-truth age we live in, where fiction frequently masquerades as fact.

It was Andy Warhol who predicted that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, but even he could not have predicted that each of us would one day have our own personal media channels through which to promote the brand of self-twenty-four hours a day. The consequences of the digital age are only now becoming apparent, and we are only just beginning to understand what the final cost might be.

As artists The Connor Brothers have always been interested in the blurred line between truth and fiction, and in this exhibition they explore that boundary, and what it means for each of us. The fact that we, as humans, need to develop an online social media image that is not an accurate reflection of our lives reveals an uncomfortable truth about us all.

What exactly that truth is maybe hard to pin down precisely. Perhaps it’s that the contemporary world feeds us constant adverts designed to make us feel an inadequacy relieved only by purchase, and this has become mirrored in our social media lives where online approval temporarily gives us a reassuring hit of self-worth. It seems that our greatest subconscious fear really is that we are ordinary.

The images chosen for the paintings in this exhibition originate from 1950’s Pulp Fiction novels. The worlds these books created were designed to provide readers with an escape from the mundanity of ordinary life. There is a sense in which they provided the same escapism we now seek online as we scroll endlessly through images of lives supposedly more interesting than our own. The text added to the paintings, whether the artists own or borrowed from writers they admire, is, for the most part, intended to call into question the truth of these fabricated worlds.

Please contact Chris Clifford, Director, at chris@privateandpublic.com or by phone on either +44 (0) 1534 859093 or +44 (0) 7797 714186 

Personal Sanctuary
A Winter Exhibition of Paintings by Nicholas Romeril

Preview Evening Friday 6th December 5pm to 8pm
Exhibition runs daily from Monday 9th to Friday 24th December 2019

For our next exhibition Private & Public Space will be showcasing the extraordinary paintings of Jersey’s own Nicholas Romeril who has spent the last year creating 28 works which depict, in exacting beauty and great detail, the extraordinary power of our coastal waters.
Sponsored by Quilter Cheviot this sensuous exhibition opens to the public for a preview evening and drinks reception on Friday 6th December from 5pm – 8pm and all are welcome to attend. The exhibition will then run weekdays from 10am to 6pm until 24th December or at any other time by appointment.

In describing his exhibition Nicholas Romeril says “I have a deep rooted physical and emotional connection to the sea and have spent the last year walking the coastline to record its natural beauty and the seasonal changes that affect it. I find the experience both relaxing and exhilarating in equal measure as it continually provides me with a means of freeing myself from the anxieties often associated with the pace of modern life”.

“For me the experience of being next to and in the sea is central to how these paintings have been created and I have become increasingly fascinated by the way our crystal clear coastal seas trap natural sunlight and create an enchanted luminosity in all depths of water. To be able to capture that raw feeling in my paintings gives me enormous pleasure and I sincerely hope that everybody who attends my exhibition will connect with these works and feel that same joy”.

Gallery Director Chris Clifford said “Having visited Nick’s studio many times over the last year it is clear that these new paintings transcend traditional forms of representation and have come to signify an emotional and spiritual cleansing. These are unquestionably his most powerful paintings to date and visitors to the gallery will not fail to be impressed by their sheer technical complexity and extraordinary beauty. Owning a painting by Nick Romeril is not only to enjoy a hugely immersive visual delight – it also provides a passport into a magical world of natural beauty that is impossible to otherwise imagine. Nicholas Romeril, Jersey’s greatest living painter, has beautifully captured our dreams and memories”.

In addition to Nicholas Romeril’s paintings the gallery will also be staging a smaller exhibition in the client spaces by the British artist Emily Croft-Baker who offers a versatile range of evocative and expressionistic work in oils, acrylics and pastels. Emily’s journey as an artist is dictated by continuous experimentation, imagination, emotional expression and intuition. Her work draws on life events as inspiration and she attributes her versatile work style to her own life-long self-teachings, along with her

Please contact Chris Clifford, Director, at chris@privateandpublic.com or by phone on either +44 (0) 1534 859093 or +44 (0) 7797 714186 

New Paintings by Ilsa Capper – Heart of the Forest
Private & Public Gallery – Preview Evening Friday 15th November from 5pm to 8pm

In 1980 the British gothic rock band The Cure released ‘A Forest’ which went on to become their most enduring single and the subliminal soundtrack of an angst ridden generation. This haunting melody plugged into collective psychological fears of the dark, loss and loneliness and created a consistently evocative mood by way of sparse musical arrangements and plaintive vocals buried deep within the reverb-laden mix.

Once the track had been recorded the lead singer Robert Smith said “It wasn’t something to elate you, it was something to really make you think.”

Real forests operate within our memory as mysterious places. In legends and fairy tales they are inhabited by shadowy creatures, symbols of all of the dangers with which young people must contend if they are to become adults. It is a place of testing, a realm of darkness holding the secrets of nature which we must penetrate to find meaning and in analytical psychology the forest represents feminity in the eyes of a young man, an unexplored realm full of the unknown.
In conversation the artist Ilsa Capper states;

“The forest is really a metaphor for a journey into the unknown, conjuring the imagery used in fairy tales and myth movies, computer games and gothic music. It’s wonderful and terrifying and totally immersive. When I paint I am in a process of building up and breaking down the images in order to rethink and push the painting further. Every painting is a long process of decisions which take it one way or another and, in a way, it’s like being in a dense forest, submerged, but not really ever completely sure where things are leading”.

In the months before this exhibition Ilsa Capper’s daily studio routine started with drawings and sketches of cocoa forests which then developed into larger paintings. Elements of these drawings were then used to stain the canvas with oil paint to create a basic structure or skeleton. These structures were then pushed further by using different applications of paint techniques and colour which allowed a rich and colourful variation across each canvas in a style and finish which created remarkable visual sensations.

“I am captivated by forests and find them truly magnificent. I love walking through any forest or woodland. It feels wonderful. The woods outside Dinan have fungus which only grows on trees where the air is completely pure. The smell in those woods is incredible.”- Ilsa Capper.

It is this intense appreciation of the power of nature that has delivered the remarkable works contained within this exhibition but unlike The Cure’s dark and claustrophobic pop anthem Ilsa Capper has made paintings that are bright, colourful and celebratory and which ultimately are about desire, expectation, love and indulgence. The use, by the artist, of cocoa forests as the inspiration for these paintings is a deliberate and strategic signifier within the exhibition.

“Chocolate is the only substance on the planet we know of which releases the same hormones and sensations as being in love. I think that is amazing and why we consume it the way we do….. and those cocoa forests are our love drug”.

Ilsa Capper was born in Jersey before studying Fine Art at Central St. Martins and Chelsea School of Art in London. Having worked in London for many years she has now returned to Jersey and this is her first solo exhibition at Private & Public Space.

Thank you to our exhibition sponsors Charles Yorke and also to the chef Dylan Suttie who has created a set of bespoke chocolates inspired by Ilsa Capper’s paintings especially for the preview evening.

Chris Clifford, Gallery Director, says “Ilsa Capper’s paintings are certainly enigmatic. They hover between representation and abstraction and resemble places that feel both familiar and totally alien in equal measure. In this, our penultimate exhibition in Jersey in 2019, visitors to the gallery will be immersed in paintings that radiate bright colour, positive energy, sunlight and everything that is great about the natural world in its purest form. In many ways a visit to our gallery spaces will be the perfect antidote to the endless rain and shorter days that have characterised our weather of late”.

Nocturne – Contemporary Painting Exhibition
by Jason Martin

The George Crossan Gallery – Preview Evening Friday 1st November from 5pm to 8pm

Private & Public Gallery are pleased to announce their first collaboration with Bailiwick Estates for an exhibition of new works by the internationally acclaimed Channel Island artist Jason Martin. Following exhibitions in New York and Paris last year, Martin continues his investigation into the fundamentals of painting creating unique compositions of multiple shades, chromatic blends and elegant tonal shifts.

This exhibition, which is remarkably his first ever in Guernsey, will be shown in the pristine exhibition spaces of the George Crossan Gallery throughout the month of November and a public preview evening and drinks reception will be held on Friday 1st November from 5pm to 8pm. All are welcome.

As seen throughout his career, Martin never ceases to challenge himself and interrogate the origins and parameters of painting. Through his experiments into the unknown, Martin explores new materials to discover different reactions through which to expand his practice.

For this exhibition Martin is, for the first time, showing watercolour paintings which result in a series of works which have an intensely natural feel and earthly elemental nature that appear to make reference to his early life as an artist when he was continually inspired by the natural beauty of the Channel Islands, their landscape, sea and light.

The late Robert Tilling RI, Martin’s teacher at Victoria College in Jersey, had a huge influence over Martin’s formative years as an artist and in this exhibition there are unquestionably subtle references to Tilling’s work which are both touching and poetic.

Jason Martin is unquestionably one of the worlds pre-eminent mid –career painters whose large scale paintings fetch six figure sums on both the primary and secondary markets but Private & Public Gallery are delighted that Guernsey art enthusiasts can now own an original, investment grade artwork at an affordable price for most collectors. To own one is not only to hold a piece or art history in your hands it is also to have a unique piece of Channel Islands history that will continue to rise in value in the future.

About Jason Martin
Born in Jersey in 1970 Jason Martin studied Fine Art at Goldsmith College in London and upon graduating in 1993 instantly shot to stardom with his inclusion, by Charles Saatchi, in the seminal exhibition ‘Sensation’ at the Royal Academy which defined the YBA generation of artists.

He was subsequently represented by Lisson Gallery in London and has staged major solo exhibitions on every continent and his works are held in many of the world’s leading museums. Solo exhibitions include Schauwerk Sindelfingen Museum, Germany (2017); Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst, Ottendorf Germany (2016); Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2009), Es Baluard Museu d’Art I Contemporary de Palma, Majorca, Spain (2008), Kunstverein Kreis Gutersloh, Germany (2007); and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Malaga, Spain (2005).

Please contact Chris Clifford, Director, at chris@privateandpublic.com or by phone on either +44 (0) 1534 859093 or +44 (0) 7797 714186

Wayne Audrain – Balancing Acts – The Idealism of Geometry

Private & Public Gallery – Preview Evening Friday 25th October from 5pm to 8pm

The grid is a visual structure that lies at the heart of contemporary art. As a graphic component in painting, it came to prominence in the early 20th century in the abstractions of the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich and the Dutch-born Piet Mondrian, who was widely considered the “most modern” artist of his time. In 1912, Mondrian began to create his “compositions” which were paintings constituted by grids of horizontal and vertical black lines in three primary colours. “These basic forms of beauty,” he wrote, “supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.“

The art historian Rosalind Krauss pointed to the emergence of the grid as a critical step in the evolution of modern art. In her canonical 1979 essay “Grids,” she wrote: “In the early part of this century, there began to appear, first in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition within the visual arts ever since. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.”

The use of the grid evolved over the course of the century. During the late 1950s, artist Agnes Martin began to draw lines that formed organizational sequences constructed on a rational system; it defined her final break from representational painting. At the same time, the grids served as a stand-in for the most basic form of drawing—leaving marks on a surface—and the meditative state of mind the artist sought in the solitude of her New Mexico home. These paintings foreshadowed Minimalism, and were a significant influence on many artists.

The American Sol LeWitt adopted the grid as the underlying element of his artworks which bridged Minimalism and conceptual art. In the 1960s LeWitt started to draw directly on interior walls using the grid as a simplified format that excluded representational images. The wall drawings evolved into a set of precise and mathematical instructions that the artist would have a third party carry out, so that his own hand did not touch the artwork. LeWitt’ s sculptures, meanwhile, drew upon the grid to form spare geometric abstractions that stand in three dimensions—like an Agnes Martin painting that leapt off the canvas.

Far from being a static element, the grid mutated in the hands of different artists to assume a wide array of forms. Gerhard Richter made lively abstractions of coloured boxes; Carl André lay down squares of metal tiles in geometric patterns on the floor; Chuck Close used the grid as a structure to expand photographs into large paintings. Alan Shields, Sean Scully, Mary Heilmann, Donald Judd, Bernd & Hilla Becher and Frank Stella are just a few of the other seminal artists from the period who made the grid their own.

I was compelled to then visit the catacombs beneath Paris that contain the bones of its murdered citizens. The walls are marked with hundreds of messages all expressing the same message ‘The Republic or Death!’ Those 18th century Communard revolutionaries were the forefathers of modern graffiti and went on to invent mass produced lithography that was pasted around the city as a means of vitriolic political protest by speaking truth to power.

Jersey born Wayne Audrain has skilfully extended these ideas further in our next exhibition – Balancing Acts – The Idealism of Geometry – and his current body of work rests firmly within a minimalist or ‘concrete’ tradition. Vocal in its abstract intent yet concordant with the traditional painterly concerns of composition, form, colour, structure and texture. 

Urban Interventions – A History of Street Art from Hip-Hop to Banksy

Private & Public Gallery – Preview Evening Friday 27th September from 5pm to 8pm

Graffiti can be many things, from the scandalous scrawling’s of Roman citizens to the radical graffiti of revolutionary Parisians. It can be scratched, written and painted but why do we do it and what does it mean?

For tens of thousands of years humans have been leaving their marks on walls. From pre-historic caves to the city streets of New York graffiti is something that seems to bubble up wherever humans go and one thing is for certain. It’s an explosion of creativity.

Graffiti surrounds us. Is it a blessing or is a curse? When does it become vandalism? When does it become ‘street art’ and when does ‘street art’ become fine art?

As a young art student I visited Lascaux, which is the setting for a complex of caves near the village of Montignac in the department of Dordogne in southwestern France. I was overwhelmed by the extraordinary beauty and artistic elegance of the wall paintings depicting Bison, Mammoth and Deer that adorned the interior of the caves. They looked like Picassos and were a poignant reminder of how much we have in common with our ancestors.

Next year I visited Rome and was astonished to see third century Roman graffiti used a means of expressing political allegiances, regional rivalries and gladiatorial satire. In ancient Rome I learnt that vicious rivalries were expressed as a war of words and that walls became new areas of territorial conflict.

I was compelled to then visit the catacombs beneath Paris that contain the bones of its murdered citizens. The walls are marked with hundreds of messages all expressing the same message ‘The Republic or Death!’ Those 18th century Communard revolutionaries were the forefathers of modern graffiti and went on to invent mass produced lithography that was pasted around the city as a means of vitriolic political protest by speaking truth to power.

By the 1960’s graffiti had taken on a new form thanks largely to the invention of the aerosol spray can. American graffiti then became the definitive story behind one of the most influential art forms of the last sixty years. The radical evolution of the medium, from its early freight-train days to its big-city boom on the streets of New York City and Philadelphia, has been replicated the world over and its modern-day influences include fashion, film, music, art and architecture.

Today graffiti has become part of our everyday visual culture and when Banksy’s ‘Balloon Girl’ went through the shredder at Sotheby’s last year having reached a hammer price in excess of £1m it was evident that this art form has truly become investment grade.
Many thanks to our highly creative sponsors Axis Mason architects for their ongoing support.

Gallery Director Chris Clifford said ‘My interest in graffiti started when I was a young teenager knocking about the streets of St. Helier. I was into hip-hop music, body popping, breakdancing and spent most of my Saturday afternoons spinning around on a piece of lino in Queensway House outside Lady Jane Records. Making graffiti, tags and burners was a natural extension of that cultural phenomenon but my career as street artist was quickly brought to a close following a parish hall inquiry. Some 35 years later I am delighted to bring this world class exhibition to Jersey containing examples of street artists such as Banksy and Keith Haring. It has taken many months to source these very rare and highly collectable artworks so I hope that people will take the time to make a visit to the gallery’.

The featured artists in this exhibition are Keith Haring, Banksy, Invader, Pure Evil, Hush, Gillian Linden, Copyright, Miss Bugs, Mr Brainwash, The Connor Brothers, Harland Miller, Nick Walker, Eelus, Bluntroller, Midnight Industries, James Jessop, Shepard Fairy and Mustafa Hulusi.
Chris Clifford BA (Hons) MA

Pink Exhibition

Private & Public Space are delighted that Jasmine Mansell has curated her first exhibition since joining the gallery earlier in the year. Jasmine is highly creative, hardworking and has built an excellent rapport with our clients so I am delighted to provide her with this platform for her personal development within the art world.

One of the first things Jasmine commented on when she started with the company was how masculine she felt both the exhibition programme and the design of the spaces are and whilst over the last two years I have shown works by incredibly talented artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Bridget Riley, Emily Thomas, Sue Arrowsmith and given solo shows to Stacey Yates and Emily Allchurch (something never offered to any man) I was left wondering how it might be possible to make the gallery environment feel more inclusive.
Prior to joining the gallery Jasmine worked in interior design and brings with her a wealth of knowledge and experience in how to create beautiful spaces with layers of decorative elegance.

She appreciates that turning a house into a home, and in doing so creating a sanctuary away from the pressures of modern life, is vital in order to provide a sense of peace and tranquillity while simultaneously conveying refined elegance combined with cultural sophistication. As such she has embraced a very deliberate curatorial strategy of applying a feminine theme where form is celebrated and floral symbols and patterns act as signifier motifs.

But this is not an exhibition curated to be purely set within the boundaries or constraints of a feminine stereotype. This is an exhibition that asks questions about how we perceive interior decoration within the context of our homes from a female perspective and how, in art, figuration and abstraction can play an equally important role in informing ideas of feminine empowerment and beauty in equal measure.

I sincerely hope that you enjoy our summer exhibition and take home a treasure that will make a sophisticated design statement within your beautiful home.

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Sir Claude Francis Barry

Until recently Sir Claude Francis Barry was not a widely known name in British modernism.
This is possibly because he came from a wealthy, aristocratic family and sold few of his works during his lifetime, leaving a prodigious body of work in his studio on Jersey when he died. Barry was educated at Harrow and, against the wishes of his family, followed his inclinations as a painter from the moment he left school.

He studied in Newlyn - then a burgeoning centre of painting - and from the age of 23 exhibited at the Royal Academy and later at the Royal Society of British Artists and the salon des Artistes Francais.
Indeed, his style was in some ways more aligned to French than to English painting.

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Nicholas Romeril

A native of the Channel Islands, Nicholas Romeril captures the essence of what is central to so many islanders’ lives. His striking motifs of boulders, sand dunes and foaming seas create beautiful and dramatic visions of pristine coastlines.

Nicholas Romeril was born in Jersey, in the Channel Islands on 11 October 1967. Between 1988 and 1993, he attended Camberwell College of Art and Design in London, obtaining a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and an MA in Printmaking. During his course at Camberwell, he won a travel scholarship from the Royal Overseas League International Competition, allowing him to travel and paint in Mexico. On his return, he published and exhibited his work for the Royal Overseas League in St James, London.

After a few years working in the capital, he became frustrated at his inability to see a whole vista in London, and was drawn back to his native Jersey. 

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Eliza Anna Reine

Originally from Latvia, has huge talent and an amazing array of technically developed skills that enable her to capture beautifully feminine atmospheres. Exclusively for this exhibition she has created mixed media abstract collages inspired by the female form.

Her work is empowering and serene with a vibrant and calming colour palette.

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Rebecca Leigh

REBECCA LEIGH is a London based artist whose portraits, seemingly from a bygone era, are represented and reimagined with a modern, naïf and even whimsical twist to create unique imagery in a style that is instantly recognisable.

A particular favourite with the British Royal Family she sold her first painting from a shop window on the Kings Road in Chelsea three years ago.

Since then her popularity, and collectability, has grown steadily and she is now feted by actors such as Sadie Frost who recently hosted her own private viewing of Rebecca’s paintings at her home in Regents Park to an international celebrity audience.

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Daniel Porter

DANIEL PORTER’s paintings explore the very nature of painting both as cultured language and sheer expression and he disregards the classical polarities of abstraction and representation, past and present, canvas and frame.

Assertive compressed gestures, sweeping complex textures, a lush palette, and the dynamic interchange of light and dark are all traits of his distinctive signature. With their maximalist gestures and beautiful saturated colours, his works are opulent and theatrical. Painted onto canvas they embrace joyous spontaneity and directness in equal measure and have echoes of the post-impressionist period, of Monet and his magnificent home in Giverny.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger – Images from the Urban Landscape

Exhibition Preview 5.30pm to 8.30pm on Thursday 25^th April

In her beautiful meander of a book “The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone,” The writer Olivia Laing examines the idea of loneliness, in particular the loneliness of the urban dweller, through the works and lives of a number of different artists. It made me think that loneliness is less a state than it is a fixed part of our identity, a tribe one might belong to which gives rise to some intriguing notions: first, that loneliness, true loneliness, is an urban dwellers trait (or privilege, or curse, depending on who you are); and second, that it is a realm most deeply inhabited, and fluently expressed, by visual artists.

Artists such as, Klaus Nomi, the lonesome bird of the late-nineteen-seventies New York art scene who spent the majority of his time discussing the acknowledged masters of modern despondency such as Edward Hopper (with his acid paint colours and neon chiaroscuro) or Andy Warhol, isolated and protected by his layers of sartorial artifice. More specifically I began to realise that if love belongs to the poet, and fear to the novelist, then loneliness belongs most specifically to the photographer.

To be a photographer is to willingly enter the world of the lonely, because it is an artistic exercise in invisibility. In the course of its relatively brief history, photography (and, by extension, those who take photographs) has been accused repeatedly of constituting an act of predation, as if the street is a savannah and the person with a camera a large cat, silent and hungry, ready to sprint after its next meal. In reality, though, the person with the camera is not hiding but receding. They are willfully removing themselves from the slipstream of life; making themselves into a constant witness, someone who lives to see the lives of others but not to be seen themselves.

Writing is often assumed to be the loneliest profession, but solitude should not be confused for loneliness: one is a condition we choose, the other is a condition that is forced upon us. If a writer creates a world and they are the ruler of it then the photographer moves through the world hoping for anonymity and to see and record what the rest of us, in our noisy perambulations, are too present to ever see. To practice this art requires first a commitment to self-erasure.

It is also why so many great photographs concern loneliness. The lens may distance the photographer from the rest of humanity, but with that distance comes an enhanced ability to see what is overlooked and under loved, whether it is a scattering of shadows decorating the side of a house, the melancholy iconography of the open road or the sun-cracked stucco of a crumbling building. These types of images are to modern photography what a wheel of cheese and a tumble of grapes were to Renaissance painting.

The annals of photography contain many extraordinary stereotypes, but the ones we linger on longest achieve something exceptional: they suggest that in the microsecond it takes for the shutter to blink, some ‘communion’ has been found, that an unseen life has become a seen one, that attention has been paid, that an act of witness has been accomplished. They remind us how much we want to be seen, and also how infrequently we practice the skill of seeing others. But if there is a cure for the invisibility of loneliness then you will surely find it within this exhibition.

A year in the making, Don’t Shoot the Messenger, showcases the work of three exceptionally talented male photographers who are all, to some degree, fascinated by the public realm, urban environments and the pleasures of wondering through architectural landscapes. Each works in an entirely different way but the results are both visually striking and technically complex. You will find joy, anxiety, distance and great pleasure in their works and I honestly believe Jersey is fortunate to have such serious and dedicated photographers recording our age.

Chris Clifford BA (Hons) MA – Gallery Director 

The Colourfield

 Exhibition Preview Friday 12th April 2019 5.30pm to 9pm

Daniel Porter & Kirsty Garcia

A painting is simply a screen between the producer and the spectator where both can look at the thought processes residing on the screen from different angles and points in time. It enables me to look at the residue of my thinking.
—Katharina Grosse 

Kirsty Garcia rose to prominence with her in situ paintings, in which explosive colour is painted directly onto architectural interiors.

The artist embraces the events and incidents that arise as she works, opening up surfaces and spaces to the countless perceptual possibilities of the medium. Approaching painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity, she uses traditional painting techniques to create gestural and propulsive marks onto the surface of both walls and canvas.

Born in Jersey, Kirsty began painting at an early age and has always been attuned to the ways that colour and light merged with thought itself. In her earlier works she juxtaposed colors of various densities and temperatures, repeating vertical, transparent brushstrokes. These led to related works painted directly onto the wall, where she has lined hallways in sublime fields of artificial colour.

 For this exhibition Kirsty has chosen to tackle the end wall of the main gallery space for a one off installation but other examples of her smaller works are available to purchase.

 Daniel Porter’s paintings explore the very nature of painting both as cultured language and sheer expression and he disregards the classical polarities of abstraction and representation, past and present, canvas and frame. Assertive compressed gestures, sweeping complex textures, a lush palette, and the dynamic interchange of light and dark are all traits of his distinctive signature. With their maximalist gestures and saturated colors, his more intimately scaled paintings appear jewel-like, while larger works are opulent and theatrical. Painted onto canvas and glass they operate as both objects, images and mirrors and embrace joyous spontaneity and directness in equal measure.

 His studio practice is a processes of reflection and capitulation and it may take a year for Daniel to prepare to execute a single brushstroke. The seemingly casual, urgent quality of his paintings belies the fact that most of them have been worked on for two or three years. More than ever they convey the relationship between hand, eye, and memory that drives their process, visual structure, and emotional temperature.

 For this exhibition Daniel’s works are displayed in the main gallery space and the interplay between Daniel and Kirsty’s works will produce a truly dynamic exhibition the likes of which has never have been seen before in Jersey.

 Chris Clifford BA (Hons) MA – Gallery Director

Pop Icons of the 20th Century – British & American Pop Art

Exhibition Preview Friday 1st March 2019 5.30pm to 9pm

Exhibiting artworks by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Peter Blake, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, Eduardo Paolozzi, Patrick Caulfield and Allen Jones

Exhibition opens daily from Monday to Friday 10am to 5.30pm and at weekends by appointment through to Saturday 30th March

Emerging in the mid 1950’s in Britain and late 1950’s in America, Pop Art reached its peak in the 1960’s and went on to become the most recognisable art form of the 20th century. It began as a revolt against the dominant approaches to art and culture and traditional views on what art should be.

Young artists felt that what they were taught at art school and what they saw in museums did not have anything to do with their lives or the things they saw around them every day. Instead they turned to sources such as Hollywood movies, advertising, product packaging, pop music and comic books for their imagery.

Private & Public Space are therefore delighted to bring this blockbuster exhibition ‘Pop Icons of the 20th Century’ to Jersey to enable residents and visitors to own works by some of the greatest post war artists from America and Britain.

Although they were inspired by similar subject matter, British Pop Art is often seen as distinctive from the American version. Early pop art in Britain was fuelled by American popular culture viewed from a distance, while the American artists were inspired by what they saw and experienced living within that culture.

In the United States, pop style was a return to representational art (art that depicted the visual world in a recognisable way) and the use of hard edges and distinct forms after the painterly looseness of abstract expressionism. By using impersonal, mundane imagery, pop artists also wanted to move away from the emphasis on personal feelings and personal symbolism that characterised abstract expressionism.

Gallery Director Chris Clifford said, “Pop Art often takes imagery that is currently in use in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, seen in the labels of Campbell’s Soup Cans, by Andy Warhol who is one of the artists featured in this exhibition. I am delighted to be able to present this ground breaking exhibition in Jersey and especially so for our first exhibition of 2019. The gallery spaces are open during the week and by appointment at the weekend and evenings so if you would like to see some truly incredible artworks by a group of artists who have become global house hold names then I look forward to welcoming you to this exhibition’.

This exhibition has been kindly sponsored by Smith & Williamson

Nicholas Romeril & Herbert Ponting – The Ice Breakers

Preview Evening Friday 30^th November from 5pm to 7.30pm
Exhibition runs daily by appointment until Monday 24th December 2018

Showcasing the work of two very talented Antarctic adventurers, featuring poignant photographs taken over a hundred years ago and on display in the Island for the very first time.

Sponsored by Voisin Law, ‘The Ice Breakers’ is a new exhibition showcasing work from Herbert Ponting alongside local artist Nicholas Romeril. The exhibition explores the work of the both the very first and the most recent cultural attachments to the polar expeditionary force.

Visitors to the gallery will be led on an historic journey through a series of photographs taken by Ponting during the winter of 1911 when he joined the Terra Nova Expedition, officially the British Antarctic Expedition.

Ponting took some of the first known colour still photographs of the expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott who wanted to be the first to reach the geographic South Pole. Having got there on 17th January 1912, the team discovered they’d been beaten to it 34 days earlier by a Norwegian team.

Emily Allchurch – Fact & Folly

Preview Evening Thursday 8th November 5.30pm – 7.30pm
Exhibition runs daily by appointment until Friday 30th November 2018

Emily Allchurch uses photography to reconstruct Old Master paintings and prints to create contemporary narratives.
Her starting point is an intensive encounter with a city or place, to absorb an impression and gather a huge image library. From this resource, hundreds of photographs are selected and meticulously spliced together to create a seamless new ‘fictional’ space.

Each artwork represents this journey, compressed into a single scene. The resulting photographic collages have a resonance with place, history and culture, and deal with the passage of time and the changes to a landscape, fusing contemporary life with a sense of history.

Although also available as prints, presenting the work as lightboxes maximises their theatricality, and creates a window into another world.

The Silk Road Superstars

21st Sept – 12th October 2018

The Directors of CCASM Modern & Contemporary are delighted to announce the opening of their latest exhibition with a public preview evening on Thursday 20th September at their gallery spaces on the first floor of Sommerville House on Phillips Street in St. Helier.

This group exhibition brings together some of the most interesting and highly acclaimed international artists practising today all of whom have works displayed in national museum collections from Beijing to Istanbul.

The curated theme for the show explores the blending and dissemination of art along the staging posts of the Silk Road and how it closely related to the larger context of the travel of people, their beliefs, culture and merchant trade from east to west.

Religion was an important inspiration for art everywhere, and much of the art of the Silk Road was religious in origin. This includes not only the extravagant visual art of Buddhism, which created a legacy of thousands of statues, murals, and illustrated texts across much of Central and East Asia, but also the glazed tilework of Islamic mosques, which stresses calligraphic, geometric, and other nonrepresentational artistic motifs.

But as justly famous as this Buddhist art is, it is only one of many types of art that have flourished or been transported along the Silk Road over the centuries. Artistic artifacts and influences of many cultures, in many media and in many styles have traveled in both directions along the Silk Road, and have exerted their influences over surprisingly long distances. In addition to sculpture and pictorial art, the art of the Silk Road includes textiles, ceramics, metalwork, glass, and a wide variety of decorative techniques applied to objects of beauty and utility.

Each of the artists featured in this exhibition have drawn their inspiration from the ancient trade routes and this show provides a unique opportunity to see contemporary cultural interpretations of thousands of years of humanity by artists from Turkey, Uzbekistan, China and the former Soviet Union.

The Directors of the gallery will be giving an informal presentation at 6.15pm on the preview evening. Drinks and canapes will be served. Those unable to attend on the opening are invited to make an appointment to view the exhibition.

Co-Founder and Director Chris Clifford said “I am especially pleased that the gallery has been able to secure such an extraordinary treasure trove of some of the most incredibly beautiful, intricate and powerful imagery from artists of truly international significance. This extraordinary exhibition, which has taken many months to plan, is a must see for anybody with an interest in seeing art work that is truly breath taking and visually arresting in every sense”.

Surface of Space – Adventures in Abstraction

16th August – 4th September 2018

This exhibition predominantly focused on two young English abstract painters, Emily Thomas and Daniel Porter who have recently moved to Jersey and established professional working studios.

The exhibition was augmented by paintings from some of the most interesting and highly collectible British abstract painters alive today including William Tillyer, Keith Coventry and Tom Hammick in addition to new works by the Canadian based painter Gary Pilkington who lived briefly in Jersey 20 years ago.

The curated theme for the show explores the central issue in abstract painting since the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky created the first abstract canvas in 1911. In the paintings he made between 1911 -1916 Kandinsky created the illusion of a three dimensional space using vibrant colours and natural forms.

Within two years this avant garde approach was quickly denounced by fellow Russian artist Kasimir Malevich through his concept of Suprematism which sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms and subject matter in order to access “the supremacy of pure feeling” and spirituality in which the canvas became a two dimensional surface.
Early on, Malevich worked in a variety of styles, quickly assimilating the movements of Impressionism, Symbolism and Fauvism, and after visiting Paris in 1912, Cubism. Gradually simplifying his style, he developed an approach with key works consisting of pure geometric forms and their relationships to one another, set against minimal grounds. His Black Square (1915), a black square on white, represented the most radically abstract painting known to have been created and drew “an uncrossable line between old art and new art”.

Emily Thomas and Daniel Porter are two very talented painters who have diametrically opposite views on how and why abstract paintings should be made and presented. As such we see this show as a great opportunity to highlight the formal concepts contained within abstract painting and provide the public with a richer appreciation of the issues faced by practicing artists who have differing viewpoints on the nature of contemporary art practice.

Absent Presence: A College for Girls

A photographic project by Stacey Yates
29th June – 19th July 2018

In Partnership with the Jersey Development Company (JDC), we were delighted to present a new project by Amsterdam based photographer Stacey Yates. JDC commissioned Stacey to document the historic site of Jersey Ladies College, later Jersey College for Girls, prior to its redevelopment.

Built in 1888, the Ladies College was at the forefront of women’s education in the late 19th century and was one of only a handful of schools to prepare girls for university examinations. Stacey’s brief was to explore, record and archive the former Ladies College, from a perspective that considers the social importance of the building, not just as an important piece of 19th century architecture, but also as a space rich in layered narratives and personal memory – a place created out of strong desire to educate, inspire and support a culture of strong, confident and enquiring young women in an era of gender inequality.

The photographs serve as an evocative and personal reminder to many who passed through its spaces noting the success and subsequent outgrowth of this educational institution and celebrate a new residential chapter for this site – College Gardens.

Stacey Yates is a photographer and director with a specific interest in contemporary, documentary storytelling. She produces considered, autonomous work that explores space, place and identity and has exhibited across the UK and Europe. She works with a number of organisations including –The BBC, The International School in Amsterdam, Philips, Channel 4 and The Mayor of London–supporting them in communicating tightly-observed, meaningful stories. She is currently based in Amsterdam represented by Revolver agency.

Photographic prints and a book are available to purchase at the exhibition. Within the book – accompanying a selection of the photographs – are interviews conducted by Jersey born writer Hannah Patterson with photographer Stacey Yates and with interior architect Siobhann Macleod both of whom were students at the school.