Exhibitions
Find out below about the artists currently exhibiting at The City Gallery.
You can also find out about past exhibitions listed in our exhibition archive.
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Actions of a Disparate Man
Part 1
15 March - 26 April
S Mark Gubb explores idioms of popular culture, religion and history ranging from Scooby Doo and the Evil Dead to heavy metal and skateboarding.
For his exhibition at The City Gallery, Gubb has created two independent gallery spaces, only one of which any individual audience member is allowed access to. The wall that creates this divide references the history of partition that has dominated the 20th century and continues into the 21st century. The motif of the wall has become a preoccupation for Gubb and on either side of it sit two quite different exhibitions. The arbitrary nature of the process by which visitors are assigned to one or other exhibition suggests an absurdity to the process.
Both shows are interesting insights into his practice, showcasing his pop cultural erudition through country music, Americana and Soviet history. By segregating the audience from something it creates a sense of injustice and a desire to experience what one has been barred from.
Here today, Gone tomorrow by S Mark Gubb © The Artist
‘ten years on..’ - Fireworks Clay Studios
15 March – 26 April
This exhibition celebrates the first decade of Fireworks Clay Studios in Cardiff showcasing the work of present members and profiling past members. This extraordinary exhibition celebrates the first decade of one of Europe’s most significant art co-operatives. Fireworks Clay Studios has built an international reputation for strength, diversity and dynamism in its field, having facilitated 44 ceramicists over ten years.
Exhibiting artists: Daniel Allen, Sam Bakewell, John Blackwell, Kelly Campbell, David Cushway, Lowri Davies, Anne Gibbs, Virginia Graham, Lisa Krigel, Nicholas Lees, Sara Moorhouse, Emma Parker, Matthew Rowe, Caroline Taylor, Matthew Thompson, Gemma Wilde.
Mererid Velios, writer and curator for the exhibition says: ‘This exhibition provides an extraordinarily exciting and diverse insight into the ways in which ceramics can be used. There is variety in the materials and techniques used and each artist’s source of inspiration is unique and personal.’
Sugar bowl stack by Virginia Graham (slab built stoneware, slips, ceramic decal) 2007 © The Artist
Guy Allott
Falling forwards
10 May – 28 June
Guy Allott has, over the past few years been exploring the qualities and significance of wood and trees. Not just our simple pleasure in it as a material, but a sustained unpicking of its significance to us as a culture. His work includes paintings of spaceships built from wood, paintings onto wood, and then a series of portraits of trees.
The tree represents a primitive prelapsarian state and as a material it is the primal form of technology, before we had the skills for metalworking. The individual tree, particularly in the history of art, inescapably carries a reference to the tree of knowledge, which led to the banishment of humankind from the Garden of Eden.
Contemporary narratives of deforestation and ecological disaster are also a rich source of reference for Allott’s pictorial vocabulary. For The City Gallery, Allott has produced a new series of black and white paintings of forest environments that hark back to Romantic traditions of landscape painting and their brooding tone has an inescapably Germanic quality.
Image: Landscape Spaceship by Guy Allott. Private Collection, London. Courtesy f a projects, London © Guy A
Sara MacKillop
Floor/Wall
10 May – 28 June
The detritus of everyday experience is given a new lease of life through the artwork of Sara MacKillop. She is interested in an investigation of mundane transient materials and what they can signify.
Her objects have the iconic presence of minimalist art works by the likes of Agnes Martin or Sol le Witt. Like the minimalist artists there is no trickery or illusion to her projects. Unlike the minimalist’s preoccupation with permanent substances, with metal and timber or pigment and paper, she utilises the most transient stuff she can find, paperbacks, records sleeves or free biros.
Much of her work takes objects that are dense with information, books, records or jigsaws and by manipulating them replaces their specific information with a blank surface. Through these processes the work retains a gentleness and wit.
7,7,12 by Sara MacKillop © The Artist