New Exhibitions open at the School of Art Gallery

The School of Art Gallery is open Monday to Friday 10:00 to 17:00.

We are closed over Easter, Christmas and the New Year. Admission is free.

Both exhibitions are open 6 March to 12 May 2017 

Cutting Edge: The British Print from Hayter to Hockney 1960 to 1980

Including work by Stanley William Hayter, Jeffrey Steele, Ian Hamilton Finlay, William Scott, John Piper and David Hockney

This exhibition surveys the cutting edge of British printmaking from the 1960s to the early 1980s. It has been chosen chiefly from the Aberystwyth University School of Art Collection that benefitted from a gift of prints from the Arts Council of Wales in 2002.

In the 1960s, British artists broke away from traditional making techniques, not only in painting and sculpture but also in printmaking.  Printmaking had enjoyed a revival in the first decades of the twentieth century with an emphasis on etching that required highly accomplished figure or landscape drawing as well as expertise in the craft elements of printmaking.

In the ‘60s British artists began to use screen-printing which suited both hard-edged Abstractionist and Pop Art imagery, inspired by the example of American artists working in New York earlier in the decade. Op Art, with its use of stripes and dots, also gained much from the clean-cut, industrial nature of silkscreen printing.  At the same time, new experiments in lithography and combinations of techniques, often employing photographs and collage, meant that British printmaking became a vibrant and exciting form.

 

From the Life Room: Art School figure drawings and studies since 1800 

Including work by Hugh Blaker, George Chapman, John Elwyn and Evelyn Gibbs

For centuries, drawing the human form in the life room was regarded essential to an artist’s professional training. Life drawing classes continue to play an important role in the instruction of artists at Aberystwyth. Drawing the figure is arguably the ultimate test of a student’s powers of hand-eye coordination,manual dexterity and expression.

This exhibition of drawings and paintings taken largely from the School of Art Museum collection offers an insight into drawing practices in British art schools over the last two hundred years. Works by William Etty, Christopher Williams, Hugh Blaker, John Elwyn and John Minton as well as Aberystwyth alumni will be shown alongside life room props and teaching aids: plaster casts of the antique statuary, a skeleton, anatomy manuals and mannequins.