Helen Chadwick
height 43 1/4 ins
Exhibitions
With exhibition label from ‘Something the Matter’ exhibition, organised by the British Council Visual Arts Department.
Beneath the pavement, the beach, Sotheby’s S|2 Gallery, London, UK, 2017
Helen Chadwick: Bad Blooms, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, UK, 2014
Helen Chadwick: Wreaths to Pleasure, The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK, 2013
Helen Chadwick: Works from the Estate, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, UK, 2013
Helen Chadwick: A Retrospective, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2004; This exhibition travelled to Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; Kunstmuseet Trapholt, Kolding, Denmark; and Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden, 2004.
And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, Ireland, 2003
Helen Chadwick, Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull, UK, 1998. This exhibition travelled to Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Nottingham, UK and Pitzhanger Manor House & Gallery, London, UK.
Blumenstücke Kunststücke, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, 1995-1996. This exhibition travelled to Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN.
Bad Blooms, MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York, US, 1995. This exhibition travelled to Norrköping Art Museum, Norrköping, Sweden; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN and Uppsala Museum of Art, Uppsala, Sweden.
Something the Matter: Helen Chadwick, Cathy de Monchaux, Cornelia Parker, 22nd International Biennial of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, 1994
effluvia Helen Chadwick, Museum Folkwang, Essen, 1994. This exhibition travelled to Fundació la Caixa, Barcelona, Spain and Serpentine Gallery, London, UK.
Helen Chadwick: Flesh and Flower, Zelda Cheatle Gallery, London, UK, 1994.
Literature
Stephen Walker, Helen Chadwick: constructing identities between art and architecture, London 2013 (illustrated, p. 190).
Leonie O'Dwyer, Helen Chadwick: a critical catalogue raisonné, Leeds 2012 (illustrated in colour, nos. 136 - 148).
Gloria Chalmers (ed.), Helen Chadwick: Stilled Lives, Edinburgh 1996 (illustrated in colour, n. p.).
Kirk Varnedoe, Paola Antonelli and Joshua Siegel (eds.), Modern Contemporary: art at MoMA since 1980, New York 2000 (illustrated in colour, p. 346).
Pawel Leszkowicz, Helen Chadwick: ikonografia podmiotowosci, Krakow 2001 (illustrated in colour, nos. 28, 29).
Mary Horlock, Eva Martischnig, Mark Sladen and Marina Warner, Helen Chadwick, Ostfildern 2004.
Niclas Östlind, Notes on the art of Helen Chadwick, especially the early works, Stockholm 2005 (illustrated in colour, p. 15).
British Council Nigeria, A collection of our art works: The Lagos Art Collection, Lagos 2008 (illustrated in colour, n. p.).
It was later exhibited at the XXII Bienal de Sao Paulo, 1994 as well as at MoMA, New York City, 1995, in Helen Chadwick Bad Blooms.
Over the past three decades, many artists have concocted their photographic subjects in the studio rather than seeking them in the world at large. This strategy puts a premium on imagination, which Chadwick possessed in abundance. What is more, in the fertile realm of her fancy there was no distinction between feeling and thinking. In Bad Blooms, a series of thirteen photographs made in 1992 and 1993, Chadwick turned to flowers. What could be more natural than flowers? Yet these lush posies are not exactly pretty, and they don't feel entirely natural. The circle is a common form in nature, but the obsessive symmetries of Chadwick's wreaths evoke the ritual perfections of inert geometry. Then there are the goos and liquids, which suggest both the fecund ooze and suck of organic life and the chemical sterility of synthetic gels and detergents. These voluptuous blossoms of paradise are also pungent visions of a nightmare nature remade by humans. Beautiful and vulgar, seductive and repulsive, natural and artificial, feminine and masculine: Chadwick's art merges these opposites in a visceral union that does mischief to the eye and mind.(Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights since 1980, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 126.)
In 2013 the Henry Moore Institute staged an archive exhibition on the series entitled Helen Chadwick: 'Wreaths to Pleasure' 8 Sep 2012 – 17 Feb 2013 at Leeds Art Gallery. Their cataloguing records that: "Chadwick often referred to the 'Wreaths' as 'bad blooms', explosions of form and colour that are simultaneously seductive and repellent. These sculptural arrangements reference bodily forms, a concern Chadwick explored throughout her work. Her early performances and installations, for example 'Ego Geometria Sum' (1982-83), used the artist's own body; later she collapsed boundaries between exterior and interior, incorporating bodily fluids, flesh, and plant matter to represent and explore human biology, in work such as 'Unnatural Selection' (1996). The 'Wreaths' are photographed as if viewed through a microscope: they could be interpreted as sexual organs or cells and suggest manipulation of micro-organisms in a laboratory.