The City & Guilds of London Art School Degree Show 2019 is opening soon!
The private view is Tuesday 25 June, 6.30-9.30pm and open week is 26-30 June – see times below.
Everyone is very welcome to attend.
Exhibited throughout our historic building, the Degree Show is a great opportunity to view or buy work from today’s emerging contemporary fine artists, wood and stone carvers and object conservators.
The interim work of our current Artists in Residence is also exhibited.
PRIVATE VIEW
Tues 25 June 18:30 – 21:30
OPEN
Wed 26 June 11:00 – 18:00
Thurs 27 June 11:00 – 18:00
Fri 28 June 11:00 – 21:00
Sat 29 June 10:00 – 17:00
Sun 30 June 10:00 – 17:00
This is a free entry event.
VENUE
City & Guilds of London Art School
124 Kennington Park Road
London SE11 4DJ
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
Fine Art
This year’s Degree Show features work from an eclectic range of practices and subjects. Installations include an exploration of death, loss and memory with subterranean exhibits of fur and bones encased in glass mouldings and a swarm of almost 300 individual ceramic vessels that draw on the Delftware tradition, combined with expressions of gender transformation.
Materiality is explored in sculpture and participatory art that focuses on objects or materials, particularly those in the domestic sphere, that spark interest for their formal qualities and for their potential in carrying meaning as the embodiment of ideas.
Spray paint and highly-coloured acrylics are used on large-scale canvases, depicting a fetus-like imaginary character representing the artist’s childhood, inspired by the iconic work of Charles M. Schultz. Meanwhile themes of nostalgia, temptation, seduction, consumerism and deception are explored through paint in works where photorealism sits next to a painterly brush mark and trompe l’oeil is used to challenge the viewer.
Historic Wood and Stone Carving
The exhibition features an interpretation in stone of Charles Sargeant Jagger’s bronze Royal Artillery Memorial depicting WWI Officers, fine examples of drapery carved in stone and lettering carved into a large roof slate from the Palace of Westminster. Meanwhile, woodcarving and gilding students are exhibiting a range of breathtaking pieces from an ornate, gilded wall mirror inspired by a Rococo Chinoiserie Girandole design to an intricate cupboard in English Oak depicting the four seasons. Other exhibits include a colourful coat of arms honouring the Prime Warden of the Fishmongers Company Her Royal Highness, Princess Anne, and an imposing gilded wood and metal installation which depicts cycles on wellness and juxtaposes a medical aesthetic with organic elements, drawing on the maker’s own experiences.
Conservation
Conservation students exhibit their final year conservation projects that they have managed independently, with cultural objects loaned from private and public collections. The show features, amongst a range of exhibits, a Pietre Dure table top that has had its many loose and missing stone pieces reinstated to bring the piece back to its original splendour and an Italian, polychrome wood sculpture of St Gerard Majella that has been treated with algae to consolidate the flaking paint and significant losses have been restored.