Welcome all on this day of International Friendship.So much is happening behind the scenes at Burgh House. We have a host of new faces working hard to get the House back open and an incredible events and exhibition programme up and running. We will be introducing you to the new staff team over the next few weeks, we have a new Curator, the wonderful Sophie Richards just started, and a Front of House Manager, Sam Johnson who will be with us soon. Plus a full team of the most amazing duty managers looking after our events and some new trustees on our board ready to steer Burgh House into it's next exciting phase.
Burgh House will officially reopen on Wednesday 15th September, Free to enter as always, 10am-4pm Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays ready for the opening of our next big and ambitious contemporary arts collaboration with artist Jonny Briggs, which opens on Wednesday 22 September. The House will also be open to visit on Sunday 29 and Monday 30 August for everyone who has missed us. We've missed you all, it's been hard to remain closed for so long, we have had so much to catch back up with and make sure everything is safe, but we are nearly there, ready to go and stronger than ever.
This week also brought us sad news, the loss of a legend. We mourn the peaceful passing of the one-and-only Piers Plowright, friend, patron, neighbour and long time supporter of Burgh House. All our thoughts are with his family at this time. |
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Knots: Jonny Briggs x Burgh HouseContemporary Interventions into a Historic HouseWednesday 22 September 2021 -– Sunday 6 March 2022
Burgh House is delighted to present Knots, an innovative, experimental, and site-specific exhibition of new work by young British artist, Jonny Briggs. Knots features multidisciplinary artworks which respond to and interact with the exterior, interior and architecture of Burgh House, encouraging visitors to reinterpret their surroundings and reconsider the roles of familiar objects. Surreal, staged photographs and sculpture will be presented both overtly and covertly in dialogue with selected objects from the Museum collection and located throughout the House and Garden in a game of hide-and-seek. Designed as an intervention into the spaces of the house and garden, Briggs has said, "I want the experience of discovering my work to be intriguing, amusing and unexpected."
Working collaboratively with a contemporary artist for the first time will see Burgh House’s Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Gallery on the ground floor playfully transformed into a strikingly monochrome installation, indicative of Briggs’ interest in the home as a metaphorical body, the visualisation of psychological spaces and trompe l'oeil. Reflecting not only on Briggs’ own family history, but also on the human history of Burgh House and its past inhabitants, this imaginative and unconventional exhibition will include a series of absurdly shaped shoes, 3D photographic sculptures from which walking sticks protrude as well as masks and more.
In generating new perspectives on Burgh House and its collection, the exhibition makes connections with the cultural history of the local area, and, more specifically, Hampstead’s place within the developmental history of psychoanalysis and surrealism. Briggs has said, "through my work’s focus on familial history and our relationship with the past I am keen to encourage awareness of mental health issues and, in its surrealist content and display, to discover the therapeutic value of humour".
A work commissioned by and created within Burgh House will be included in the exhibition and added to Burgh House’s permanent collection.
Who is Jonny Briggs?Born in Berkshire in 1985, Jonny Briggs is a multidisciplinary artist best known for his idiosyncratic brand of highly autobiographical, self-psychoanalytical and yet universally relatable photography, whose arresting, hybridised, multi-media creations operate in the interstices between fact and fiction. Briggs’ work is reflective of both the artist’s preoccupation with his own family history and with the practice of psychoanalysis, facilitating the articulation of the once unspeakable. Intelligent, intuitive and ingeniously deceptive, much of Jonny’s work over the past sixteen years has featured his parents in a variety of imaginative scenarios, their presence having much to do with the artist’s sustained interest in the credulous condition of childhood. Endeavouring through a series of reincarnations and reconfigurations, ‘to think outside the reality I was born and socialised into,’ he attempts to animate an ‘unconditioned self’. The dialectical relationship between self and other is clearly something which fascinates Briggs whose work turns compulsively on the paradox that self and other whilst seemingly insuperably separated are at the same time mere recto and verso of one another. Briggs’ work seems characterised by radical uncertainty and insecurity, uncertainty in particular concerning the distinctions between past and present, self and other, fiction and reality. His characters/protagonists then, neither quite projections of the self nor representations of family members, not quite now and not quite then inhabit, it seems, the ‘eternal interim’ between life and death. In the artist's words, in recent years 'the physicality of the image has become more significant, through the production of photosculptures and photomontage. The gaze, the mouth, connection / disconnection, cutting and splitting have often surfaced in the work, as have photographs of photographs, featuring protruding body parts'. Briggs’ works seem imbued with a kind of cryptic potential, the accumulation of which as well as an undeniable emphasis on the fantastical combine to make viewing an intriguing and magical experience.
Briggs studied Fine Art at Chelsea College (1st class) and the RCA (Distinction) in London, graduating in 2011. He was awarded the Conran Award for Fine Art and the Saatchi New Sensations prize in 2011 and Foam Talent 2014 in addition to being a Catlin Prize finalist in 2012 and a Saatchi Gallery UK/raine Finalist in 2014. In 2017, 2018 and 2019 he received Paul Huf nominations. Solo exhibitions of Briggs’ work have been held at Simon Oldfield Gallery, London, 2013; Julie Meneret, New York, 2014; Marie-Laure Fleisch, Rome & NContemporary, Milan, 2015 and Photoforum Pasquart Photography Museum, Switzerland, 2017. His work has also been represented in group shows at Shanghai Centre of Photography in China; The Benaki Museum in Greece; and Saatchi Gallery; 176 Zabludowicz Collection; Jerwood Space and the Photographers' Gallery in London. Commissions include Saatchi Gallery, Channel 4, The Financial Times (made at Freud Museum in Hampstead) and Jerwood Visual Arts.
For more information email Sophie Richards |
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