TRUE TO LIFE
Coventry City Art Gallery
3 February - 27 March 2007

Illustrated: Study of Kevin Gasson, 1988.
Project - Observations on Local Education.

Featuring works by Freud, Auerbach, Bomberg, Shoa, Haughton,and a number of 'New British Realists'.

"Chunks of nature, utterly raw, thrown onto the canvas and pulsating with life," is Emil Zola's statement about the Impressionists. It is above the door of a new exhibition, 'True To Life' at The Herbert, Coventry City Museum & Art Gallery.

'True To Life' celebrates the evolving tradition of figurative painting with past and contemporary classics. If Zola's words were not enough, I was left in no doubt on entering this exhibition that I was in for a sensory visual feast. Major works by Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, David Bomberg, Robert Lenkiewicz, Nahem Shoa and Desmond Haughton, together with the New British Realists stop you in your tracks. "In the present critical climate a show like this feels revolutionary." (Myrna Shoa, 2007).

Myrna Shoa's YouTube video is available here.

CLOSE READING
Exquisite Corpse
Plymouth Arts Centre
9 May 2007

Illustrated: Robert Lenkiewicz with the embalmed corpse of Diogenes, the vagrant Edwin MacKenzie, 1985. Photo: Dr Philip Stokes.

Speaker: Wolfe Lenkiewicz

This Close Reading will focus on Lenkiewicz's relationship with one of his most well known sitters, Edwin McKenzie. Perhaps better known to many as Diogenes, this talk will look at events which led to him becoming the exquisite corpse.

Lenkiewicz' son, Wolfe Lenkiewicz, also an artist, has chosen to talk about his first hand experience of the events that occurred around the time of the death of Diogenes. Wolfe was a part of it all and also knew Diogenes in his lifetime. He will be showing some material in relation to those events and discussing some of the issues raised by the seizing of the body by the Coroner in October 2002 and the subsequent decision to return it to the Executor of the Lenkiewicz estate. He will also sketch out a brief history of the dead body in the history of art and follow this with some thoughts in relation to his father's work as it related to death and the dead body and also the philosophy of death as materialised in the dead physical body.

Wolfe Lenkiewicz studied philosophy and, like his father, has a passionate interest in matters philosophical (as well as matters artistic). He lives in London and runs a successful contemporary art gallery.

The Close Reading will be held at the Plymouth Art Centre, Batter Street studio on Wednesday May 9th at 7.30. The Studio will hold 70 people. Doors will be opened at 7.15 and people will be admitted on a first come first served basis.

(Dave Goodwin, www.lenkiewicz.org, 2007).

Lenkiewicz: The Thinking Painter
Plymouth City Museum Lunchtime Talk
Tuesday 20 November 2007

Illustrated: 'The Hour of Our Death', Philippe Aries. Oxford Paperbacks.

Speaker: Francis Mallett

As part of its Talks Programme, the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery are hosting a presentation by Francis Mallett on Tuesday 20 November. Titled Lenkiewicz: The Thinking Painter, the talk will look at the themes and ideas behind the artist's work, in particular his concept of "aesthetic fascism", its origins and meaning.

The speaker will also try to situate Lenkiewicz' thought in relation to the counter-cultural movement by examining his links to thinkers such as R.D. Laing, Ivan Illich and others.

AT THE EDGE: Works by R.O. Lenkiewicz (1941 - 2002)
Hartlepool Art Gallery
29 September - 18 November 2007

Novas Gallery, Camden
29 November - 25 January 2008

Illustrated: Bishop Startled, 1972. Project - Vagrancy.

"The ideas that underlie this exhibition... at the edge... stretch back to the late 1960's and to the themed exhibitions that Robert Lenkiewicz began to organise in Plymouth in 1973.

We are seeking to show work that we hope will demonstrate Lenkiewicz's skill and humanity but will also - when seen together - create within you an aesthetic response that will have staying power. This is a themed show, in the Lenkiewicz 'mould' but is not of course an original Lenkiewicz theme. We hope this exhibition will stretch the imagination of those attending in a way that Lenkiewicz himself would have hoped to do.

This is a new project; we can't reconstruct one of the original collections (which he called Projects), so we are generating the first post-Lenkiewicz project showing work from several of the original Projects but all touching on one of his 'meta-themes'; that of social enquiry. We think that this is a legitimate 'stretch' from his mode of presenting his work because he himself moved work between related themes, putting the same piece in different projects if he felt like it. We could explore any of the many aspects within his work but we have chosen this orientation, because we feel it resonates with his objectives.

We want to 'provoke thought' (a favourite Lenkiewicz expression and undoubtedly one of his objectives) and have sought to select pieces that collectively and individually will achieve this.

Why 'at the edge'? We wanted to illuminate Lenkiewicz's over-arching interest in people who are in extremis, or at critical moments in life, or suffering acute degrees of isolation for one reason or another. At such times human beings may feel very alive but may also be near to death or very excluded from the world that surrounds them. A paradox.

Lenkiewicz didn't see the projects as tools of social change, but in a sense they were. As a figurative painter of social themes, an accessible, even obsessive chronicler in a time of change, Lenkiewicz in faraway Plymouth has a lot to show us about the tectonic shifts that have occurred in our social fabric. Not oblivious to the tide of conceptual work that has engulfed the art world since he left London, but not swayed by it either, he used traditional painterly skills to open the eyes of the onlooker."

(TLF introduction to gallery brochure for At The Edge: Works by R.O. Lenkiewicz (1941-2002)).

AT THE EDGE: Works by R.O. Lenkiewicz (1941-2002)
Novas Gallery, Camden
29 November 2007 - 25 January 2008

The Lenkiewicz Foundation have organised a series of Close Readingsto coincide with the exhibition. These will be held at the Novas Gallery:

• 7 December: Nahem Shoa. The Bishop Startled.
• 14 December: John Healy in conversation with Annie Hill-Smith. The Grass Arena/Addictive Behaviour.
• 11 January: Wolfe Lenkiewicz (& friends). Exquisite Corpse.
• 18 January: talk by Louise Courtnell.
• 25 January: talk by Matty Small.

Welcoming Home The Painter Prodigal Son
Camden New Journal, Thursday 29 November 2007