ARTISTS: Amanda Beech, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Jenny Holzer,
Martin Kippenberger, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Roman Vasseur
CURATED BY: Amanda Beech & Matthew Poole
DATES: 20 February 2006 - 25 March 2006
PRIVATE VIEW : Friday 25 th February 6-9pm
OPENING HOURS: Monday to Friday 11 am - 5 pm, Saturdays 1 - 4.30 pm
Little Private Governments is a group exhibition of painting, drawing, sculpture, and video works by eight international contemporary artists. The exhibition showcases the work of emerging artists, Amanda Beech [UK], Pil & Galia Kollectiv [Israel], and Roman Vasseur [UK] alongside more established figures Jake & Dinos Chapman [UK], Jenny Holzer [USA], and Martin Kippenberger [Germany].
Little Private Governments thinks through the prevalence of art's long-term interest in its place within the structures of capital, democracy and idealism.
Specifically, this exhibition demonstrates the implications of their close proximity in contemporary western culture. The works in the exhibition entangle and confuse the first principle of liberal democracy: the language of individualism, with the rhetoric of venture capitalism, mass production, business and government.
Little Private Governments examines the ways in which this belief in individual freedom is located and exercised as a force of administrative and bureaucratic management.
The artworks operate at the level of little private governments; secular forces that make explicit their contingency with the violent collision between the ethics of democracy and the politics of capital. They simultaneously confound and illuminate our understanding of the way we operate within these circumstances when we know that these forces are immanent to how we organize our lives now and our collective future.
Amanda Beech, and Pil & Galia Kollectiv will be presenting new works.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Regarding Little Private Governments please contact Matthew Poole:
M: 07918 171 086 - poolem@essex.ac.uk - coloursandstyles@btinternet.com
For the Gallery please call or email Jessica Kenny: (01206) 873184 arts@essex.ac.uk
Little Private Governments is financially supported by Arts Council England, East, and
The University of the West Of England, Bristol.
We are also grateful for the support of White Cube, Spruth Magers Lee, Collection Erhard Klein, and The Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain.
University Gallery
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
CO4 3SQ
Tel: (01206) 873184
arts@essex.ac.uk
http://www.essex.ac.uk/Arts/office/gallery