Patrons studio Saturday: Stephen Chambers RA and Jane and Louise Wilson RA
Saturday 18 May 2019 10.30am - 2pm
East London. Full address provided on RSVP.
Free for Patrons, booking required.
We invite Patrons into the studios of Stephen Chambers RA and Jane and Louise Wilson RA, to learn first-hand about the process of being involved with the world’s largest open submission exhibition of contemporary art - the Summer Exhibition.
Following on from the tradition of "Show Sunday", the day when 18th century artists’ would open up their studios to receive guests ahead of the Summer Exhibition, studio Saturday brings Patrons into the studios of Royal Academicians to learn first-hand about the process of being involved with the world’s largest open submission exhibition of contemporary art.
This summer we are thrilled to be visiting members of this years’ committee, Stephen Chambers RA, and Jane and Louise Wilson RA in their East London studios, where we will hear about their experiences of being part of the selection and hanging process of the Summer Exhibition.
In recent years Chambers has worked on sequences of paintings and prints. Whilst certainly a narrator, his work, increasingly, discusses topical themes. No wish to be a preacher, and wary of those that are constantly ‘on message’, he does though use imagery to instigate debate. Recent sets of work; State of the Nation (triptych), and The Court of Redonda (101 panel paintings) were both shown at the Venice Biennale 2017. They concerned the current schism in Britain’s identity, in the first instance, and in the second, inspired by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, an imagined alternative government where decisions are made by those not usually asked to dine at high table such as artists, writers and composers et al.
Jane and Louise Wilson have been working as an artist duo in collaboration for over two decades. Since 1990, they have gained a national and international reputation as artists working with photography and the moving image, installation in an expanded form of cinema and lens-based media. Their early works centred on abandoned buildings, often imbued with the presence and ideology of the original occupants. Through carefully choreographed film installations, sound works and photography they have explored some of Europe’s least accessible sites, including a former Stasi Prison in former East Berlin, the British Houses of Parliament and the huge Star City complex in Moscow, a key site of the Russian Space Programme.