Raven Row's inaugural exhibition - to open on 28th February - is the first large UK show of the collages and mailings of New York artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995). Johnson used radical means to construct and distribute images, inadvertently inventing the ‘mail art movement’. He made art out of social life – both real and imagined – gathering celebrities, the art world, and friends into his work. His influence on twentieth century art far exceeds the recognition he receives.
‘Ray Johnson. Please Add to & Return’ will be the largest exhibition yet of Johnson's work in Europe. Significantly, it will be the first anywhere to represent Johnson's mailings, objects he regarded as gifts and thus contrary to the market, equally with the collage works he made for gallery exhibition in the sixties and seventies. Also included will be the collages he subjected to a seemingly endless process of reworking and overlaying that were found signed with multiple dates and neatly arranged in his house at the time of his death.
Raven Row is a new non-profit contemporary art exhibition centre at 56 Artillery Lane, Spitalfields, London. Constructed within two eighteenth-century silk merchants' houses onto which 6a Architects have added two contemporary galleries, the art centre stands on a part of the street that was known as Raven Row until 1895, when it was absorbed into Artillery Lane.
To learn more:
http://www.blogger.com/www.ravenrow.org
http://www.blogger.com/www.ravenrow.org
