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ICONOCLASTS:ART OUT OF THE MAINSTREAMTeacher Resource
- Introduction
- Overview: Iconoclasts
- Exhibition floorplan
- Room by room guide
- Talking Points
- Practical Activities
- Glossary of terms
Introduction to the Gallery
The Saatchi Gallery is a contemporary art gallery –
artworks displayed are made by artists living and working
today.
These artworks are at the cutting edge of contemporary
art.
Many of the exhibited artists have never previously shown
in the UK. They may be unknown when first exhibited, not
only to the general public but also to the commercial art
world.
These artists are subsequently offered shows by galleries
and museums internationally. In this effect, the gallery
operates as a springboard for young artists to launch their
careers.
The Gallery presents 3-4 new exhibitions per year.
Overview of the Exhibition: Iconoclasts
Traditionally, Iconoclasm is the
deliberate destruction within a
culture of the culture's
own religious icons and other
symbols or monuments, usually
for religious or political motives.
People who engage in or support
Iconoclasm are called
Iconoclasts.
Iconoclasm is Greek for “breaker of icons”. In the
Byzantine Empire in the 8th and 9th century AD,
Iconoclasts were the image-breakers who refused to
adore the icons of saints and the Virgin Mary.
Over time, Iconoclasm has also come to refer to
aggressive statements or actions against any well-
established status quo. It has been used across every
medium, from journalism to advertisement.
In the art world, there is a history
of Iconoclasm motivated by the
aesthetics or appearance of an
artwork, manifesting itself by
attacks on art by individuals.
For some contemporary artists,
ideas of destruction and change
have become forms of creation.
• Iconoclasts: Art Out of the Mainstream explores the experimental, and often transformational, practices of a small
group of ground-breaking artists.
• The exhibition contains a myriad of unusual image-making practices – from branding imagery onto human skin
and sculpting using crow feathers to embroidering onto vintage photographs.
• We know that historically, Iconoclasts were ‘image breakers’. However, modern culture has turned art and
iconoclasm into mainstream practices, eroding the radicalism of the concept. Thus, this exhibition asks us to
engage with what modern day iconoclasm might be.
• The thirteen contemporary artists in this exhibition explore ideas and themes of contemporary iconoclasm. Not
only do they appropriate past images and modify or alter them in new ways, they question the intrinsic nature of
iconoclasm itself, by asking what defines a work of art.
• Other than their shared iconoclastic urge, there is no overarching theme bringing these artists together, although
parallels can be drawn between many of their practices.
• Not only do a high number of materials and techniques cohabit in one exhibition, but also diverse genres,
including abstraction, figuration, creation and deconstruction.
Overview of the Exhibition: Iconoclasts
GROUND FLOOR
G1: Josh Faught
G2: Thomas Maileander
G3: Makiko Kudo
G4: Maurizio Anzeri
G5: Danny Fox
FIRST FLOOR
G6: Matthew Chambers, Aaron Fowler, Renee So *
G7: Daniel Crews-Chubb *
G8: Dale Lewis *
G10: Sculptures by Kate MccGwire , Douglas White and
Alexi Williams Wynn
* These galleries contain artwork that may not be appropriate to under 16’s, please check on website prior to your visit.
Gallery 1 - Josh Faught
• Gallery 1 shows five large-scale, embroidered works by American artist Josh Faught.
• Faught combines textiles, collage, painting and sculpture to create tapestries that in his words
“address the relationships between language, community, and constructions of identity”.
• He uses found and everyday objects, highlighting the connections and disconnections between
materials and things.
• The employment of traditional craft techniques like crochet, loom weaving and ikat, is applied to
reference the queer and feminist deployment of traditionally domestic crafts during the 70's and
after.
• His work often features political slogans and kitsch references.
• Through his work, Faught attempts to explore the construction of queer identity and
investigates relationships relating to desire, domestic dysfunction, and sexual difference.
• Some of the materials and objects used in his work: hand-dyed, handwoven and crocheted
hemp; wool; cochineal (ground up insects); indigo; silver lamé yarn; plastic pretzels; spilled nail
polish; rubber nachos; plastic chocolate chip cookies; toilet paper; rubber onion rings; pins and
greeting cards.
Untitled (I), From Be Bold For What You Stand
For, Be Careful What You Fall For 2013
(detail).“I’m always asking myself how we can say something urgently through the slowest
means possible.”
Born 1979, Missouri, USA
Gallery 2 - Thomas Mailaender
• Gallery 2 shows nine works by Thomas Mailaender, a French multimedia artist, who is an
obsessive collector of old photographs. He focuses on the source material and its subjects,
appropriating and diverting images he finds on the internet, in car boot sales and in charity
shops.
• This room includes five blue toned pieces and four works from his series Illustrated People.
• For his Illustrated People series, he uses a unique process of applying negatives onto the
skin of unknown individuals, before projecting a powerful UV lamp over them. The physical
process of transferring the photo negative onto skin results in a sunburnt effect on the body,
which naturally dissipates as it is exposed to daylight.
• The result reveals a fleeting picture on the skin’s surface, which he photographs just
moments before they disappear.
• He uses negatives from the Archive of Modern Conflict, an organisation and publisher based
in London which maintains an archive of material relating to the history of war. The archive
primarily contains photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, and both professional and
amateur.
• The effect of brandishing unknown people with images of past conflicts What new meaning
does the image take on when burnt into the flesh?
Thomas Mailaender, Illustrated People #22, 2014, lambda
print on paper
Born 1979, Marseille, France
“These (found) pictures are underrated in the history of photography, so
through my work I want to give them more space”.
Gallery 3 - Makiko Kudo
• Gallery 3 presents six large-scale, oil on canvas works by Japanese Artist Makiko Kudo.
• Her works are created using a combination of both everyday encounters and the dream-like world of her imagination. They
appear to hang in a liminal space between the real and the imaginative.
• Her dynamic yet detailed brushstrokes of vivid colour produce a chaotic liveliness. Perspective is played with and worlds-within-worlds appear.
• Many of her works allude to Monet’s water lilies or Matisse’s bold fauvist phase.
• Kudo’s work is reminiscent of traditional Japanese Prints, as
well as Manga comics. There is almost always a protagonist,
often a young girl, navigating her way through the myriad of
dreams, emotions and textures.
• These solitary figures seem to be seeking a return to
innocence.
Makiko Kudo, Stage Curtain, 2010, oil on canvas
Born in 1978, Aomori Prefecture, Japan
“I feel like a kind of ghost in a thin and flimsy world, because I
lack a sense of volume and reality. I sense reality more in my
dreams. Constructing a painting is similar to dreaming. Shuffling
different landscapes, creating stories and connecting them with
emotion and imagination, like a collage or a jigsaw puzzle”.
Gallery 4 - Maurizio Anzeri
• Gallery 4 displays small embroidered artworks by Italian artist Maurizio Anzeri.
• Anzeri creates his portraits by sewing directly onto found vintage photographs.
• His embroidered patterns garnish the figures like elaborate costumes, but also suggest
a psychological aura – perhaps they are revealing the person’s thoughts or feelings.
• The concept of photography fascinates Anzeri, in the sense of a fragment of reality
entrapped within a mere piece of paper.
• His ‘defacing’ or ‘enhancing’ of the original photographs affords them a three-
dimensional quality, creating photo-sculptures, a term invented by the artist himself.
• The work Enrico, 2014 contains a colourful egg shape covering a young boy’s face. At
first comical and jovial, we then spot an eye peering through a gap in the embroidery –
Enrico can see us, but we cannot see him, creating a more sinister narrative.
Maurizio Anerzi, Enrico, 2014, embroidery on
photograph
Born in 1969, Loano, Italy
“I come from three generations of fishermen and have seen men using threads
and needles all my life. As a kid I used to spend so much time looking at them
repairing and fixing fishing nets on the sea front. Those rituals and meticulous
gestures are deeply ingrained in my mind and imagination. For me, embroidery
represents a different way of drawing: with threads rather than pencils.”
Gallery 5 - Danny Fox
• Displayed in Gallery 5 are six works by British artist Danny Fox.
• A self-taught artist, his naïve style nods to Basquiat, Gaugin and
Picasso at times, with a distinct desire to shock.
• Fox’s Cornish ancestry is clear in his work, most obviously in the
parallels between his oil paintings and the naïve work of 19th Century
fisherman-painter Alfred Wallis, who also lived for a time in St Ives.
• Childlike in style, his work blends ideas of the real and the imagined.
The horse, myth, magic realism, urban sleaze, colonialism and class
are some of the subjects that interest Fox.
• The majority of his work is inspired by the people and situations
happening on the street outside. His colour palette changes in relation
to his environment, whether he is based in L.A. or London, or on
holiday in Cuba.
Danny Fox, Planned Parenthood Waiting Room, 2017, acrylic on canvas
Born in 1986, St Ives, UK
“Historical paintings are fun to do. I haven't done that many
that are actually based on a historical event. Most are more
mythological, or re-imagined to the point where they are not
recognisable”
Gallery 6 - Matthew Chambers*
• Gallery 6 displays works by three artists: Matthew
Chambers, Aaron Fowler and Renee So. Some of the
artworks in this room may not be suitable for younger
students.
• Matthew Chambers’ often colourful and bold works
explore the act of painting itself as well as the boundary
between abstraction and figuration.
• With active, emotive brushstrokes, Chambers paints
descriptive images inspired by pop culture, movies, art
history and his own imagination.
• His ‘slash paintings’ are composed of ribbons cut from
his own pre-existing paintings, demonstrating a punk,
self referential iconoclasm. This composition,
decomposition and re-composition reconfigures the
traditional ‘oil on canvas’ painting.
Matthew Chambers, A Utility of Immense details,
2010, oil and acrylic on canvas
Born 1982, Idaho, USA
“I didn’t want to make paintings, as much as I
wanted to work for them. Boss-employee,
submissive to the wants of the canvas”. Matthew Chambers, Not for the Purpose of
Restoring the Tower, 2010, oil and acrylic on
canvas
Gallery 6 - Aaron Fowler *
• Fowler’s densely packed, action-packed figurative
surfaces are almost Matisse like in their flat decorative
treatment of space, but unlike Matisse’s peaceful
interiors they are full of often violent movement.
• His starting point is often one of his own photographs,
which captures a moment or episode in his life.
• The dynamic between the group and the individual is
important in his work.
• Aaron Fowler incorporates three-dimensional objects
into his elaborately collaged works, constructed from
various pieces of furniture and crude objects sourced
from his local surroundings.
• Each piece has a narrative forged from events of his
own personal history. These horrific personal
experiences of violence, such as cousins incarcerated
and friends gunned down, provoked Fowler to become
an artist.
Aaron Fowler, Untitled (Footlocker), 2013, mixed media on panel
Born 1988, St Louis, USA
“As a young Black man who has grown up in the lower class, I have
seen and witnessed too much violence, poverty and corruption. All my
life I’ve been surrounded by the horrors of gang violence, under-
funded public school institutions, racial discrimination, and I have
been met with institutional indifference. This is why I became an artist.
These issues started to define my life and art gave me the opportunity
to redefine it”.
Gallery 6 - Renee So
• Renee So’s work creates links between iconographies, cultures,
illustration, graphic design, textiles, ancient civilisations, painting and
sculpture.
• Her knitted pictures are inspired by medieval wall tapestries. She uses a
knitting technique called intarsia.
• The imagery and figure are reductive and simple, as a result of the
knitting process. There is a cartoonish quality to these pieces – outlined
in black and filled in with flat blocks of colour.
• There is a central male character throughout her work. He is imaginary
and is often accompanied by an array of props – beards, wigs, top hats,
walking sticks, pipes, cigars and glasses of wine.
• The male character has a distinctive double head with two faces that can
be turned upside-down. This recurring motif at times transforms into
objects such as boots or jugs.
Renee So, Promenading, 2010, wool, tray, frame
Born 1974, Hong Kong
“The craft element of my work is integral and inherent in everything I make,
it informs my choice of materials which also determines what I can and
cannot do with these materials. I try to build on that to create something
personal and unique to me”.
Gallery 7- Daniel Crews-Chubb
• Gallery 7 shows seven large works by British artist Daniel Crews-
Chubb.
• Crews-Chubb’s practice consists of paintings on canvas and
paper. His intimate figures are influenced by primitive art and
culture, as well as pornographic imagery found online.
• He uses a variety of materials and methods, such as collage and
spray paint.
• He employs a traditional, expressionistic, painterly language that
wrestles with his primary influences of primitive art, ancient rituals
and amateur anthropology.
• Focusing primarily on the nude, Crews-Chubb uses historical
parallels to explore both abstract and figurative mark-making. His
bold and vibrant works employ a traditional, expressionistic
language, which wrestles with his primary influences of tribal art,
ancient rituals, social media and amateur anthropology.
Daniel Crews-Chubb, Rituals with cactus (red), 2017, oil, acrylic, spray paint and charcoal
on collaged canvas
Born 1984, Northampton, UK
“I’m like a sponge taking in everything I love about painting and feeding it into my work. It’s obvious that I am fascinated by the
nude and its place in art history. Picasso, Baseltiz, Jorn and De Kooning are all major influences, but in the end, the female
form has been a conduit or enabler for playing with abstract mark-making and paint”.
Gallery 8 - Dale Lewis *
• Gallery 8 displays five monumental works by British artist
Dale Lewis.
• Lewis’s work features a choreography of figures on large-
scale formats which refer to mythology, modernist
iconography, as well as contemporary life.
• Using sweeping yet controlled brushstrokes, he creates
large-scale frieze-like compositions of elongated figures
inspired by British working-class male life.
• Lewis uses a combination of oil, acrylic and spray-paint.
The overlapping and intertwining figures take up a large
proportion of the canvas in order to confront the viewer.
• Lewis feels his work is representative of his position as a
white, gay male of working-class upbringing. His work also
possesses a sense of satirical and good-natured humour,
which at times can be dark and absurd.
Dale Lewis, Olympians, 2015, oil, acrylic, spray paint on canvas
Born 1980, Essex, UK
“The figurative, mural-scale works are explicitly
influenced by the symbolic conventions and
compositional drama of Medieval and Renaissance
painting, wherein the composition is dominated by the
intertwining of bodies and punctuated by emblematic
tokens of sin, virtue and status. This is combined with
personal encounters and an acute eye for the everyday
human dramas that play out in the urban environments Ifrequent…”
Gallery 10 – Douglas White
• Gallery 10 consists of sculptures by Douglas White, Kate MccGwire and Alexi
Williams Wynn.
• Douglas White’s work invites us to look for human presence in installations where
no such intervention is to be seen.
• White is interested in the transformative potential of seemingly mundane, discarded
or overlooked objects and materials. Ideas of change, growth and decay are
prominent in his work.
• New Skin for Old Ceremony, 2011, was inspired by an elephant carcass which he
saw in East Africa in 2001. Most of the carcass had been scavenged so there was
very little left. The scattered arrangement of bones and its draped, deflated skin
reminded him of a collapsed tent.
• The large ‘skins’ are made in wet clay and transported to the gallery, then hoisted
up and lowered over wooden armatures to create the final work. As the show
progresses they will transform and mutate as the clay dries and hardens, echoing a
bodily transformation.
Douglas White’s photograph from 2001 (top) which inspired
New Skin for Old Ceremony, 2011, clay and steel table
(bottom).
Born 1977, Guildford, UK
“Many years later as I worked a rolled-out slab of clay it begun to crease and
crack and it became, in my mind’s eye, that elephant’s skin. After so long I felt, at
least in part, able to recuperate something of this strange, lost encounter and of
the unreasoned desire for this abject form.”
Gallery 10- Kate MccGwire
• Kate MccGwire’s sculpture titled Corvid, 2011, is a serpentine form made of
crow’s feathers.
• MccGwire was born and raised in rural Norfolk. During this time, she
developed a deep connection with the natural world and a particular
fascination with birds and animals in flight.
• She collects different varieties of real bird feathers. She has a network of
around 150 pigeon racers, farmers and gamekeepers who send her feathers
in the post. She uses thousands of them to construct large, knotted, snake-
like forms.
• Although these works may be considered abstract. Their structures are
organic, and follow the lines of the human body.
• In folklore, the crow is associated with thieving and deviant behaviour – a
wicked kind of beauty. The artist wanted to create a form which appeared
muscular and tensile, as if it has the power to restrain. Like the pattern of our
thoughts, it turns endlessly in on itself, without beginning or end, or any
obvious resolution.
Kate MccGwire, Corvid, 2011, crows’ feathers and mixed media
Born 1964, Norwich, UK
“I’m constantly trying to create this fine
line between desire and disquiet; the
forms are bodily, so we recognise the
creases and crevices, yet they are also
alien and strange. The work uses natural
patterns to suggest familiarity and truth,
but they are impossible creatures”.
Gallery 10 - Alexi Williams Wynn
• Alexi Williams Wynn, Echoes of the Kill, 2015 (Wax, wood and steel)
• Williams-Wynn grew up in rural Wales and brings her childhood
experiences to her work by attempting to disrupt our conventional
perceptions of natural beauty. She is intrigued by the way in which humans
understand and process the world.
• She uses a mixture of manmade and natural materials such as wood, steel,
and wax to create installations that seduce the eye with their sensuality, yet
confuse by their ambiguity. Williams-Wynn organises and manufactures
these materials to generate installations that, at first, appear to be part of
the natural world, but are in fact completely of her own design.
• The work emerging from this process blurs the boundaries between the real
and the surreal, overturning and questioning our notions of beauty.
Alexi Williams Wynn, Echoes of the Kill, 2015, wax, wood and steel
Born 1972, Wrexham, UK
“I have had a long fasciation with the dialectic between beauty and the abject.
As a young child in rural Wales I remember being struck by the sight of a dead
stag, hanging from a beam. My aim is to challenge our disconnect from the
natural world. Casting directly from animal organs, I abstract the flesh in an
attempt to find a new language with which to perceive the body”.
Iconoclastic Talking Points
What has Iconoclasm meant in the past?
What does it mean in today’s society?
What historical images/ideas have the artists adopted in this exhibition?
What thoughts are provoked by the original images?
In what ways have these images and ideas been altered by the artists?
What has been added or taken away?
What is the effect of these alterations?
Do you think this opens up a dialogue with artists of the past?
Do any of the works share iconoclastic urges?
Are there common cultural or social factors that the works were borne out of?
Do you think these artists are ‘out of the mainstream?’
What qualities afford them this title?
Artists by Theme
Craft
Josh Faught
Maurizio Anzeri
Renee So
Collage/ mixed media
Matthew Chambers (Slash Paintings)
Aaron Fowler
Josh Faught
Renee So
Figuration
Thomas Mailaender
Maurizio Anzeri
Aaron Fowler
Daniel Crews-Chubb
Dale Lewis
Kate MccQuire
Photography
Thomas Mailaender
Maurizio Anzeri
Aaron fowler
Sculpture / installation
Douglas White
Kate MccGwire
Alexi Williams Wynn
Josh Faught
These themes have been selected with the curriculum in mind, following topics chosen by various exam boards.
Using/ recycling found objects/ artefacts
Josh Faught
Thomas Mailaender
Maurizio Anzeri
Kate MccGwire
Aaron Fowler
Society/ class/ race/ politics
Aaron Fowler
Dale Lewis
Josh Faught
Danny Fox
Biomorphic forms / the human condition
Kate MccGwire
Douglas White
Daniel Crews-Chubb
Fantastical/ the absurd/ dreamlike
Makiko Kudo
Maurizio Anzeri
Danny Fox
Renee So
Conflict/ Death
Aaron Fowler
Dale Lewis
Douglas White
Thomas Mailaender
ActivitiesThe activities on the following pages have been designed in line with curriculum aims. Activities can be adapted to suit different age groups and learning
abilities. It is indicated if the activity is to be used in the gallery or in school.
Meeting the artist
In-gallery
A useful activity when visiting any
exhibition is to split the group into
smaller groups and ask them to
devise a set of questions that they
would like to ask the artist. After a
given time, ask the groups to swap
questions and work together to come
up with the answers.
Observing gallery visitors
In-gallery
Ask students to subtly choose another visitor
in the gallery and make a drawing whilst
observing their movements. Students spend 5
minutes drawing their chosen visitor’s
movements as a line, ensuring the line
remains continuous.
When completed, students can draw over the
pencil lines with a marker pen and then cut
out the shape that the journey made. This is a
visual record of one person’s experience of
the Iconoclast exhibition. Assemble all of the
different shapes together on the gallery floor.
Questions:
- Are there any similarities between the
drawings?
- Do people behave in similar ways to each
other in an art gallery?
Listen & learn
In-gallery
Ask students to choose an artwork and then use the
voice recorder on their phones to answer the following
questions (without saying the name of the artist or the
title):
- How does this artwork make you feel?
- What do you think it is about?
- Is it a popular artwork? How are other people
interacting with it?
Students should then swap phones and listen to the
recording, to guess which artwork their friend is talking
about.
Compare and ContrastIn-gallery / in-school
Students Visit Gallery 10 and look at the
sculptures by Kate MccGwire, Douglas
White and Alexi Williams Wynn.
Ask students to compare and contrast the
three works focussing on….
Material
Effect
Size
Subject
Feedback to the rest of the group.
Descriptive Task
In-gallery
In pairs, sit back to back with one person
facing an artwork of their choice. The
other person should not be able to see
the artwork. The person facing the
artwork should describe it in as much
detail as possible to the other person,
who will be drawing what they hear in
their sketchbook.
Allow 10 minutes and then swap.
Feedback as a group on how they found
the exercise.
- Was it easier or harder than they
thought it would be?
- What were more important- drawing
skills or communication skills?
- Did it allow students to look at the
artwork in more detail? Would they
have normally spent this long studying
it?
Making links
In-gallery
Ask students to choose an artwork. Does the work
relate to any other areas of knowledge, such as
Science, Geography or History? Can they link it to
any other arts, such as film, music or literature?
Discussion of terms
In-gallery / in-school
Discuss the meaning of the following terms:
Iconoclasm / mainstream / appropriation
The activities on the following pages have been designed in line with curriculum aims. Activities can be adapted to suit different age groups and learning
abilities. It is indicated if the activity is to be used in the gallery or in school.
Activities
Glossary of termsIconoclasm: Historically: A supporter of the 8th- and 9th-century
movement in the Byzantine Church which sought to abolish the veneration
of icons and other religious images.
In contemporary society: the action of attacking or assertively rejecting
cherished beliefs and institutions or established values and practices.
Mainstream: The ideas, attitudes, or activities that are shared by most
people and regarded as normal or conventional.
Appropriation: The deliberate reworking of images and styles from
earlier, well-known works of art.
Crochet: A handicraft in which yarn is made up into a textured fabric by
means of a hooked needle.
Loom weaving: Making fabric by weaving yarn or thread.
iKat: Fabric made using an Indonesian decorative technique in which
warp or weft threads, or both, are tie-dyed before weaving.
Feminist art: Art which supports the feminist cause (The advocacy of
women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes).
Queer art: Art which supports homosexual rights and equality amongst all
people regardless of their sexuality.
Kitsch: Art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of
excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an
ironic or knowing way.
Abstraction: Art that does not attempt to represent external reality,
but seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, forms, colours, and
textures.
Figuration: Art that is clearly derived from real object sources, and
is therefore by definition representational.
Expressionistic: An artist who seeks to express themselves through
the inner world of emotion rather than external reality.
Anthropology: The study of human societies and cultures and their
development.
Frieze: A broad horizontal band of sculpted or painted decoration,
especially on a wall near the ceiling
Reminiscent: Tending to remind one of something.
Parody: An imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre
with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect
Underbelly of society: a vulnerable area and also a corrupt or
sordid part.
Memento Mori: An object kept as a reminder of the inevitability of
death, such as a skull.
Conventional: following traditional forms and genres.
Source: The Oxford English Dictionary