Teachers’ Private View: In the footsteps of the East London Group
Thursday 7th November 2024 , 5:45pm to 7:30pm
Join us to see our latest show, participate in an informal drop-in workshop, and meet with members of the Learning team.
This event is a great opportunity to find out more about what we do, see examples of recent projects and discuss how we can support visual arts provision at your school, as well as a good time to view the exhibition before bringing a student group.
The Nunnery Café is open late on the first Thursday of the month throughout autumn, so stick around for live music and a range of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.
All materials (and a few drinks!) provided.
About the exhibition
Bow Arts is delighted to present an exhibition exploring the past and present of east London, bringing together the historical paintings of the East London Group with their 21st century contemporaries.
Inspired by the East London Group’s scenes of the old East End, 22 painters from the Urban Contemporaries group and invited guests, including David Hepher, Doreen Fletcher, Ben Johnson, Philippa Beale, Timothy Hyman RA and Harriet Mena Hill, have created new works to be shown alongside their historical counterparts.
Exploring the artists’ shared passion for immortalising, celebrating, and unpicking the streets and scenes of east London, the show will explore the city across time – remembering long-demolished buildings, revealing hidden streets, and celebrating communities from the 1920s to the present day. A newly commissioned sound piece, made by an artist local to the Nunnery Gallery, will also provide an atmospheric soundscape to the exhibition.
The historic East London Group began with evening painting classes in Bethnal Green; made up of mostly working-class men and women, the group painted what surrounded them – the East End – capturing their city in a way never previously seen. Taught by painters John Cooper (1894-1943) and Walter Sickert (1860-1942), amongst others, the group became enormously successful despite the class prejudices of the time, exhibiting at Whitechapel Gallery and National Gallery, Millbank (now Tate Britain) and representing Britain in the Venice Biennale in 1936.
Only in recent years has the Group gained the historical recognition it deserves, and this show will present work from artists including Elwin Hawthorne, Cecil Osborne, Grace Oscroft, Henry Silk and the Steggles brothers, including works never previously seen publicly. Viewers will be able to explore Bow Road, Bethnal Green, and Grove Hall Park (behind the Nunnery Gallery), as well as canals, lumber yards and breweries, witnessing through these fascinating depictions the face of a changing London during the inter-war years.
Exhibition open Friday 4th October – Sunday 22nd December 2024.
