Compton Verney, extended until January 2021.

Although headless, the sculptures have personality and their Roman home is in the museum of the most imposing thermal complex ever built in Rome. Erected between 298 and 306 CE, the baths spanned more than 13 hectares and could accommodate up to 3000 people at the same time. The Baths of Diocletian were converted into a church by Michelangelo, these photographs were taken in the Cloister of the Charterhouse, today filled with an array of artworks.

Website

https://www.comptonverney.org.uk/terme-di-diocleziano-the-baths-of-diocletian/

The Cosmati paving in Roman churches provided the material research context for semi-precious stone frottages. These resulted in visualizations that represent a palimpsest of pilgrim footfall. The artworks reflect a fusion of ghostly past pilgrims and Rideal’s twenty-first century ‘haunting’ of the space.

The images constitute an amalgam of artistic methodology, and exist as a hybrid form that echo spaces redolent of hidden histories. They act as a creative metaphor that articulates the complex and self-reflective ways of working in the public arena while simultaneously engaging with the public and the geographic and the cultural site.

Rideal’s fluid photographs and drawings on frottage suggest a fleeting human presence through recorded interventions against backgrounds of immutable stone; churches, ruins or pavements. Her process is a visual response to research that elides photography with painting and focuses on drapery as subject.

The project merges an idea of contemporary Roman pilgrimages connecting a variety of research fields; art, history, archaeology, photography and digital humanities.

The project was a collaboration between three institutions and five academics: Professor Liz Rideal (Slade School of Fine Art, UCL), Assistant Director Harriet O’Neill and Research Fellow Clare Hornsby (British School at Rome) and Associate Professor Inge Lyse Hansen and Associate Professor Lila Yawn (Department of Art History and Studio Art, John Cabot University).

Funded by UCL Cities Partnerships Programme

Due to the pandemic, the exhibition in Rome at the 4m2 Gallery, John Cabot University was shut, and I made further related work in the UK – “Nutmeg”. The show is extended now until the end of December.

Website

4m2 Gallery: http://4m2gallery.weebly.com/archive.html

Maria Chevska, Paul Ashurst, Stephen Nelson, Liz Rideal 
2 - 25 July 2020

Having opened the gallery in March only to see it close during lockdown was like seeing the air slowly let out of a balloon. The work stayed up and a new audience of neighbourhood explorers waved through the window and smiled, some even bought work online. Now after three months of mothballed expectation, Ken artspace is delighted to announce a ‘soft’ reopening with an exhibition of work by four artists who all live locally, and we have known for over thirty years. Taster is an opportunity to see a sample of work by artists we hope to show more fully in the future. In this time of suspended animation, we have all become attuned to the shifting horizon of temporality, time present and time past, a presence in the work of all the artists in the exhibition.

Mme Altemps derives from another Roman trip, funded by UCL Cities Partnerships. Prof. Florian Mussgnug was instrumental in setting up contacts in Roman universities.

Ephemerality and the beauty of the moment captured is ever present in the work of Liz Rideal. A waft of colour translates emotion, action enlivens and pleasures the eye. Abstract images of falling draperies, oceanic currents, and museum portraits obscured by a gestural veil of silk have been an abiding theme in her photographs and drawings

Website

4m2 Gallery