Life Class: Today's Nude
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Tuesday 7 July 2009, 7pm
Conway Hall
25 Red Lion Square
Holborn
London WC1
Alan Kane, Maggi Hambling and Humphrey Ocean discuss their individual perspectives on life drawing, its renewed popularity and the aim of Life Class: Today's Nude in disseminating the activity via television.
Chaired by Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery
Tickets £7.50/£5.50 conc.
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About the participants...
Alan Kane is the Artist/Director of Life Class: Today's Nude. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including The Stratford Hoard at Stratford Station as part of TfL's Art on the Underground series (2008), Steam Powered Internet Machine in collaboration with Jeremy Deller at Turner Contemporary, Margate (2006) and Folk Archive in collaboration with Jeremy Deller at New Art Gallery, Walsall. Extended biog here.
Maggi Hambling, who leads one of the five televised life classes, is a household name in British art. She was the first Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in 1980-81, and among other of her works, her portarits of George Melly and Max Wall hang in the National Portrait Gallery. Hambling is a figurative painter, sculptor and printmaker whose strong identification with her subjects is expressed in bold handling and colour. Her work can also be seen in the British Museum, Tate Collection, The Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon and many other public collections in the UK and abroad.
Humphrey Ocean, who also leads a class for Life Class: Today's Nude, was born in Sussex in 1951 and went to art schools in Tunbridge Wells, Brighton and Canterbury. From 1971 to 1973 he was bass player with Kilburn and the Highroads and was elected a Royal Academician in 2004. Exhibitions include Double-Portrait at Tate Liverpool (1992), urbasuburba with Jock McFadyen at The Whitworth Art Gallery (1997), The Painter's Eye with John Tchalenko, National Portrait Gallery (1999) and how's my driving at Dulwich Picture Gallery (2003). In 2009 he will exhibit at Sidney Cooper Gallery in Canterbury Christ Church University.
Sandy Nairne is Director of the National Portrait Gallery. He was Director: Programmes at Tate for eight years working alongside Nicholas Serota in the building of Tate Modern and the Centenary Development at Tate Britain. He has also worked as Director of Exhibitions at the ICA and Director of Visual Arts for the Arts Council of Great Britain. Nairne is well known for his innovative television series and book State of the Art, 1987, and co-edited anthology Thinking about Exhibitions, 1996. He has curated and co-curated exhibitions which include Objects and Sculpture; Leon Golub; British Sculpture in the 20th Century; Jeff Wall; The Impossible Self; American Realities and the first retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs. His most recent book is The Portrait Now (National Portrait Gallery, 2006).