The Royal Academy of Arts 238th Summer Exhibition

Tuesday, 20 June 2006 13:58

London - The Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition is the world’s largest open submission contemporary art exhibition, with a tradition of showcasing work by unknown and emerging artists alongside that of more established names.  Insight Investment, one of the UK’s largest investment managers and part of the HBOS group, is the sponsor of this year’s Summer Exhibition.

The Summer Exhibition, which opens to the public on Monday 12 June 2006, attracts entries from around 9,000 artists, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints and architectural models.  Many of the artists from the 1997 ‘Sensation’ exhibition are included this year such as Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Damien Hirst and Gary Hume RA.  In addition, artists that have been invited to submit work include Chantal Joffe and Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry.

This year’s exhibition co-ordinators – Royal Academicians Peter Cook, David Mach and Alison Wilding, part of a larger committee, have selected over 1300 works, the majority of which are for sale, offering an unrivalled opportunity for collectors and the public to purchase original artworks. 

Visitors to the Summer Exhibition 2006 will come face to toe with Damien Hirst’s enormous sculpture Virgin Mother.  Standing 34 feet high and weighing 14 tons, Hirst’s bronze sculpture of a dissected naked pregnant woman dominates the Annenberg Courtyard.  Inspired by Degas’ La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (currently on display in the Royal Academy’s John Madejski Fine Rooms), The Virgin Mother’s body is flayed on the right hand side, revealing a fetus inside the womb.

The Summer Exhibition 2006 includes two memorial galleries dedicated to the late Members Patrick Caulfield RA and Sir Eduardo Paolozzi RA, both of whom died in 2005.

Patrick Caulfield RA (1936 – 2005)
Caulfield, born in London and brought up in Bolton, Lancashire, is hailed as an originator of Pop Art in England who established his reputation in the 1960s as one of the most thoughtful and engaging painters of our time.  He entered the Royal College of Art as a postgraduate student in 1960, one year behind David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj, and went on to paint his highly original and very personal interpretations of such traditional subjects as interiors and still lifes, marked by a graphic elegance, a finely tuned sense of color and a sometimes melancholy air.  The Patrick Caulfield Memorial Gallery includes eleven paintings spanning five decades, among them the Tate's key 'After Lunch' of 1975, a full set of the ravishing 22 Jules Laforgue screenprints of 1973, and his penultimate painting, the mysterious and haunting 'Bishops'.  The display has been curated by Marco Livingstone, the leading authority on Caulfield's work and the author of the Lund Humphries monograph on his paintings published in 2005.

Sir Eduardo Paolozzi RA (1924 – 2005)
Paolozzi, born of Italian parents in Leith, Edinburgh, was a founding figure of the British Pop Art movement and the creator of vast public art works.  One of Britain's foremost sculptors, collagists and printmakers, his work is based on his interest in the mass media and in new developments in science and technology of the post-war era.  He was highly influenced by industrial techniques, making many of his sculptures in aluminum and incorporating prefabricated parts.  The Sir Eduardo Paolozzi Memorial Gallery focuses on his works created between 1950 and 1970 and presents the artist's versatility with an exuberant display ranging from sculpture to printmaking.  The display has been curated by Dr. Daniel Herrmann, Paolozzi Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

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