Anthony Wilkinson Gallery presents The Storm by Bob and Roberta Smith – storms, birds and words. The paintings of storms are uncharacteristically images inspired by storms on the border between France and England, seen from Ramsgate looking towards Calais.
Bob and Roberta Smith started in 2022 making watercolours of this view and exchanging them for donations to life-saving charities. The image of the channel was once a playground and an entry point to Europe, but the perception of the channel has changed over the past decade. It’s now seen as a border and a barrier; it’s polluted, and it’s tragically a place where people die trying to cross to the UK. The paintings of storms, oil on found wood material, are images of mental states and uncertainty. Moody and expressive, they are partly painted from life and partly improvised from memory. Each work has its own sculpture of a bird dedicated to it. The birds, seagulls or crows, made from scraps of wood and old piano parts, are seen as a point of entry to the paintings. The birds are champions and perhaps defenders of the spirit of the paintings. The viewer is invited to imagine that the seagulls or crows have flown out of the paintings and into the gallery space, waiting to fly back again into the storm.
More typical of Bob and Roberta Smith’s output are his text works. For this exhibition he is presenting works from the series The Word Observatory – hexagonal paintings that are portraits of words. He attempts to paint the character of a word, of how each word might look in a particular light and how they might feel different in other contexts: Hope, Storm, Imaginative, Together… The composer Eric Satie once claimed to have made a contraption for looking at musical notes. For instance, Satie said the B flat was the most vile looking creature. The word portraits were originally shown in the exhibition The Word Observatory at Von Bartha Gallery, Copenhagen in 2022.
In 1996, Anthony Wilkinson invited Bob and Roberta Smith to create a happening at the Serpentine Lake in London, where he made concrete boats and invited friends and art lovers to attempt to float them on the water. The performative aspect of this happening, entitled Flawed, established the idea that art could exist in the act of play and the viewers interacting with artworks. Flawed led Nicolas Bourriaud to invite Bob and Roberta Smith to take part in the significant exhibition Altermodern at Tate Britain in 2009 and to do a retrospective at MO.CO. Panacée in Montpellier in 2018, both exploring ideas about relational art. For The Storm, both rooms encourage the audience to participate and play with the birds and the words.
| Duration | 08 March 2025 - 17 April 2025 |
| Times | Wed - Sat 11 - 5 pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Anthony Wilkinson Gallery |
| Address | 44 Lexington Street (Room 2), London W1F OLW , , |
| Contact | 07980 892 851 / info@anthonywilkinsongallery.org / www.anthonywilkinsongallery.org/ |