Ikon, Birmingham’s internationally acclaimed art gallery, celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2014-15. A series of special exhibitions and events, collectively known as Ikon 50, is planned to mark the milestone year.

Ikon Icons sees a return to Ikon by five key British artists from an exhibition programme that has articulated five decades, each presenting work in the gallery’s Tower Room corresponding to their earlier shows at Ikon. John Salt was the first artist to have an exhibition at Ikon, in April 1965, on the cusp of his embrace of photorealism, whilst Ian Emes’ 1973 film animation heralded the start of a brilliant career, amongst other things visualising the music of Pink Floyd. In 1988 Cornelia Parker exhibited her seminal work Thirty Pieces of Silver and ten years later likewise Yinka Shonibare’s combination of found objects and African fabric was a defining moment. The new millennium was ushered in by an ambitious programme that included a survey of new work by Julian Opie.

Ikon 1980s will be a highlight of the anniversary year, a review of Ikon’s programme from 1978-1989. The comprehensive selection of paintings, sculpture, installation, film and photography exemplifies a pivotal decade in British art history, including the work of Helen Chadwick, Dennis Oppenheim, Vanley Burke, Sean Scully and Susan Hiller.

An exhibition of photography and film by Kurdish artist Jamal Penjweny opens Ikon 50. Ikon Director Jonathan Watkins first encountered Penjweny’s work through research for the Iraqi Pavilion he curated at the 2013 Venice Biennale. There the photographic series Saddam is Here – twelve images of Iraqi people, each holding a life-size image of Saddam Hussein’s face in front of their own – was shown to great critical acclaim. This, his first solo exhibition, is a key moment for Ikon.

Other exhibitions include the work of Belgian artist Michel François in his most comprehensive UK exhibition to date, whilst the Korean artist Lee Bul presents her first ever UK solo show. Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year 2013 Imran Qureshi visits Ikon from Pakistan, and David Tremlett’s colourful drawings cover every inch of the walls on Ikon’s second floor. The year finishes with a compelling video installation by Angolan artist Nástio Mosquito, shown in stark contrast to the minimalism of A.K. Dolven whose exhibition includes the seascapes of her fellow Norwegian, the nineteenth century painter Peder Balke.

Late in 2014, Ikon will unveil a sculpture by Gillian Wearing, positioned outside the Library of Birmingham. A Real Birmingham Family is the outcome of the artist’s quest to find, and immortalise in bronze, a ‘real’ Birmingham family. From over 370 nominations, a judging panel chose the Jones family - two sisters and their sons - to be the subjects of this new commission. The sculpture of Roma and her sister Emma, along with their young sons Kyan and Shaye, will celebrate the everyday and the unsung and be a lasting memorial to the people of Birmingham.

Ikon 50 will also include an extensive public programme of talks, events, film screenings, conferences and audience engagement projects.

Established in 1964 by a group of artists looking for a new, accessible place to share artistic ideas, Ikon’s first home was in a glass-sided kiosk in the Bullring shopping centre, a ‘gallery without walls’. Since then, Ikon has had many homes around the city centre, including the Pallasades shopping centre where, in 1974, the gallery was the unintended casualty of an IRA bomb, the actual target being the army recruitment office next door. Ikon moved to its current Brindleyplace venue in 1998, converting the former Victorian school into a contemporary gallery space now welcoming over 130,000 visitors a year.

From a humble start, Ikon has grown to develop a worldwide reputation with an internationalist outlook. In recent years, exhibiting artists have hailed from China, Japan, Australia, France, USA, Russia, Canada and the Pacific Islands, in addition to homegrown Birmingham talent including John Salt, John Myers, Ruth Claxton, Stuart Whipps and Hurvin Anderson. Throughout its 50 years, Ikon has played a key role in the development of many artistic careers - Antony Gormley, Cornelia Parker, Julian Opie and Carmen Herrera all had important exhibitions here, to name just a few.

As part of Ikon 50, Ikon will undertake its largest fundraising campaign to date, in a concerted effort to ensure that Ikon continues to grow, making the very best in contemporary art available to all.

Summary of exhibitions in date order:

David Tremlett, 3 Drawing Rooms
4 December 2013 – 21 April 2014
David Tremlett (b. 1945) is best known for his large-scale site-specific wall drawings of geometric arrangements: abstract compositions of arcs, circles, trapezoids, text and line. Using pastel pigment applied by hand, Tremlett makes these compositions directly on architectural surfaces. They are orchestrated to shift the viewer’s comprehension of a built environment, opening out, expanding and reducing, creating new vistas, geometric rhythms and pauses. While at once being formally constructed compositions of purely abstract elements which emanate the sensual joy of colour, and illustrate relationships between straight and curved lines, they speak too of things experienced, seen and done by the artist.

Jamal Penjweny
19 February – 21 April 2014
An exhibition of work by emerging artist Jamal Penjweny from Iraqi Kursdistan, including a number of photographic series that are as poignant and smart as they are formally straightforward. Saddam is Here consists of twelve images of Iraqi people in familiar surroundings, each holding a life-size picture of Saddam Hussein’s face in front of their own. Saddam’s likeness becomes a mask obscuring any expression of emotion, any gaze, or possibility of sure identification and individuality. It is ludicrous, hilarious and at the same time absolutely ominous, pointing up the insidious influence of a dictator. Another Life, a short film by Penjweny, follows some days in the lives of Iraqis smuggling alcohol from Iraq into Iran. It has the grainy appeal of covert cell phone footage, and is very matter-of-fact in its editing. There is no melodrama, but the last moments are like an emotional hammerblow when, instead of rolling credits, we find ourselves reading paragraphs explaining how two of the men just introduced to us were killed by customs police a few days after filming.

Michel François
30 April – 22 June 2014
This will be the most comprehensive UK exhibition to date of work by Belgian artist Michel François (b. 1956). Comprising sculpture, film, paintings, prints and photography, it exemplifies the artist’s conviction that the meanings of a work of art are determined through its combination with others in relation to an exhibition space. Visitors to Ikon will encounter an installation of numerous pieces to be read as a whole, integrated with the entire building. Such pervasiveness is fitting given the fundamental proposition of François’ work whereby art and life are deemed inextricable, and making reference specifically to sculpture, he observes, “L’art, de toute façon, c’est la vie que l’on sculpte” (“Art, afterall, is life sculpted.”)

Ikon 1980s
2 July – 31 August 2014
A survey of Ikon’s programme from 1978 to 1989, Ikon 1980s is a highlight of our 50th anniversary year. Following on from The Best Things in Life Happen Accidentally and This Could Happen to You - surveys of the 1960s and 1970s respectively (2004, 2009) - this is the third chapter in an ongoing account of art shown by the gallery since it opened in 1964. The comprehensive selection of paintings, sculpture, installation, film and photography reviews a pivotal decade in British art history through the lens of a major British visual arts institution, highlighting the rise of postmodernism and the increasing popularity of installation. Ikon 1980s includes the work of such artists as Cornelia Parker, Vanley Burke, Helen Chadwick and Susan Hiller.

Lee Bul
10 September – 9 November 2014
This is the first UK solo exhibition for Lee Bul (b. 1964, Korea), considered one of the most important artists of her generation. Lee Bul’s work is as visually compelling as it is intellectually sharp, preoccupied especially with gender politics and idealism expressed through modernism, science fiction and the development of technology. This judicious survey includes early drawings, photographs and video (documenting performance), more sculptural pieces from the 1990s and ambitious later installations, including a new commission made possible through the Art Fund International scheme. This latter piece, a suspended sculpture dripping with an excess of crystalline shapes and glass beads, references the exponential growth and unsustainability of the modern world, pointing up Lee Bul’s interest in the failings of utopian optimism.

Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year 2013: Imran Qureshi
19 November 2014 – 25 January 2015
Imran Qureshi is Deutsche Bank’s 2013 ‘Artist of the Year’. Born in 1972 in Pakistan, he studied in Lahore at the National College of Arts with a major in miniature painting, a traditional discipline that he teaches there today. Qureshi is one of the most important contemporary artists on the Subcontinent, not least because he reclaims the regionally and historically rooted discipline of miniature painting and transports it to the present day. His work constitutes a unique synthesis of the genre’s motifs and techniques with current issues and the formal language of contemporary abstract painting. Qureshi incorporates personal observations on current affairs in Pakistan into his work, reiterating that violence can be encountered not only in his native country, but throughout the world.

A.K. Dolven
3 February – 19 April 2015
Norwegian artist Anne Katrine Dolven shows her work alongside that of nineteenth century Norwegian painter Peder Balke (1804 - 87), renowned for his landscapes of the far north. Dolven has identified with Balke as an artist now for many years, not simply because of the fundamental themes of his work conveyed through visions of the northern Norwegian landscape, but also he is an ancestor of hers by marriage. For this exhibition, as well as presenting her own paintings and film, video, photography and sound installation, she will take paintings by Balke as found objects in order to engage him in a kind of artistic conversation, to take place between here and now and there and then.

Ikon Gallery
1 Oozells Square
Brindleyplace
Birmingham B1 2HS United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)12 12480708
www.ikon-gallery.co.uk

Opening hours
Tuesday – Sunday
From 11am to 6pm

Related images

  1. Ikon Icon Cornelia Parker, Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1988, Installation View, courtesy the artist and Ikon
  2. Ikon Icon Ian Emes, French Window, 1973, video still, courtesy the artist and Ikon
  3. Ikon moves to Oozell's Street School, Brindleyplace, 1998, courtesy Ikon