philippa beale
Philippa Beale (b. 1946) has exhibited widely in the UK, showing frequently at Angela Flowers Gallery. Recent solo shows include Visions at KEY London and Art and the Spirit at St Pancras Church.
Her work has been bought for several public collections, including Tate Britain, The National Art Archive and Southampton City Art Gallery.
Reviews of her work have appeared in various publications, including The New Statesman, The Financial Times, The Guardian, and Time Out. Philippa Beale also writes and has been written about by Sarah Grylls, Sarah Kent, Jaqueline Morreau, Rozika Parker and Liz McQuiston.
Beale studied at Goldsmiths College and the University of Reading and was the first artist in residence at Southampton City Art Gallery in 1983, where Blue Bird was originally shown. She went on to teach postgraduate design at the London College of Communication, following eminent war artists Tom Eckersly, Mary Kessle and refugees from the Bauhaus, who helped shape it into the ideal environment for an artist wishing to experiment with cutting-edge technology. Beale is now PhD Supervisor for SMARTlab at the University of East London. She is also the former President of The London Group and is on the advisory board at FosterArt, The Sassoon Gallery and outsidedge online art magazine.
Philippa Beale has had fifteen solo exhibitions and a number of group exhibitions where works in this retrospective were originally shown. These include St Sebastian at The Walk Gallery, London, Visions at KEY London and Return to the Future, an exhibition with Neville Boden at the London Institute Gallery. ‘Billboards’, ‘Love Story’ and ‘The Red Shoes’ were shown at Les Cloîtres Gallery, Poitiers, France and on giant billboards along the Old Kent Road. ‘Past Her Sell Buy Date’ was chosen by Guy Brett for Critics Choice 2, Air Gallery, London; ‘Baby Love’ was first shown at Angela Flowers Gallery, (reviewed by Waldemar Januszczak for the Guardian) and ‘His Ears are Small and Neat’, ‘His Chest is Covered with Soft Brown Hair’ atAkumulatory 2 Galleria, Poznan, Poland, curated by Jaroslav Koslowski. ‘Newton’s Wonder’, an installation of 100lbs of apples, was at the Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh.
She has curated a number of exhibitions notably From Wilson to Callaghan (1997), Poster Studio and The London Group Biennial (1995), Barbican Gallery, London.
Beale also produces films, screenings of which include 11 minutes on Leicester Square shown continuously in Leicester Square for 6 weeks May to June 2000 on GMI Giant Video Screen, followed by Art School, also screened for four weeks in Leicester Square in 2001. Wilson to Callaghan Conceptual Art Practice in the UK 1964-78 was screened at the ICA, London 1999.
Philippa Beale studied at Goldsmiths College and the University of Reading before teaching postgraduate design at the London College of Communication as part of an emerging generation of artists – Jeff Nuttall, William Furlong, Radovan Kraguly, Natt Gooden and Robin Klassnik. It was here that she met and collaborated extensively with the artist Jane Humphrey and latterly with the photographer Graham Diprose. She has sought input from several typographic practitioners, but predominantly Christopher Plato, who is also an alumnus of the college.
Beale emerged as an artist in the early 1980s with large, serial screen prints that often humorously play on the confusion between Fine Art and advertising. Prefiguring the work of later women artists such as Tracey Emin, Love Story (1980), lists all the men an imagined woman might have slept with had she been afforded the freedoms of a younger generation. Other early prints – Baby Love (1982), Red Shoes (1985), and Past Her Sell Buy Date (1986) – use a cosy 1950s vernacular to challenge received wisdom about female sexuality.
In recent works, Beale has turned to well-known tales of loss, longing and deliverance, using new digital technology to conjure luminescent, multilayered images. In Stations of The Cross (2006), photographs have been projected onto cast reliefs, which are then re-photographed to produce a series of prints, accompanied here by the looped recording of a young woman reciting a satirical ode to cliché.
To arrange an interview or for more information and images please contact Eve Peasnall (07932 075 865) or e-mail bluebird.press@gmail.com An illustrated catalogue, with Foreword by Angela Flowers, will accompany the exhibition. Twenty per cent of all proceeds from sales will be donated to the Artists' Benevolent Fund.