Riflemaker is a contemporary art business and exhibition space in London specialising in exhibiting and representing emerging artists. The building is a historic gunmaker's workshop off Regent Street. Built in 1712, it is one of the oldest public buildings in the West End of London. Riflemaker is also a publisher of artists books and host of a variety of events including poetry, music, film events, talks, discussions and performances in the space.
The gallery business was opened in 2003 by Virginia Damtsa and Tot Taylor to explore areas of feminist, performance and sound art, with live performances and discussions taking place every Monday night. The gallery's artists have exhibited at Tate, V&A, ICA, MoMA, Lacma, Frieze Masters and numerous art fairs and public museums around the world. Exhibitions have included portraitist Stuart Pearson Wright in a dual painting/film exhibition featuring the actress Keira Knightley in her debut art-film performance and photographs of voodoo ritual in Haiti by Leah Gordon (co-curator Venice Biennale Haitian Pavilion 2011) as well as a themed exhibition on the disappearance of the ANALOG world - particularly with regard to print photography and recorded music. [1] [2] In 2006, the gallery stopped being Riflemaker for four months and transformed itself into the seminal London art space Indica Gallery (active from November 65 - November 66), with a changing exhibition of work actually shown at Indica and a series of performances including Peter Whitehead (film) and Yoko Ono (Bagism). [3] [4] Ono's artwork Apple was recreated for the exhibition. [5]
Widely reviewed were a floor-to-ceiling installation of paintings by Francesca Lowe with accompanying text by the novelist Alasdair Gray, and Pt 2 of the ANALOG three-instalment exhibition 2010-2015. There were also 'live' exhibitions by Christopher Bucklow (2004) and (2009) and Graham Fink (2014) and (2017).
The 2012 programme included Berlin collective Artists Anonymous and poem machines by the American kinetic pioneer Liliane Lijn in conjunction with Sir John Soane's Museum (Lijn is currently featured in the exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets at MoMA New York); Belfast sculptor Tim Shaw's figurative installation Soul Snatcher Possession, 1970s photo-collages by Penelope Slinger and flipbook films by Juan Fontanive. 2012 exhibitions included Leah Gordon's Caste Portraits (June–July) [6] [7] and a performative exhibition by Alice Anderson in October that year. The feminist artist Judy Chicago displayed test-plates from The Dinner Party and also early drawings and paintings in 2016. The Chinese artist Wen Wu's 2018 exhibition of small 'text' paintings in Beijing and at Riflemaker London was the final exhibition at the Beak St premises.
Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking.
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines and for generating new art forms. These art forms include intermedia, a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins; conceptual art, first developed by Henry Flynt, an artist contentiously associated with Fluxus; and video art, first pioneered by Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell. Dutch gallerist and art critic Harry Ruhé describes Fluxus as "the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties".
Bridget Louise Riley is an English painter known for her op art paintings. She lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France.
Modern Art Oxford is an art gallery established in 1965 in Oxford, England. From 1965 to 2002, it was called The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.
Kristine Stiles is the France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global contemporary art and trauma. Her most recent book is Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma, University of Chicago Press, 2016. She is best known for her scholarship on artists’ writings, performance art, feminism, destruction and violence in art, and trauma in art. Stiles joined the faculty of Duke in 1988, and she has taught at the University of Bucharest and Venice International University. She received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence in 1994, and the Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring in 2011, both at Duke University. Among other fellowships and awards include a J. William Fulbright Fellowship in 1995, a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, and an Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts in Totnes, Devon, England in 2005.
Indica Gallery was a counterculture art gallery in Mason's Yard, St James's, London from 1965 to 1967, in the basement of the Indica Bookshop. John Dunbar, Peter Asher, and Barry Miles owned it, and Paul McCartney supported it and hosted a show of Yoko Ono's work in November 1966, at which Ono met John Lennon.
John Dunbar is a British artist, collector, and former gallerist, best known for his connections to the art and music scenes of the 1960s counterculture.
The Destruction in Art Symposium was a gathering of a diverse group of international artists, poets, and scientists to London from 9–12 September, 1966. Included in this number were representatives of Fluxus and other counter-cultural artistic undergrounds who were there to speak out on the theme of destruction in art.
The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was a concert held in the Great Hall of the Alexandra Palace, London, on 29 April 1967. The fund-raising concert for the counterculture paper International Times was organised by Barry Miles, John "Hoppy" Hopkins, David Howson, Mike McInnerney and Jack Henry Moore. It was part-documented by Peter Whitehead in a film called Tonite Let's All Make Love in London.
Haunch of Venison was a contemporary art gallery operating from 2002 until 2013. It supported the work of contemporary leading artists, presented a broad and critically acclaimed program of exhibitions to a large public through international exhibition spaces in London and New York.
Grapefruit is an artist's book written by Yoko Ono, originally published in 1964. It has become famous as an early example of conceptual art, containing a series of "event scores" that replace the physical work of art – the traditional stock-in-trade of artists – with instructions that an individual may, or may not, wish to enact.
Grapefruit is one of the monuments of conceptual art of the early 1960s. She has a lyrical, poetic dimension that sets her apart from the other conceptual artists. Her approach to art was only made acceptable when [people] like Kosuth and Weiner came in and did virtually the same thing as Yoko, but made them respectable and collectible.
Liliane Lijn is an American-born artist who was the first woman artist to work with kinetic text, exploring both light and text as early as 1962; and in addition, she is in all likelihood the first woman artist to have exhibited a work incorporating an electric motor. She has lived in London since 1966.
Jeanne Beth Greenberg Rohatyn is the owner of Salon 94, an art gallery with three locations in New York City.
Juan Fontanive is a contemporary artist based in New York City.
Cynthia Marie "Tina" Girouard was an American video and performance artist best known for her work and involvement in the SoHo art scene of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting is a 1966 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono.
Apple is a 1966 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono. The work is classified as Temporary art.
Half-A-Room is a 1967 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono.
Tot Taylor is an English, Cambridge-born, London-based songwriter, composer, record producer, author and art curator. He was a songwriter, singer, performer and band member throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties as well as composer of film soundtracks and theatre scores including stage-productions for the UK's National Theatre. In 2003 he founded the Riflemaker Gallery in London with the curator Virginia Damtsa, which featured feminist, audio and performative art for galleries and museums.
Leah Gordon is a British photographer, artist, curator, writer and filmmaker. Her work explores the intervolved and intersectional histories of the Caribbean plantation system, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Enclosure Acts and the creation of the British working-class. She has made various work in Haiti, such as the photographs of Kanaval, which was published in 2021 by Here Press and exhibited at the New Art Exchange, Nottingham in 2012; and the documentary film Kanaval: A People's History of Haiti in Six Chapters.
51°30′46″N0°08′11″W / 51.5129°N 0.1364°W
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