•“Mat’s making a surprise and doesn’t want to release any details” says gallery director Barry Barker of Lisson’s first exhibition of Mat Collishaw, “but he is bringing everything together in a substantial body of work which will include photography and video projections with objects.” It is an appropriately ambiguous statement about an original Freeze participant who has exhibited more widely than Damien Hirst or Rachel Whiteread and yet remains an enigmatic personality. But there is a mood in the market which believes that, harnessed to Lisson’s administrative and financial muscle as a result of his recent decision to part company with private agent Thomas Dane, Collishaw will now be able to offer a fuller picture of his interests and win the wider recognition due to him.
27 October until 30 November, Lisson, 52-54 Bell Street, London, NW1 5DA, Tel: +44 171 724 2739 •Fax: +44 171 724 7124
•Allen Jones was one of the senior British names unexpectedly released from contract by Leslie Waddington with whom he had exhibited for thirty years. During the last three or four seasons he has been busy with public commissions for the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Sir Terence Conran’s Mezzo restaurant and Swire Properties, Hong Kong; a print retrospective at the Barbican Art Gallery (1995); and museum exhibitions in Europe, even appearing in a current Dada anthology in Verona. But now he is holding his first commercial gallery exhibition in London for four years with senior modern art dealer Thomas Gibson, who remarks, “I’m returning to my youth and showing the artists of the sixties”. Peter Phillips will be exhibiting with him in 1998.
For this occasion Jones has created ten new watercolours collectively entitled “Piano Recital” and illustrating pairs of intertwined figures dancing, floating or performing at a piano.
Until 17 October, Thomas Gibson Fine Art Ltd, 44 Old Bond Street, London, W1X 4HQ, Tel: +44 171 499 8572 •Fax: +44 171 495 1924
•In spite of his powerful reputation as one of the inventors of Pop Art, and his prominent presence in the recent exhibition of Gabrielle Keiller’s collection of Surrealist and modern art at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Eduardo Paolozzi, whose monumental bronze statue of Sir Isaac Newton was unveiled in the forecourt of the new British Library last month, has not enjoyed a particularly happy relationship with the art market. However, he is opening his second exhibition in eighteen months with Jason & Rhodes, showing new plaster figures, a bronze bust of Josephine Baker, two wood relief tondos and a new suite of twenty-four prints entitled “Duck Farm”. A proposed museum of Paolozzi’s art, which has stirred controversy and dissent, is scheduled to open at The Dean Centre in Edinburgh in autumn 1998.
22 October until 22 November, Jason & Rhodes, 4 New Burlington Place, London, W1X 1FB, Tel: +44 171 434 1768 •Fax: +44 171 287 8841
•Since he parted company with Karsten Schubert two years ago, Keith Coventry, who participated in “Young British Artists V” at the Saatchi Collection in 1995 and is showing several paintings in “Sensation!”, has been organising his own exhibitions, a trend adopted by other contemporaries, whether by choice or circumstance. His new exhibition involves The Showroom, a non-profit space originally devised by the Robinson Road artists and, following its bankruptcy, reopened by curator Kim Sweet in 1993. It is a version of the event staged by Spacex, Exeter, six months ago and will feature “Looted Shop Front”, a bronze cast of a shop window vandalised during the Brixton riots in 1995; “Chartwell”, a mosaic of paintings which becomes a brick wall; and a new “estate” painting, a continuing series in which Coventry describes the ground plan of council estates in the language of abstract modernism.
15 October until 16 November, The Showroom, 44 Bonner Road, London, E2 9JS, Tel: +44 181 983 4115 •Fax: +44 181 981 4112
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Mat’s move as he opens at Lisson'