BEXHILL ON SEA.- In a Dream I Saw a Way to Survive and You Were Full of Joy is an exhibition curated by Turner Prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price. It features works by over fifty artists including Becky Beasley, Guy Bourdin, Claude Cahun, Henry Fuseli, Richard Hamilton, The Lumiére Brothers with Loie Fuller, Henry Moore, Paul Neagu, Bridget Riley, Jo Spence and Francesca Woodman.
This exhibition is designed to create an immersive experience for the viewer, in which works are connected associatively, with the slippery, fugitive logic of a dream. Price has staged the exhibition to explore the psychological and formal power of the horizontal, in a vast repertoire of images depicting the reclining or recumbent body in varying states of weariness, stupor, reverie, grief, death, erotic transport and languor. The exhibition includes sculptures, drawings, photographs, films and videos, arranged in four loosely threaded sections: Sleeping, Working, Mourning and Dancing.
This is the latest in a series of Hayward Touring exhibitions curated by artists. These exhibitions often embrace an eclectic range of historical and contemporary works, offering illuminating insights into the artist's own creative processes as well as the relationships between the works chosen. Elizabeth Price is one of Britains most thoughtful and original artists, whose video installations use a dynamic fusion of image, text and music to explore aspects of social history.
Elizabeth Price (b.1966) predominantly works in high definition digital video with live action, motion graphics, 3D computer animation and sound. Her work is informed by histories of narrative cinema and experimental film. In 2012 she was awarded the Turner Prize, and in 2013 the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award for Museums, with the Ashmolean, Oxford, in partnership with the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. The commissioned work, A RESTORATION, was exhibited at the Ashmolean in 2016. In 2010, she featured in British Art Show 7 with USER GROUP DISCO. She has had solo exhibitions at BALTIC, Gateshead; the Bloomberg International and Chisenhale Gallery London; The Stedelijk, Amsterdam; The New Museum, New York; The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland and the Musée dart Contemporain de Montréal.
Elizabeth Price said: The opportunity to create an exhibition of other artists work is one that comes rarely to artists themselves. I have approached it with an artists methods, but also as a (solitary) viewer of art exhibitions over many years. For me exhibitions are a place for inventing: for encountering objects, images and events, in all their sensual and material complexity; imagining why they were made, and what could they mean. In creating this exhibition, I have reflected upon some genealogies of arts forms, as well as the social histories that have generated them, but above all, I have sought to explore the license that art gives us to make our own sense of it.