Firstsite, Colchester, is pleased to announce a new commission by Essex-based artist Lata Upadhyaya, Transit: The Identity of a White Van. In the work, Upadhyaya uses the symbolic status of a white transit van as a canvas to explore the rich diversity of contemporary Britain and the communities living in Essex.

The  Emerge  Awards,  a  UK-wide, open competition that champions emerging talent and diversity in the creative industries, have announced the three finalists in the art category.

Sion and Moore, a new commercial gallery project dedicated to photography, is delighted to announce its inaugural show, Work Books 1984 – 2018, a presentation of work by the photographer Nigel Shafran.

The exhibition, which has been designed by Michael Marriott, is comprised of approximately 40 books containing drawings, notes, small photographs and other printedmatter,aswellasfilmsofthebooks–noneofwhichhavebeenshowninLondon before. 

Bethlem Gallery, Beckenham, presents IN/DI/VISIBLE, a group show featuring the work of seven artists: Larry Achiampong, David Blandy, Leon B, Esther Maxwell-Orumbie, John M, Daniel Regan and Mr. X.

The show takes as its starting point themes explored in Achiampong and Blandy’s Finding Fanon trilogy (2015 – 2017), a series of three films that blend popular culture, personal history and post- colonial theory to explore ideas of race, identity and globalisation. 

‘Kudryashov’s works are so good, and so unlike anything else, that the obscurity to which we have so long relegated him, and the difficulties that he has encountered and overcome, should serve as a lesson to us all.’ – William Packer, Financial Times

The Russian Centre of Culture and Science in London together with the London Collectors Club are delighted to announce the presentation of Bridge To The Future – the first comprehensive monograph on the artist Oleg Kudryashov accompanied by an exhibition of selected works created between 1983 and 2003. 

Turner Prize-winning artist Yinka Shonibare, MBE RA, has lent his support to the recently created Emerge Awards, a UK-wide, open competition that champions emerging talent and diversity in the creative industries.

Guy Armitage, the CEO of Zealous, a London-based digital submissions platform for the creative community, set up the awards in response to the changing nature of Britain’s relationship with Europe. 

Saatchi Gallery is pleased to present KNOWN UNKNOWNS, a major new exhibition featuring the work of 17 contemporary artists.

Known Unknowns showcases an international selection of artists, born between 1966 and 1990, from the Saatchi Gallery’s collection. The title refers to the artists' status in the mainstream art world – whilst the group is largely unknown, their respective practices are greatly admired by their artistic peers and seen as breaking new ground.

Firstsite, Colchester is delighted to announce its next exhibition, BRONZE AGE c. 3500 BC – AD 2018. An iteration of Hauser & Wirth’s satirical museological presentation at Frieze London 2017, the show has been curated specifically for Colchester – the earliest recorded Roman town in Great Britain.

Austin / Desmond Fine Art is delighted to announce Fragmented Dialogues, an exhibition in collaboration with CF-LART London that brings together the work of conceptual artist Mario Fonseca and photographer Mauricio Valenzuela. Both Fonseca and Valenzuela worked in Santiago, Chile, during the 1970s and 1980s. Despite two seemingly very different bodies of work, both artists intrinsically shared a strong dialogue around the notions of absence and prohibited identity.

Firstsite, Colchester, in partnership with the Koestler Trust, is delighted to present Chip Night, an exhibition of artwork, writing and music from people in prisons, secure hospitals and on community sentences in the East of England. Curated by Firstsite’s Young Art Kommunity (YAK), the exhibition is drawn from works submitted to the 2017 Koestler Awards – an annual awards programme spanning 52 artforms.

Firstsite, Colchester, is delighted to present The Britishness Project, a groundbreaking exhibition that investigates notions of Britishness through art making.

The show, which was initiated by the gallery, is the result of a collaboration between Essex schoolchildren and eight professional artists, each of whom undertook residencies in schools and education organisations in Colchester, Harlow and Harwich between September and December 2017. 

Home Strike, guest curated by Alexandra Kokoli and Basia Sliwinska, brings together the work of four women artists — CANAN, Paula Chambers, Malgorzata Markiewicz, Su Richardson — in an exhibition exploring contemporary resistance to the persistent feminisation of domesticity and household maintenance. The exhibition interrogates those biopolitical and cultural norms that see women and their bodies systematically domesticated, exploited and imprisoned by patriarchal ideologies. 

‘Chambers’ work is strikingly relevant because he takes the familiar and puts it on a bigger scale. The personal and the universal are stories closely weaved and inextricably bound...’ Lucy Binnersley, The London Magazine

The Heong Gallery at Downing College, University of Cambridge, is delighted to announce the UK presentation of The Court of Redonda – a major solo exhibition by Stephen Chambers RA, following its highly acclaimed unveiling as a Collateral Event of the 2017 Venice Biennale. 

Kent-based arts charity Strange Cargo is delighted to announce that the fourth edition of the Cheriton Light Festival will take place on the 24th and 25th February 2018, from 6 – 9pm. 

Founded in 2013 and staged every two years, the festival offers the public a chance to see the very best in light art, with commissioned works created by leading figures in the field. 

l’étrangère is pleased to present an exhibition of recent film and sculptural work by French artists Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini. Entitled Show Me it features Expanded Crash (Show Me) (2016), along with the award-winning film Dark Energy (2012). Pugnaire and Raffini’s collaborative practice has received international recognition with exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, which holds their work in its collection. 

“[By 1960], I decided I didn’t want to express other artists’ ideas any longer. I wanted to paint what was in front of me.”
Philip Pearlstein, Studio International, 2016

SALON, in collaboration with Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, is delighted to announce its fourth exhibition, Paintings 1990–2017, a presentation of works by the revered American artist, Philip Pearlstein. 

Now in its fourth year, Tintype’s ESSEX ROAD invites eight artists to each make a short film connected to the mile-long north London street.

The gallery’s large window, on a busy corner of Essex Road, becomes a public screen for six weeks over Christmas and New Year. 

Firstsite, Colchester, is delighted to present Power for the People, an exhibition of works by the highly acclaimed and influential British artist Rose Finn-Kelcey.

Finn-Kelcey (1945 – 2014) first came to prominence in the early 1970s as a central gure in Performance and Feminist art. This presentation, which is comprised of more than thirty works charting her forty-plus year career, highlights some of the recurring themes in Finn- Kelcey’s work, in particular empowerment, voice, faith and spirituality, and explores the conceptual strategies she employed to illuminate them. 

Firstsite, Colchester, is delighted to announce The Life of Julie Cope, an exhibition of works by the Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry. 

The show is made up of four large-scale tapestries, as well as material related to A House for Essex (2015), the building designed by Perry in collaboration with Charles Holland of FAT Architecture. An ornate ceramic-clad, gingerbread-like edi ce, A House for Essex serves as a secular chapel to the memory of a ctional Essex woman, Julie Cope.

In Autumn 2017, Austin/Desmond Fine Art will present an exhibition of rare vintage photographs and collages by the British artist Keith Vaughan (1912-1977).  Dating from the 1930s, the majority of these images have never previously been seen or exhibited.