Kate Bryan (born 11 March 1982) is a British art historian, curator and arts broadcaster. In 2016, she became head of collections for Soho House globally. She presents the Sky Arts Series Inside Arts which began in 2019. [1] She wrote and presented the art television series Galleries on Demand, which aired every week in 2016 on Sky Arts. She is a judge on the Sky Arts television series Artist of the Year, presented by Stephen Mangan and Joan Bakewell. [2] [3]
Bryan has been a contributor to the arts television programme The Culture Show on BBC Two, [4] Newsnight on BBC Two [5] and in 2013 presented an hour-long special for The Culture Show on The Art of Chinese Painting. [6] In 2016, she was a presenter of the Sky Arts documentary The Mystery of the Lost Caravaggio, which aired in Italy as Operazione Caravaggio. [7] [8] She also contributed to Dante's Inferno, [9] Raphael and Beauty and Artemisia Gentileschi: Painting to Survive on Sky Arts. In 2018, she presented an hour-long live broadcast from Tate Modern on the Picasso 1932 exhibition, also on Sky Arts. In 2019 she presented a follow-up as live programme from Tate Britain, Van Gogh and Britain for Sky Arts.
Bryan grew up in Bracknell, Berkshire, [10] and attended a state comprehensive school. [11] Having come from a modest background, she says she hates the elitism which sometimes makes art feel daunting. She earned her BA from Warwick University in 2003 and her MPhil from Hong Kong University in 2010. Her thesis subject was images of the Penitent Magdalene in Italian Renaissance Art. In 2014, she won the Arts and Culture category of the Women of the Future Awards. She is a mentor for young women in the arts. [12]
She is married, and has a daughter, Juno Bobby Bryan, born on 4 July 2019.
Bryan started her career at the British Museum and in 2006 worked on the Michelangelo Drawings exhibition. [13] She lived in Hong Kong from 2007 to 2011 and was gallery director of The Cat Street Gallery. She was a contributing editor for Asian Art News and contributed art-related articles to the South China Morning Post, Time Out [14] London and The Guardian. [15] She has worked as an expert guide for Art History Abroad and Art History UK.
Bryan has worked in the commercial art world as an art dealer in Hong Kong and London. She was fair director of a global art fair in London, Art15. [16] [17] She was a director of the art dealership Fine Art Society on New Bond Street in London between 2011 and 2015. [18] She directed the Contemporary exhibition programme. Notable exhibitions include What Marcel Duchamp Taught Me in 2014, which marked 100 years since Marcel Duchamp created the readymade; [19] [20] Chris Levine's Light 3.142 in 2013; Rob and Nick Carter's Transforming, including a display for the artistic duo at The Frick Collection in New York City; [21] and an exhibition in 2012 entitled Things I Love at the Fine Art Society in which she invited the British pop artist Peter Blake to select his favourite works from the gallery vaults. [22]
Since 2016, Bryan has curated the global art collection for Soho House, comprising over 5000 artworks on permanent display across eight countries. In April 2016, she curated the Vault 100 art collection for The Ned London. The collection highlighted gender disparity in finance and the art world; Bryan acquired the work of 93 women and seven men, reversing the FTSE 100 CEO gender ratio. [23] [24]
In October 2018, Bryan curated Not 30% at The Other Art Fair London, presenting the work of 30 female artists in a separate space as part protest, part exhibition. [25] [26] [27]
In September 2021 Bryan published Bright Stars profiling great artists that died too young. In June 2019, Quarto Press published The Art of Love by Bryan, which profiles 35 artist couples over 140 years. She coauthored A Little Book of Portraits, released in conjunction with the Sky Arts series Artist of the Year, and has written essays for several published exhibition catalogues, including those for Belinda Fox and Sir Peter Blake. [28]
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. He has had an immense impact on 20th- and 21st-century art, and a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal", intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind.
Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti was a French Dadaist painter, collagist, sculptor, and draughtsman. Her work was significant to the development of Paris Dada and modernism and her drawings and collages explore fascinating gender dynamics. Due to the fact that she was a woman in the male prominent Dada movement, she was rarely considered an artist in her own right. She constantly lived in the shadows of her famous older brothers, who were also artists, or she was referred to as "the wife of." Her work in painting turns out to be significantly influential to the landscape of Dada in Paris and to the interests of women in Dada. She took a large role as an avant-garde artist, working through a career that spanned five decades, during a turbulent time of great societal change. She used her work to express certain subject matter such as personal concerns about modern society, her role as a modern woman artist, and the effects of the First World War. Her work often weaves painting, collage, and language together in complex ways.
Gillian Ayres was an English painter. She is best known for abstract painting and printmaking using vibrant colours, which earned her a Turner Prize nomination.
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The 1913 Armory Show, also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. It was the first large exhibition of modern art in America, as well as one of the many exhibitions that have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories.
The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA contains galleries, a theatre, two cinemas, a bookshop and a bar.
Richard William Hamilton CH was an English painter and collage artist. His 1955 exhibition Man, Machine and Motion and his 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, are considered by critics and historians to be among the earliest works of pop art. A major retrospective of his work was at Tate Modern in 2014.
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist. Some of her work consists of exact photographic reproductions of the work of other photographers such as Walker Evans, Eliot Porter and Edward Weston.
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki is the principal public gallery in Auckland, New Zealand. It has the most extensive collection of national and international art in New Zealand and frequently hosts travelling international exhibitions.
Art intervention is an interaction with a previously existing artwork, audience, venue/space or situation. It is in the category of conceptual art and is commonly a form of performance art. It is associated with Letterist International, Situationist International, Viennese Actionists, the Dada movement and Neo-Dadaists. More latterly, intervention art has delivered Guerrilla art, street art plus the Stuckists have made extensive use of it to affect perceptions of artworks they oppose and as a protest against existing interventions.
Hauser & Wirth is a Swiss contemporary and modern art gallery.
Florine Stettheimer was an American modernist painter, feminist, theatrical designer, poet, and salonnière.
Arturo Umberto Samuele Schwarz was an Italian scholar, art historian, poet, writer, lecturer, art consultant and curator of international art exhibitions. He lived in Milan, where he amassed a large collection of Dada and Surrealist art, including many works by personal friends such as Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Man Ray, and Jean Arp.
Iwona Maria Blazwick OBE is a British art critic and lecturer. She is currently the Chair of the Royal Commission for Al-'Ula’s Public Art Expert Panel. She was the Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London from 2001 to 2022. She discovered Damien Hirst and staged his first solo show at a public London art gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1992. She supports the careers of young artists.
The Fine Art Society is a gallery based in both London and in Edinburgh's New Town. The New Bond Street, London gallery closed its doors in August 2018 after being occupied by The Fine Art Society since February 1876, the entrance façade of which was designed in 1881 by Edward William Godwin (1833–1886).
Brice Brown is an American artist who lives and works in New York City.
Phoebe Boswell, is a multi-media artist and film maker based in London, UK. She has won awards in the UK and Ukraine.
Kate Beynon is an Australian contemporary artist based in Melbourne. She was the 2016 winner of the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize for the painting, Graveyard scene/the beauty and sadness of bones.
Kathleen Soriano is a British independent arts curator, writer and television broadcaster.
Nick Fudge is a British painter, sculptor, and digital artist.