Stuckist Show

Stuckists: Elizabethan Avant-Garde

Combining rebellion, aesthetics, spiritual perspective and imaginative concepts, the Stuckists constitute Britain’s contemporary modern art movement. This exhibition brings together over 250 works in different media, including painting, sculpture, photography, video and Turner Prize demonstration placards, revealing the Stuckists to be advanced in their approach to every genre. Led by Charles Thomson, Joe Machine, Ella Guru and Paul Harvey, the Stuckists rebel against the art establishment of the early twenty-first century, taking inspiration from early Modernist painting.

The exhibition establishes the Stuckists as a present day example of the avant-garde: painters who self-consciously overturn orthodoxy and establish a new benchmark for contemporary painting and communication. It will include many famous Stuckist works, and will also re-introduce some rarely seen masterpieces including Charles Thomson’s polemical Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision 2001 and the 2006 sculpture created by Adrian Bannister of a grey businessman on an orange space hopper.

You’ll also see Mark D’s plain-speaking painting Damien Hirst – Money for Old Rope 2005 and Annie Zamero’s politcially* charged Tony Blair Turns Catholic: after Portrait of Innocent X by Diego Velazquez, 1650 2007, showing the former Prime Minister as the Pope.

The exhibition shows that the Stuckist environment is widely encompassing in its reach across the fine and conceptual arts, in response to a fast-changing irreligious and political backdrop, and in its relationship to women practitioners.

This Postmodern text is a piece of conceptual art employing appropriation, a strategy which is, the Tate says, “used extensively by artists”.

With grateful acknowledgement to the Tate’s text on their show, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. See www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/pre-raphaelites-victorian-avant-garde

*As initially spelt on the Tate site. Archived 17.8.12 at www.webcitation.org/69ydZZ5tQ

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