Tate St Ives
Saturday 15 May – Sunday 26 September 2010
Lily van der Stokker No Big Deal Thing
Lily van der Stokker is a Dutch artist based in Amsterdam and New York. Her bold, colourful works most often take the form of large-scale decorative wall drawings, and have a child-like innocence and an adolescent naivety. They deal, in a disarmingly unashamed and exuberant way, with ideas of beauty, love, relationships, family and the everyday. Despite, or perhaps because of, their apparent simplicity, van der Stokker’s works are often challenging and she has come to be seen as an increasingly important artist in the growing discourse of post-feminist practice. This show will be the largest exhibition of her work to date in the UK.
van der Stokker plays on stereotypical femininity, developing a style she calls ‘nonshouting feminism’ through which to explore ideas that seem to be forbidden in art, especially the decorative, the sentimental and the ‘nice.’ Her demure medium: coloured-pencil drawings on A4 paper which she scales up and paints directly onto the walls of the gallery, call to mind the palette of baby clothes or children’s drawings and address the gap between the ‘art world’ and the creativity of everybody else. She seems to ask just what is a fitting subject for a work of art in a museum? Challenging the idea of the ‘grand’, the ‘serious’ or the ‘solemn’. At Tate St Ives, van der Stokker will present a series of large-scale wall drawings, furniture works and small works on paper in the spectacular, curved, sea-facing galleries.
Born in 1954, her work found prominence in the early 1990s as she began exhibiting in important exhibitions and institutions across the world including the Pompidou Centre, Paris, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven and Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis.
A fully-illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition including a new essay by Charles Esche.
Object : Gesture : Grid
St Ives and the International Avant-garde
Alongside the van der Stokker exhibition a series of thematic rooms, drawing on the Tate Collection, will highlight various international trends which fed the flowering of late English Modernism in St Ives through the middle of the twentieth century. This substantial display will occupy the rear suite of galleries and will include key artists associated with St Ives throughout the twentieth century, alongside important European and American peers. It will be the largest Collection display presented at Tate St Ives in a decade.