Sarah Douglas, 'Untitled Drawing', 2006, ink on paper, 21x30cm
Revisiting what she knows best, the increasingly successful artist's agent and curator Flora Fairbairn is reaching out into independent curating once more. She has recently left Madder Rose - the much-applauded Whitecross Street gallery she set up with lawyer Debbie Carslaw last June but will remain as agent to three artists exhibited at the gallery last year, namely Jason Shulman, Annie Kevans and Rachel Kneebone. "I just got back from New York where I was organising a Kneebone solo show", she told me. "The location is unconfirmed as yet but there are a number of choices. I'm going back in a few weeks to make a firmer decision." Kneebone's rather seductive ceramics sold out within hours when she opened for Madder Rose in June 2006.
Annie Kevans, Lillian Gish, 2006
This Thursday sees the opening of Salon 2007 - New British Painting and Works on Paper, Fairbairn's inaugural show under the banner of Artwork Productions, the company she formed last month with new business partner Will Burlington. "Will's family have always been massively supportive patrons of the arts, so this is a logical progression of that. We hope it'll be the start of a beautiful working relationship", she said. (Will Burlington and Lismore Castle Arts are also hosting a huge Richard Long exhibition at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, Ireland - the family pile - from May to October of this year.)
Mustafa Hulisi, 'Portrait of Spring III', 2007, oil on canvas, 136 x166 cm
Salon 2007 will be a purely figurative venture - not an abstract in sight. Fairbairn and writer/curator Sotiris Kyriacou trawled the studios of both new and more established artists and this is what they unearthed. Emma Puntis (who incidentally, Fairbain tips as the painter to watch this year), Sarah Douglas, Annie Kevans, Oliver Clegg (also showing this week from today at the Gallery, 125 Charing Cross Road), Wolfe Leincewicz, Heather and Ivan Morison, Mustafa Hulusi and Thomas Hylander are all exhibiting. Altogether, an astounding fifty artists will be showing their creations from Thursday until the end of the month. "I wanted to bring together an eclectic mix of artists who revitalise the legacy of figuration", Flora Fairbairn told me. "It's an opportunity we have taken to show who we think is most exciting today in painting, print and collage."
Emma Puntis, 'Untitled', 2007 (curly hair)
Recognized for putting on shows in curious venues such as the top of Arno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower (the Brutalist carbuncle of a West London skyscraper), Fairbairn has often opened up the looking-at-art thing to a much wider public than she would have done if she'd settled for exhibiting works in a mere gallery. In 2003 her show 'Gimme 5', which took place underneath the Westway flyover not far from London's Portobello Road, attracted lots of attention, and helped to launch her Luminaries Gallery at Westbourne Studios.
As co-founder of that space, which was open from 2003-2004, Fairbairn decided to focus on time-based and multi-disciplinary art to "try and provoke awareness into the future evolution of the human spirit through technology". Luminaries has ended up being the working model for her new Kinetica Museum of Kinetic and Electronic Art which opened near Spitalfields Market last year.
Seemingly not quite busy enough at the moment, Fairbairn is also joining forces with curator Kay Saatchi to showcase the most striking work of graduates from last year's art school shows. The two curators looked at 800 young artists working across all media and have come up with a shortlist of the strongest 25. Elusive Glaswegian collector David Roberts is hosting the exhibition in April, most likely at his Great Titchfield Street building in the West End, although that could change. Oh, and a hundred per cent of all sales will go directly to the artists, which is nice.
What's Flora Fairbairn's strongest memory after curating so many projects, I wondered? "The very best thing is to find and promote an artist no-one has ever heard of and to see them do well."
Salon 2007 runs from 9-31 March 2007
319 Portobello Road
Wednesday - Saturday 11am-7pm and also by appointment
T: +44 (0)7852 964 352
info@artworkproductions.net
www.artworkproductions.net
Laura K Jones
Laura K Jones is a London-based journalist and a regular news correspondent for Your Gallery magazine.
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