My Generation: A Festival of British Art in the 1960s

Three exhibitions across three venues running from 19 January – 23 August 2015

This series of three exhibitions was held across Kent during the first half of 2015 at Studio 3 Gallery (University of Kent, Canterbury Campus), Mascalls Gallery (Paddock Wood) and The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge (Canterbury).

This occasion presented an opportunity to look back at the art created by younger artists during those heady, 'swinging' times when the University was established, and to build links between the University and the blossoming art sector across Kent. These three exhibitions each had their own distinctive take on this rich and inventive period, and together provided a wide-ranging exploration of some notable developments and achievements in painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography of the period. The shows themselves were spread over a seven-month period, and were accompanied by a season of talks and events.

A catalogue accompanied all three exhibitions including illustrations of many of the exhibited works and new essays from Professor Martin Hammer and Dr Ben Thomas.

Image credit: Brian Rice, Blue Black Sunrise (1968), courtesy of the artist and Redfern Gallery

Exhibitions:

Palindrome: The Sixties Art of Brian Rice and Richard Rome (19 January – 10 April 2015)
Studio 3 Gallery, University of Kent, Canterbury
This show looked back to the works made by the artists during the mid-1960s and featured a number of bold paintings and prints from Brian Rice, as well as Richard Rome's impeccably finished sculptures and humorous and elegant working drawings.

A Marriage of Styles: Pop to Abstraction (28 March – 6 June 2015)
Mascalls Gallery, Paddock Wood

Named after David Hockney's painting, this exhibition brought together some of the most recognisable names of this period including Hockney, Patrick Caulfield, Bridget Riley and Robyn Denny to retrospectively re-evaluate the similarities between the 'opposing' camps of Abstraction and Pop.

Home and Away: Photographs of Southeastern England by Tony Ray-Jones and Eduardo Paolozzi's General Dynamic F.U.N. (9 May -23 August 2015)
The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, Canterbury

This Hayward Gallery exhibition juxtaposed two bodies of work; Tony Ray-Jones' photographs of the English seaside taken after a prolonged period in America, and Eduardo Paolozzi's celebrated series of prints General Dynamic F.U.N. that caustically reflected on American imperialism at the time of the Vietnam War. Although superficially very different, both bodies of work explored ambivalent relationships with America and an interest in the aesthetics of collage.

As well as work by these two key artists, the Beaney exhibition features a range of items from the 1960s, including ceramics and rare covers of records by The Who. 'My Generation' was one of the band's ground-breaking recordings and was released in 1965, the same year as the University of Kent opened.