Ian Breakwell: The Elusive State of Happiness on Nottingham Visual Art
Nottingham Visual Art (eds. Jennie Syson and Andrew Cooper)
26/02/10
by Wayne Burrows
(excerpt)
This resistance to containment within any particular interpretation or genre across a body of work that spans drawing, photography, writing, film, audio, performance and television generates its own confusion about the fundamental nature of Breakwell’s project, and this extreme fluidity has almost certainly contributed to both his widespread influence on younger artists (without Breakwell’s example, it’s unlikely that artists as different in sensibility as Jeremy Deller, Heather & Ivan Morison and Tracey Emin would be working quite as they do) and his relative neglect inside the art world since the 1970s.
[…]
The exhibition begins with a 1964 etching, The Regent Snooker Hall, Derby, made in the year that Breakwell graduated from the local art college. It’s a canny choice of starting point by the joint curators Louise Clements and Alfredo Cramerotti, because despite its apparent straightforwardness – an elegant, roughly rendered evocation of a dimly lit space populated by shadows, perhaps looking back to the 1950s kitchen sink realism of John Bratby and Joan Eardley – it also points forward to the perspective that would inform everything that followed. It’s all here, in embryo form: the mundane urban setting and oblique viewpoint, the snatched quality of the image, the glancing fascination with an otherwise unobserved corner of everyday life. These things would become the raw material for all Breakwell’s later work.
[…]
The addition of material from the AD period of 2004 onwards makes this the first retrospective to follow the threads of Breakwell’s practice to their inevitable, if premature completion. Yet even as Breakwell’s death becomes the main subject of the work, he never allows autobiography to dominate: instead, it’s as though the art – from which Breakwell often removed himself, acting more as engaged, bemused and fascinated observer – obliges him to stand slightly detached even from his own physical decline, bringing that experience into sharp universal focus. Despite the roots of all his art in his own immediate life, he exists here as a figure defined by what he has observed and experienced, rather than a protagonist, and his literal absence makes the web of incidental details he leaves behind seem all the more solid.
complete review at
http://www.nottinghamvisualarts.net/writing/feb-10/ian-breakwell-elusive-states-happiness
Ian Breakwell: The Elusive State of Happiness on METRO Newspaper
METRO Newspaper
22 February 2010
Ian Breakwell: The Elusive State of Happiness on The Guardian Guide
The Guardian Newspaper
Saturday 13 February 2010
This is the first major retrospective of the work of Ian Breakwell, who died just five years ago after establishing his reputation as the greatest artist to come out of Derby since Joseph Wright of Derby, and one of the most mischievously spirited artworld provocateurs of the late-20th century. Working in just about every medium, his deadpan take on the world amounts to a life long series of mundane epiphanies. One of the most engaging diarists of his time, he was arguably one of the last great diarists before the blog age. Typical is The Walking Man Diary 1975-78, a series of photographic and textual observations made from the window of his Smithfield home of a lone passerby imbued with pathos.
QUAD, Sat to 18 Apr
Robert Clark
Ian Breakwell: The Elusive State of Happiness on Derby Evening Telegraph
Derby Evening Telegraph
12th February 2010
Ian Breakwell: The Elusive State of Happiness
February 12, 2010
Ian Breakwell:
The Elusive State of Happiness
13 February – 18 April 2010
Seminar Event 14 April 2010
QUAD
Market Place
Cathedral Quarter
Derby
DE1 3AS
UK
http://www.derbyquad.co.uk
The Elusive State of Happiness is a major exhibition of the work of Ian Breakwell (1943-2005), a man with an eye for seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Breakwell was a world renowned prolific artist who took a multi-media approach to his observation of the minutiae of life through a wide range of media including dairies, film works, TV, audio and drawing.
Spanning a career of 40 years, his work is an attempt to subtract the obvious from the everyday, to isolate and bring it to another level of meaning, and aesthetic experience. The diary is the central motif of the exhibition, and the link of Ian’s books and films with his video, drawing and audio works – all of them speaking as reference for his Continuous Diary lifelong project.
The humour, mischief and oblique wonder at the world that permeates his verbal and visual legacy is already legendary. His voyeurism -social rather than sexual- is always mitigated by humour: “The humour that I love is the morose, the deadpan, the seemingly unfunny stuff that is close to misery, but not quite.” By presenting a continuous re-interpretation of what we already know, and have overlooked, Breakwell invites the viewer not to discard, but to reinvent the meaning of things. He invites us to see with other eyes.
Born in Derby and educated at the Derby College of Art, Ian Breakwell was a remarkably talented artist in any medium he handled, written, spoken and depicted, including media broadcasts, notably with adaptations of his Continuous Diary and Christmas Diary on Channel 4 in 1984 and 1988.
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Curated by Louise Clements & Alfredo Cramerotti, in partnership with Anthony Reynolds Gallery and Felicity Sparrow.
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A Seminar Event on Ian Breakwell will take place in QUAD, Derby, UK on 14th April 2010. Contributions by Breakwell’s scholars and experts and special screening of the film works Auditorium (1993) and Variety (2001).
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A richly illustrated Exhibition guide with over 80 colour reproductions accompanies the exhibition with original texts and visuals on more than 20 works from Breakwell’s illustrious career through a wide range of media. Full colour, Brossard cover, available through QUAD.
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During March a Film Season curated by Felicity Sparrow and David Sin will screen in QUAD’s cinema, showcasing some of the films that impacted on the work and life of Ian Breakwell.
For more information:
http://www.derbyquad.co.uk
info@derbyquad.co.uk
Tel. +44 (0)1332 290606 +44 (0)1332 290606
Image: detail from: Walserings 1991
© the estate of Ian Breakwell
Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
Manifesta Coffee Break 2009
Manifesta Coffee Break is a recurring public meeting, serving as an active tool to discuss the concept of Manifesta within a larger critical context. The fifth Coffee Break takes place on 12 and 13 December 2009 in Murcia, Spain, in preparation for Manifesta 8, and in direct relation to the context of the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, which will take place in 2010. Titled Towards Manifesta 8, this Manifesta Coffee Break brings together both local and international artists, curators, theorists, writers and other art professionals to reflect on Manifesta’s logic in direct relation to Murcia-Cartagena and its links with northern Africa. It is open for all who are interested, and consists of sessions by the three curatorial teams of Manifesta 8 together with invited speakers and guests.
Chamber of Public Secrets (CPS)
“Unfaithful Relations: Art, Engagement and Audience within the Biennial Model”
December 12, 10.00-13.30
with contributions by: Sara Black, Alfredo Cramerotti, Christine Eyene, Rian Lozano, Fay Nicolson and Khaled Ramadan
Through presentations and work groups at the Manifesta Coffee Break, CPS will start a dialogue about the role and involvement of the audience in the region of Murcia: visitors, artists, students and media presence. How can the local art scene, cultural producers and activists make a sustainable use of a biennial, in terms of time, space and continuity? What possibilities are there for audience development? And how to avoid or respond to the common skepticism of the local (art) scene towards a biennial which can be viewed as welcome/unwelcome or invited/invasive? The presentations by Sara Black (Great Britain) and Christine Eyene (France/Cameroon) do not attempt to answer these questions, but discuss potential approaches towards audience inclusion.
Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF)
“The Aesthetic Compass: Human Geography and its Reverberations in Art”
December 12, 16.00-19.30
with contributions by: Jeremy Beaudry, Sherif El Azma, Bassam El Baroni, Nida Ghouse and Yaiza Hernández Velázquez
tranzit.org
“Post-Communist as well as Post-Colonial”
December 13, 10.00-13.30
with contributions by: Zbyněk Baladrán, Erick Beltrán, Vít Havránek, Dóra Hegyi, Richard Kostelanetz, Boris
Ondreička and Georg Schöllhammer
For a video excerpt of MCB:
QUAD Derby / Hayward Gallery ‘MAGIC SHOW’
The Guardian Newspaper
Saturday, 28th November 2009
Alfredo Cramerotti: Aesthetic Journalism book launch and lecture performance by Fay Nicolson
Sat 07.11.2009, 7.30 p.m.
Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen
Weiherburggasse 13, Innsbruck, Austria
Critical Photography book series / recommended by NY Photo Festival
New York Photo Festival Newsletter
New York, 27 october 2009
Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti] 
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