Category: The Director’s Archive

In 1984, Modern Art Oxford presented a small show of late collages produced by Roland Penrose in the early 1980s, combined with photographs taken by his photographer wife Lee Miller in 1953. Organised by the Gardner Centre Gallery, University of Sussex, the show included two bodies of work in dialogue with each other. Collages made… Continue reading The Director’s Archive: Lee Miller & Roland Penrose – Sussex Collages (1984)

Modern Art Oxford has hosted many touring ‘blockbuster shows’ during its 50 year history and one of the most celebrated was the 1979 exhibition Kandinsky: The Munich Years (1900 – 1914), which was organised by the Scottish Arts Council in association with the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich.  The exhibition brought together 92 works made… Continue reading The Director’s Archive: Kandinsky: The Munich Years (1900 – 1914)

Modern Art Oxford’s 2003 solo exhibition of new work by acclaimed British artist Jim Lambie showcased the artist’s characteristic formal rigour and site-specific response to the gallery space with a DJ’s sense of improvisation and sampling.    The exhibition brought together a new vinyl floor work, Male Stripper, a black and white duct tape striped floor… Continue reading The Director’s Archive: Jim Lambie, 2003

Although Modern Art Oxford has become known in recent decades for solo presentations of international artists working directly in response to the spaces of the gallery, many of the memorable shows in our 50year history have also been touring exhibitions organised by other institutions and exhibited here.  One such show, presented in the early autumn of 1983, was… Continue reading The Director’s Archive: Paul Klee, 1983

I am a great admirer of the American artist Philip Guston (1913-80), and I have been looking again at his extraordinary body of work recently in light of the mood and temperament of our own turbulent times. Guston’swork seems to me to resonate with the anxiety of contemporary society.   The major exhibition of his drawings at Modern… Continue reading The Director’s Archive: Philip Guston, 1989

Bill Woodrow’s solo presentation at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1983 provided an opportunity to look at the artist’s recent work as a way to engage with a new generation of sculptural practice arising from the highly influential St Martin’s School of Art. At that time it had been the seedbed of new developments… Continue reading The Director’s Archive: Bill Woodrow, 1983

One of the most popular exhibitions over the past fifty years at Modern Art Oxford was that of the celebrated French humanist photographer Robert Doisneau (1912 – 1994) in 1992.   For those of us growing up in the 1980s and ’90’s who postered our bedrooms with his iconic images, such as Le baiser de… Continue reading The Director’s Archive: Robert Doisneau, 1992

One of the early shows during Nick Serota’s tenure as Director of the then Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1974 was an exhibition of photographs and a small selection of accompanying watercolours by the British painter, Paul Nash. An exhibition of Nash’s photographs had been shown at Tate Gallery in London the previous summer,… Continue reading The Director’s Archive: Paul Nash, 1974

In February 2007, almost a decade ago, Modern Art Oxford presented From Memory, a major exhibition of paintings by the acclaimed Scottish artist, Callum Innes (b. Edinburgh, 1962). Innes has attracted international admiration since the 1990s and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995 for his large paintings where paint is applied then removed, reapplied… Continue reading The Director’s Archive: Callum Innes, From Memory, 2007