Richard Saltoun Gallery announces an exhibition by one of the most important female British artists of the past fifty years: Helen Chadwick.

For the first time since 2004 Chadwick’s seminal series of thirteen photographs, the Wreaths to Pleasure (1992 - 93) will be installed alongside Cacao (1994), a relentlessly pumping fountain of liquid chocolate. Taking as its own Chadwick’s earlier exhibition title ‘Bad Blooms’, the exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery will stimulate the public’s sensations through this presentation of her unique use of colour and matter.

Wreaths to Pleasure consists of thirteen colour photographs, each depicting different flowers and fruits set against and within both pleasant and poisonous liquids: detergents and soaps like Windowlene, Fairy, Ariel and Swarfega, Germolene antiseptic cream, blackberries and chocolate. Shot from above and framed in the artist’s own circular brightly coloured enamel steel frames, the works are accompanied by Cacao. This sensational round fountain of chocolate which inundates the gallery with its sweet, sickly smell, will be exhibited for the first time since 2009 (New Art Gallery Walsall, UK), previously shown at her Barbican retrospective in London (2004). Chadwick took as the final image for the Wreaths to Pleasure a photograph of the bubbling chocolate with a small lily bloom floating on top: the two works completing each other. The Wreaths have been exhibited at the XXII Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1994 and at the MoMA in New York one year later, for the exhibition titled Bad Blooms.

The combination of the entire Wreaths to Pleasure series together with Cacao was first exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in a solo exhibition entitled effluvia (1994, London). Through these two works, Chadwick depicts a transient world of visual and sensorial pleasures and execrations, where both aspects collide in an environment: at the same time joyful, aphrodisiac, nauseous and abject. Chadwick examines the notions of desire and repulsion, life and death, beauty and ugliness by analysing – almost with a scientific approach – the fluidity of our existence and the matter that constitutes it.

Helen Chadwick (1953, Surrey - 1996, London)

One of the most important women artists to emerge in the last thirty years, Chadwick appeared at the intersection of conceptual-performative art and feminist thinking. She influenced and taught an entire generation of contemporary British artists through her teaching posts at Goldsmiths College, London; Chelsea College of Art & Design, London; and Central St. Martin’s, London. One of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize, in 1987, her sudden death from heart failure in 1996 shocked the art world, interrupting the brilliant life of the artist at the apex of her career. The work of Helen Chadwick can be found in many major international collections including the Tate Collection, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and MoMA, New York.

Richard Saltoun Gallery

111 Great Titchfield Street
London W1W 6RY United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)20 76371225
info@richardsaltoun.com
www.richardsaltoun.com

Opening hours

Monday - Friday
From 10am to 6pm

Related images
  1. Helen Chadwick, Wreath to Pleasure No 4, 1992-1993, Cibachrome print on aluminium faced MDF in a glazed powder, coated steel frame, 110 (diameter) x 5 cm, Copyright The Estate of Helen Chadwick, Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery
  2. Helen Chadwick, Wreath to Pleasure No 10, 1992-1993, Cibachrome print on aluminium faced MDF in a glazed powder, coated steel frame, 110 (diameter) x 5 cm, Copyright The Estate of Helen Chadwick, Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery
  3. Helen Chadwick, Wreath to Pleasure No 8, 1992-1993, Cibachrome print on aluminium faced MDF in a glazed powder, coated steel frame, 110 (diameter) x 5 cm, Copyright The Estate of Helen Chadwick, Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery
  4. Helen Chadwick, Wreath to Pleasure No 13, 1992-1993, Cibachrome print on aluminium faced MDF in a glazed powder, coated steel frame, 110 (diameter) x 5 cm, Copyright The Estate of Helen Chadwick, Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery
  5. Helen Chadwick, Wreath to Pleasure No 8, 1992-1993, Cibachrome print on aluminium faced MDF in a glazed powder, coated steel frame, 110 (diameter) x 5 cm, Copyright The Estate of Helen Chadwick, Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery
  6. Helen Chadwick, Cacao, 1994, Chocolate, aluminium, steel, electrical apparatus, 300 (diameter) x 85 cm, As installed at Serpentine Gallery, London, 1994, Courtesy The Estate of Helen Chadwick and Momart Ltd, London