Past Exhibitions
Watts Cemetery Chapel: An Arts & Crafts Masterpiece
Friday 9 July - Thursday 22 July 2010
Lewis Elton Gallery,
University of Surrey
FREE, Mon-Fri 10am-5pm
Weekends by appointment.
Watts Cemetery Chapel, which stands on the side of Budburrow Hill, is a Grade I listed building owned by the Parish of Compton. It was consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester on 1 July 1898 and continues to be a working cemetery chapel. Most who visit it today, however, are there to admire its extraordinary design and decoration.
This exhibition celebrates the ceramicist Mary Watts’s (1849-1938) achievement in building the chapel between 1894 and 1904. Including Mary's chapel notebook and diaries alongside historic and contemporary photographs, the exhibition explores how it came to be built and the beautiful and dramatic symbolism woven into the unique decoration both
inside and out.
Lewis Elton Gallery, Stag Hill, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH
01483 689167
gallery@surrey.ac.uk
Exhibition organised in association with University of Surrey Arts Office.
Watts Chapel: A Guide to
the Symbols of
Mary Watts’s Arts and Crafts Masterpiece
by Mark Bills, Curator, Watts Gallery
This new book on the Chapel presents for the first time a comprehensive guide to the symbolism of the glorious Arts and Crafts patterns that cover its interior and exterior.
Special price £14.95 (rrp £17.95)
80 pages, over 180 illustrations,
available in July,
published by Philip Wilson
Click here for more on this new publication from Watts Gallery
2010 Watts Symposium
The exhibition runs in conjunction with a two day (9 & 10 July) Watts Gallery Symposium. For further information about the symposium click here
G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary
Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate
14 November 2009 – 21 March 2010
Retrospective of one of Britain’s greatest and most original artists. Drawn from the Watts Gallery collection, more than eighty paintings, drawings and sculptures.
Click here for more on this exhibition
Watts Gallery Artist-in-Residence 2008-2009
Nathalie Roset:From Darkness to Light
Ceramics Inspired by the Watts Chapel
The Lewis Elton Gallery, University of Surrey
Visit their website
1 - 17 December 2009
From Darkness to Light reveals a diverse collection of ceramics and prints inspired by Watts Cemetery Chapel. It is the outcome of the work Nathalie Roset has done over the past year during her residency at Watts Gallery. Nathalie was born in France in 1970 and her early artistic interests in Paris focused on 'Art Plastique'. Moving to London led her to the College of Printing in Graphics and Media Design where she graduated from in 1995. Following this she worked as a freelancer and as a lecturer in Graphics. In the Summer of 2008, Nathalie graduated in Three Dimensional Design
in ceramics from the University of the Creative Arts, Farnham.
Click here to discover more about the work of Nathalie Roset
Victorian Artists in Photographs:
G F Watts and his World
Selections from The Rob Dickins Collection
Guildford House Gallery
15 August to 12 September 2009
"Fascinating Stuff"
Frank Whitford, Critical List, Sunday Times
A remarkable exhibition of photographs of the Victorian art world, many exhibited for the first time. These include images of the leading artists of the day and their studios, including Edward Burne-Jones, George Cruickshank, William Holman Hunt, Frederic Lord Leighton, John Everett Millais, William Morris and Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, but also the artists’ models, wives and families. It also includes rare images of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the principal cultural figures of the day such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens and John Ruskin. The exhibition promises to bring G. F. Watts’s world and artistic circle to life.
Click here for more on this exhibition
The Good Samaritan by George Frederic Watts
Guildford Cathedral, Guildford
from 3 September 2009
One of Watts's great eclesiastical masterpieces will be on show in Guildford Cathedral from 3 September 2009. Positioned in the South Ambulatory of the Cathedral the work has recently benefited from a period of conservation, kindly supported by Mr Henry Jones as part of the 'Adopt a Watts' scheme.
Click here for more about this painting
That’s a Bit of Us!
Guildford Cathedral,
Stag Hill, Guildford
Surrey, GU2 7UP, 01483 547881
24 August – 13 September
An exhibition of art work produced during the Watts Gallery
Community Art Project in Park Barn and Westborough, 2008-2009.
The project involved participants making a clay pebble inspired
by the theme of Past, Present and Future.
The Big Issues
Royal Society of Arts
8 John Adam Street, London
4-14 August 2009,
10-5pm Monday-Friday
Free admission
Work by women prisoners at HMP Send, participants from Surrey Youth Justice Service and Street Level Arts, a Guildford-based rehabilitation art group, in partnership
with Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey.
The exhibition was opened by Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone DL JP, Gerry Acher CBE LVO, Trustee of KPMG Foundation and RSA and Jane Weeks, Chair of the SE England Committee, Heritage Lottery Fund
Supported by:
KPMG Foundation, The Michael Varah M emorial Fund and Royal Society of Arts
Watts in the City -
G. F. Watts: Parables in Paint
St Paul’s Cathedral, London
1 December 2008 – 30 July 2009
Watts did not possess a conventional religious faith yet he retained a sense of the profound importance of spirituality. The exhibition explores the religious and spiritual dimension of his art and the way that this underpinned his sense of social responsibility.
Watts in the City -
Two Major Works by Watts in the Nave of St Paul’s Cathedral
1 December 2008 – April 2009
Time, Death and Judgement and Peace and Goodwill will return to the Nave of the great cathedral some 100 years since they were first hung.
Click here for more on this exhibition
Victorian Artists in Photographs:
G F Watts and his World
Selections from The Rob Dickins Collection
The Ruskin Library, Lancaster University
The Forbes Galleries, New York
The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate
Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
Watts Gallery, Compton
"Fascinating Stuff"
Frank Whitford, Critical List, Sunday Times
A remarkable exhibition of photographs of the Victorian art world, many exhibited for the first time. These include images of the leading artists of the day and their studios, including Edward Burne-Jones, George Cruickshank, William Holman Hunt, Frederic Lord Leighton, John Everett Millais, William Morris and Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, but also the artists’ models, wives and families. It also includes rare images of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the principal cultural figures of the day such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Dickens and John Ruskin. The exhibition promises to bring G. F. Watts’s world and artistic circle to life.
Click here for more on this exhibition
Watts Gallery: A Journey of Hope
1 April - 28 September 2008 (extended from 31 August due to popular demand)
The final exhibition at Watts Gallery, Compton, will tell the story of the Gallery and its 104 year history. Since it first opened to the public on 1 April 1904 (the same date as the exhibition opens) the Gallery has succeeded in bringing important art to a wide audience, cementing G. F. Watts and Mary Watts’ vision of art for all.
The exhibition will explore the past as well as the future of the Gallery with a newly commissioned model of the Gallery site and images of how the newly restored rooms will look. The exhibition will look at the history of the Gallery and how, by recapturing the original vision of its founders through closely studying the original paint colours, wall coverings, room structures and restoring accurately what was a state of the art building for its time, the unique ‘sense of place’ that visitors regularly comment on will be preserved in the restoration.
Click here to find out more
all images © the artist
Peter Monkman: Changing Face
12 January - 9 March 2008
Peter Monkman is a figurative painter whose work is particularly concerned with the concept of identity. Monkman’s work explores emerging identities of adolescents from different social and cultural backgrounds, the changing identities of his own children in the process of growing up and distinct identities of public personas known to the artist. Viewed collectively, the work also raises broader questions relating to education, institutions and class and the way we perceive individuals within these contexts. For sixteen years Monkman taught art in the State sector and since 2003 he has worked as Director of Art at Charterhouse, which has provided much inspiration. As the artist points out ‘Watts Gallery and Charterhouse share not only locality but also a Victorian past which has an impact on the present. The historical gravitas of Watts’s portraits of families, friends, eminent public personas, the bourgeois, the prosperous and the underprivileged in which aesthetics and politics come together will provide a very relevant context in which my portraits can be interpreted’.
Monkman originally trained as an artist in the 1980s and aspects of his earlier practice involved abstraction using automatic drawing and painting , based on memory, time and spontaneous instant reactions of the brain to visual stimuli. In 1999 Peter’s striking photo-realist portrait of his new born son ‘Joe-boy’ was selected for the BP Portrait Awards Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and this marked the artist’s increased preoccupation with the genre of portraiture, which has subsequently become his favourite artistic vehicle. Monkman has since been featured in two further BP Portrait Awards (2001, 2003) as well as at the Science Museum’s ‘Future Face’ (2005), Drawing on Time at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (2000) , and ‘Face Value’ at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery (2003) showing head studies of students from a Northamptonshire state school (see left), which as the artist said ‘challenged the way we categorise youth educationally and socially’.
Notably, Monkman describes his portraiture practice as ‘responding to the face in a physiognomic way with no initial intention to convey any specific personality traits or qualities’. According to the artist, these qualities inevitably emerge throughout the creative process when the portrait ‘starts communicating back to the painter, and on completion, it is down to the viewer how the face and personality is interpreted. The portrait becomes removed from the sitter and creates a life of its own depending on the context in which it is exhibited’. Monkman also emphasises that he does not create his art in a cultural vacuum, but rather consciously draws on iconic images from art history from past centuries as well as the contemporary art scene in order to create new identities. Leading contemporary figurative painters such as Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans and Michael Borremans have been sources of inspiration alongside Rembrandt, Van Eyck and G. F. Watts, whose double portrait of ‘Long Mary’ served as a starting point for Monkman’s double portrait of his daughter. (see below)
The exhibition will present the evolution of Monkman’s long preoccupation with the concept of identity, representing diverse individuals on a level playing field through the democratic vehicle of portraiture.
Julia Dudkiewicz, Assistant Curator
Catalogue
Changing Face - Contemporary Portraiture by Peter Monkman
16 pages -27 full colour illustrations
Director's Introduction - Perdita Hunt
Peter Monkman: The Physiognomy of Faces - Mark Bills
Public versus Private Face - Julia Dudkiewicz
£4 Buy it here