Elena Crippa

An essential introduction to the life and work of Sonia Boyce, a leading contemporary artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores artistic authorship and the creative potential in unexpected play. Sonia Boyce (b.1962) is a groundbreaking artist whose practice is founded on taking creative risks. Unafraid to play against set expectations about how art should behave, her collaborative interactions between audience and performer enable spontaneous and intimate social encounters, resulting in the creation of work that is simultaneously self-aware, visceral and open-ended. This book is a much-anticipated introduction to the life and work of this extraordinary artist. Touching on her engagement with the work of other feminist artists and her time as a leading figure in the 1980s Black British Art movement, it contextualises Boyce’s journey from her early pastel drawings and mixed-media collages to her pivotal shift to film, sound and performance art. Highlighting her artistic innovation as she experiments with medium to explore and question culture, identity and the boundaries between the public and private spheres in unexpected ways, it celebrates the visionary practice of a truly uncompromising artist.

The radical project an Exhibit (mounted in 1957 at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London) emerged from a decade of testing the formats and possibilities of exhibition making, resulting in a show with the motto "No objects, no ideas." A collaboration between two artists, Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore, and a critic and curator, Lawrence Alloway, the show was simultaneously an investigation into abstract environmental forms and a participatory experiment that would fundamentally transform the role of the viewer.In this volume, comprehensive documentation of the original exhibition is presented alongside coverage of other key projects from the era and contextualized in a detailed essay by Elena Crippa. Archival texts conveying the different voices of the project's three creators, and a contemporaneous essay by David Sylvester, are accompanied by new contributions from Martin Beck, Owen Hatherley and Lucy Steeds.

As the twenty-first century unfolds, notions of our cultural past and how our history has influenced our present shift almost daily. Within this, accepted artistic trajectories are being questioned and new connections made. In this wide-ranging and thought-provoking publication, experts in their field address specific aspects of British art of the twentieth century. Presenting new perspectives on established narratives, subjects range from British Surrealism and the rise of corporate and private patronage, to nationality and British identity. Complemented by a range of striking images, this publication succeeds in showing the strength of the British artistic tradition while also encouraging the reader to rethink and explore the existing narrative.