Aquarius Rising Artwork

Catherine Yass - Blast Furnace

Catherine Yass was born in London, England, in 1963. After receiving a BA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1986, she studied at Goldsmiths College from 1988 – 90, graduating with a Masters degree in Fine Arts.

Yass is best known for her distinctive wall-mounted lightboxes. Typically she manipulates her subject matter by overlaying the negative and the positive from photographs she has taken and then realises the resultant images as lightboxes, prints and films.

In 2017 RIBA held a screening of the artist’s film, Aeolian Piano, with the BBC. Recent solo exhibitions include Milton Keynes Gallery (2014); Alison Jacques Gallery, London (2012) a mid-career retrospective at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea (2011); The Phillips Collections, Washington D.C. (2011);  Stedelijk-Hertogenbosch Museum, The Netherlands (2009) and St Louis Art Museum, Missouri (2009).

Yass was selected to represent Britain at the Indian Triennale at the Museum of Modern Art in Delhi in 2001. She was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2002 and, in 2005, she took up a British Council Residency in China. Yass has completed major commissions for The Jewish Community Centre, London (2013); Rambert Dance Company, London (2013) and Merce Cunningham, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York (2003).

Her work can be found in a number of public collections including the Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Biblioteca Albertina, Leipzig; National Museum of Women in the Arts Collection, Washington D.C.; The Jewish Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York and Queensland Art Gallery, Australia.

Yass currently teaches MA Photography at the Royal College of Art, London.

Damien Hirst - Diacetoxyscripenol (Grey Spot)

Damien Steven Hirst (; néBrennan; born 7 June 1965) is an English artist, entrepreneur, and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom’s richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.

Death is a central theme in Hirst’s works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep, and a cow) are preserved, sometimes having been dissected, in formaldehyde. The best-known of these was The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3 m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a clear display case. He has also made “spin paintings”, created on a spinning circular surface, and “spot paintings”, which are rows of randomly coloured circles created by his assistants.

In September 2008, Hirst made an unprecedented move for a living artist by selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby’s by auction and bypassing his long-standing galleries. The auction raised £111 million ($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction as well as Hirst’s own record with £10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde.

Since 1999, Hirst’s works have been challenged and contested as plagiarised 16 times. In one instance, after his sculpture Hymn was found to be closely based on a child’s toy, legal proceedings led to an out-of-court settlement.

Langlands & Bell - The Qal'a of the Bani Hamad

Ben Langlands was born in London in 1955 and Nikki Bell was born in London in 1959. They studied fine art together at Middlesex Polytechnic from 1977 – 80 and have been working together since 1978. Through film and video, digital media projects, sculpture, installation, prints, and architecture, Langlands & Bell explore the complex web of relationships linking people and architecture and the coded systems of circulation and exchange from our own society and from other cultures.

In 2002 they visited Afghanistan for two weeks where they investigated the aftermath of war in the twenty-first century. The resulting collection of work was shown in The House of Osama Bin Laden at the Imperial War Museum, London. The body of work was shortlisted for Turner Prize in 2003 and won the BAFTA Award for Interactive Art Installation in 2004. They have also made an impressive body of prints, a selection of which were included in Eye on Europe, Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2006.

Solo exhibitions include Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (2020); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2018); Gibberd Gallery, Harlow (2014); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2007); Somerset House, London (2007); Tate Britain, London (2005); Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes (2005); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2003); Imperial War Museum, London (2003). Public commissions include Beauty < Immortality, Piccadilly Circus tube station, London (2016); FR Paris Metro/T3 Tramway interchange at Porte de Vincennes, Paris (2012); Paddington Basin Bridge, London (2004) and Terminal 5, Heathrow Airport, London (2005).

Their work is held in a large number of international museum collections including Arts Council of England, London; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds;  Saatchi Collection, London; Tate, London; New British Embassy, Moscow;  Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki; Norwegian National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Langlands & Bell live and work in Kent and London, England.

Donald Judd - A Selection of Four Drawings

Donald Judd is a landmark figure in the history of postwar art. In the 1950s, he studied philosophy and art history and took classes at the Art Students League in New York. He was first publicly recognized as an art critic, writing reviews for Arts magazine from 1959–65. It was during this time that he developed from an abstract painter into the producer of the hollow, rectilinear volumes for which he became well known. Key to this transformation was his essay “Specific Objects,” written in 1964 and published the following year in Arts Yearbook 8. The text celebrated a new kind of artwork untethered from the traditional frameworks of painting and sculpture, focusing instead on an investigation of “real space,” or three dimensions, using commercial materials and an emphasis on whole, unified shapes.

In 1964 Judd turned to professional sheet-metal fabricators to make his work out of galvanized iron, aluminum, stainless steel, brass, and copper. This effectively removed from the artist’s studio any hands-on art making, a shift that would hold great importance for the then-rising generation of Conceptual artists, who held that ideas themselves, exempt from any materialization, can exist as art. In the mid-to-late 1960s, Judd produced and exhibited a large number of his iconic forms. These range from what are referred to as “stacks”, which are hung at even intervals from floor to ceiling; “progressions”, whose measurements follow simple numerical sequences; bull-nosed shaped protrusions from the wall; and box-like forms that are installed directly on the floor. This sculptural vocabulary continued to serve as a basic foundation from which Judd developed many versions—in varied combinations of metals, colored Plexiglas, and plywood—until his death in 1994.

In 1968 Judd purchased a five-story living and working space in New York’s Soho neighborhood. Several years later, he would take up residence in Marfa, Texas, where he was drawn to the Chihuahuan Desert landscape and sparse population. In both New York and Texas, he designed his homes to include permanent installations of his work, alongside that of peers such as Larry Bell, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, and others. In Marfa, this project eventually grew, with the financial help of the fledgling Dia Art Foundation, into a large-scale, multi-building museum now called The Chinati Foundation. Judd’s deliberate installations, and the sculptures that he created, indicate that he considered space itself to be a material just as essential as the industrial surfaces out of which his objects were constructed. Architecture and design also greatly interested him, and his activities extended to preserving and repurposing existing buildings, and to furniture design and printmaking. Throughout his life, Judd continued to publish articles advocating the value of critical thought and the importance of artists to society.

Keith Coventry - Black Paintings

Keith Coventry is a British artist and curator. In September 2010 his Spectrum Jesus painting won the £25,000 John Moores Painting Prize.

Keith Coventry was born in Burnley in 1958 and lives and works in London. He attended Brighton Polytechnic 1978–1981 and Chelsea School of Art London 1981–1982. He was featured in the seminal exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1997 and in 2006, he received a mid-career retrospective at Glasgow’s Tramway (Art Centre). He was also a co-founder and curator of City Racing, an influential not-for-profit gallery in Kennington, South London from 1988 to 1998.

His work has been exhibited widely in the UK and Europe and is included in collections worldwide, including the British Council; Tate Modern; Arts Council of England; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis;, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. In 2010 Coventry was awarded the John Moores Painting Prize.

Fergus Greer - Leigh Bowery, Session VII, Look 37

Born in England and brought up in Southern Ireland, Fergus Greer studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London. He then went to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and served four years with the Irish Guards. Greer left the army to pursue a career in photography, first working as a photographic assistant with a number of photographers including Richard Avedon and later as studio manager to Terence Donovan.

As a freelance photographer, Greer worked for a variety of magazines and regularly shot covers for The Sunday Times Magazine. He moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and photographed for leading American and international magazines while continuing to work on personal projects.

As an officially accredited war artist, in the late 1990s he documented the war in Kosovo, and published a book of

these photographs in June 2001. He also collaborated with the Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery to produce Leigh Bowery Looks: Photographs 1988-1994 (2001).

Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) was the ultimate performance artist, fashion designer, nightclub sensation, art object, aspiring pop-star and above all an icon whose influence traversed music, art, film and fashion worlds. Perhaps he is best-known for his role as a nude model for some of Lucian Freud’s most iconic paintings; ironic for the man who was infamous for his costumes. Bowery arrived in London in 1980 from Sunshine, Australia, collaborated notoriously with the dancer Michael Clark, and was proprietor of the infamous 1980s Soho nightclub, ‘Taboo’.

Dan Holdsworth - Mirrors: Mount St. Helens, Crater Glacier in Washington, USA

Dan Holdsworth (born in 1974 in Welwyn Garden City, England) is a British photographer who creates large-scale photographs and digital art characterized by the use of traditional techniques and unusually long exposure times, and by radical abstractions of geography. He has exhibited internationally including solo shows at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, and Barbican Art Gallery, London; and group shows at Tate Britain, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. His work is held in collections including the Tate Collection, Saatchi Collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne and London.

Dan Holdsworth - Blackout