A special season of exhibitions, publications, film and performance, celebrating half a century of the creative output of Bruce McLean; one of the most important figures in British contemporary art. This includes a two-part retrospective at Bernard Jacobson Gallery and the premiere of a film by McLean and long-time ‘Nice Style’ collaborator, Gary Chitty, titled The Decorative Potential of Blazing Factories.
With characteristic subversive wit, in the early days of his career, McLean created his own self-styled retrospective, with King for a Day at the Tate Gallery (1972). The genesis of King for a day was a seemingly contrary decision to stop being an artist, McLean explains, ‘I had heard that if you have a retrospective at the Tate, that’s the end of your life as an artist, so the obvious thing to do was to create a retrospective.’
Luckily for audiences and collectors across the intervening decades, this prophesy proved to be very far from the case. McLean has gone on to exhibit widely across the globe, including one-man exhibitions at The Modern Art Gallery, Vienna, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, MOMA, Oxford, Arnolfini, Bristol and GOMA, Brisbane and numerous important group exhibitions, including The Tate’s Conceptual Art in Britain 1964 – 1979.
