TIL 7 July 2017

14
Alfred Wolmark, Last Days of Rabbi Ben Ezra
A CENTURY OF POLISH ARTISTS IN
BRITAIN AT BEN URI GALLERY
Ben Uri Gallery is currently showing
the second exhibition in its series on
refugee and migrant artists, highlighting
the Polish contribution in Britain over the
last century. This focus is particularly apt
as the community approaches its
millionth citizen, the largest migrant group
in Britain, and as Poland celebrates a
century since it regained its independence
as a nation state after 123 years.
The show will tell aspects of the story of
the Polish community in Britain, and
Poland's recent turbulent history, through
the lens of art. It will trace the complex
stories of Polish-born artists who fled
successive regimes, were variously
persecuted, imprisoned and interned and
crossed continents. Or those who, today,
have made positive choices to come to
Britain to study or to develop professionally.
The exhibition brings together a
century of artworks and archival material
by both celebrated and lesser-known
Polish-born artists selected from the Ben
Uri Collection and from Polish
institutions, galleries and private
collections. Paintings, posters, prints,
drawings, cartoons, book illustrations,
film and sculpture explore issues of
identity and migration, whilst intersecting
with formal art historical developments,
ranging from expressionism to Pop Art.
Featured artists from the Ben Uri
Collection include Henry Glicenstein, Isaac
Ben Uri Collection
Lichtenstein, Leopold Pilichowski and his
wife, Lena Pillico, Adriana Swierszczek and
Alfred Wolmark. Cartoonist and
caricaturists featured include George Him,
Ralph Sallon and Mark Wayner, and
Holocaust survivors: Roman Halter, Josef
Herman, Shmuel Dresner and Alicia
Melamed Adams (the last remaining
student of Bruno Schulz). Herman is
represented by two recent and important
acquisitions which pay homage to Goya’s
Black Paintings and memorialise the
fighters for the Warsaw Ghetto.
All but a handful of the featured works
have been created in England, the new
homeland, yet many retain symbols of
Polish national identity, from Catholicism
and the cavalry, to the dark forests and
traditional embroidery. Other images
reflect prevailing art historical styles of the
host nation, Znicz, Muszynski’s distinctive
palette and spiky composition recalls midcentury
works by Graham Sutherland,
whilst Zulawski’s vivid female nudes, and
his later use of unmodulated colour, calls
to mind Pop Art and the work of artists
such as Alan Jones.
Taken as a whole, this two part
exhibition documents and acknowledges
the significant, distinctive and enduring
contribution made to Britain’s visual
culture by the artists of its largest migrant
community.
Ben Uri Gallery is in Boundary Road,
NW8 0RH. The nearest tube station is
St John’s Wood.
EMILY YOUNG SCULPTURES IN
ST JAMES’S PICCADILLY GARDEN
A group of eight sculptures by Emily
Young are on view in the garden of
St James’s Church, Piccadilly, lending a
quiet reflective mood to this oasis of calm
in the middle of Piccadilly.
Emily Young was born in London into
a family of writers, artists, politicians and
adventurers. Her grandmother was the
sculptor Kathleen Scott, a colleague of
Auguste Rodin and widow of the explorer
Captain Scott of the Antarctic.
As a young woman, Emily worked
primarily as a painter, having studied
briefly at Chelsea School of Art, Central
Saint Martins London, and Stonybrook
University, New York. It was in the early
1980s that she started carving in stone,
raiding quarries and stone yards from all
around the world. A primary objective of
her sculpture is to bring to the fore the
natural beauty and energy of stone,
including its capacity to embody human
consciousness. Her sculptures have
unique characters due to each individual
stone’s geological history and its
geographical source.
Emily’s approach allows the viewer to
comprehend a commonality across time,
land and cultures. In her combination of
traditional carving skills with technology,
she produces work which marries the
contemporary with the ancient, manifesting
a unique, serious and poetic presence.
St James's Piccadilly is in many ways
the finest of the group of four closely
similar churches designed by Sir
Christopher Wren, the others being
St Anne's Soho, St Andrew's by the
Wardrobe, and St. Andrew's Holborn.
Emily Young: Wind Head.
t h i s i s l o n d o n m a g a z i n e • t h i s i s l o n d o n o n l i n e