Housed in a landmark industrial building on the south bank of the River Tyne in Gateshead, UK, the Baltic Centre is a major international centre for contemporary art. The Baltic itself has no permanent collection, providing instead an ever-changing calendar of exhibitions and events that give a unique and compelling insight into contemporary artistic practice. Baltic’s dynamic, diverse and international program ranges from blockbuster exhibitions to innovative new work and projects created by artists working within the local community. The Baltic was founded with funding from The National Lottery through Arts Council England, Gateshead Council, Northern Rock Foundation, the European Regional Development Fund and One NorthEast, and receives continued support from Arts Council England and Gateshead Council. The notion of Baltic began in 1991 when Northern Arts (now Arts Council England North East) announced its ambition to achieve ‘major new capital facilities for the Contemporary Visual Arts in Central Tyneside’. The Baltic Flour Mill was closed in 1981. Dominic Williams of Ellis Williams Architects won an architectural competition in the mid-1990s to convert the old mill building into a centre for art. Construction began in 1998, and only the south and north facades of the original 1950s building were retained. A new structure consisting of six main floors and three mezzanines was secured between the facades which contain 3, 000 square meters of arts space (four galleries and a flexible performance space), artists’ studios, cinema/lecture space, shop, a library and archive for the study of contemporary art and the Rooftop Restaurant on Level 6 (providing stunning views over the River Tyne). An additional two-story structure: The Riverside Building, was constructed to the west of the main building, providing the main entrance into BALTIC, which looks out across Baltic Square and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. After ten years in the planning and a capital investment of £50m, BALTIC opened to the public at midnight on Saturday 13 July 2002. The inaugural exhibition, ‘B.OPEN’, featured work by Chris Burden, Carsten Holler, Julian Opie, Jaume Plensa and Jane & Louise Wilson, and attracted over 45,000 visitors in the first week. Since then the Baltic has presented over 40 exhibitions and welcomed more than 3 million visitors. As well as contemporary art exhibitions, the Baltic also offers a range of spaces for hire, and can accommodate a wide range of events, from meetings and workshops to banquets and conferences. Since opening in July 2002 the Baltic has hosted a range of high profile events including The Channel 4 Stirling Prize 2002, Audi Young Designer of the Year Competition Final 2002-2005, University of Northumbria final year fashion show 2003, BBC Question Time and Prime Minister’s Newsnight. Even though BALTIC opened to the public in July 2002, the first exhibition which was seen on the site of the building was “Tarantantara” by Anish Kapoor in 1999. “Tarantantara” formed part of ‘B4B’, the Baltic’s pre-opening series of exhibitions and events. A site-specific installation by Anish Kapoor, “Tarantanrara” was commissioned specially for the site before the construction of the new building began. Over 50m long and 25m wide, the work filled the shell of the Baltic Flour Mills and was in-situ for eight weeks and seen by over 16,000 people. In 2011 the Baltic is to be the venue for the Turner Prize, this would be the first time the event has been held outside of a London or Liverpool Tate in its 25 years, a major exhibition from 21 October 2011 to 8 January 2012 will coincide with the final stages of the competition and the winning artist will be announced at a celebratory event at BALTIC in December 2011. Visit the Baltic’s website at … http://www.balticmill.com
The Baltic currently have 2 related exhibitions of work by British painter George Shaw. “Payne’s Grey” is an intimate presentation in the Baltic’s Level 2 gallery showcasing a strand of George Shaw’s practice that has never been seen before. Fourteen watercolors, named after the peculiar shade of their creation, provide a new take on Shaw’s familiar subject matter. Describing the works, Shaw said; “Once I started painting skies in Payne’s Grey and following Constable’s dictum that the sky was like the tuning fork for the tone of the painting, I began to simply allow the whole world to be sky coloured. And like the worst fears of Chicken Licken the sky did fall in – and the painted world became Payne’s Grey.” A more major retrospective of George Shaw’s works is exhibited in “The Sly and Unseen Day: George Shaw”. This major exhibition brings together some forty paintings from 1996 to the present day. Within a practice that has encompassed drawing, video-making, performance and writing, Shaw is best known for his expansive body of painting. Based upon photographs taken of and around his childhood home on the Tile Hill Estate, Coventry, Shaw’s landscapes are at once familiar and unnerving. Unassuming buildings, patches of woodland, pubs, his school, the park, and the arbitrary details of urban infrastructure deposited by town planners, are the cast of a series of paintings ongoing since the mid-1990s. Shaw’s landscapes are at once familiar and unnerving. Painted exclusively in ‘Humbrol’ enamel, the material of choice for teenage model-makers, Shaw’s subject matter brings about associations of domesticity, folk art and nostalgia for a lost childhood and adolescence. Yet, as “The Sly and Unseen Day” reveals, Shaw’s art quickly moves beyond the autobiography it first suggests. His jarring, atmospheric paintings become peculiar records of ‘Englishness’ and are suggestive of a different state of mind. Even his more tranquil paintings, for example “Scenes from the Passion: Pig Wood” and “Scenes from the Passion: The Way Home” (both painted in 1999), included within the exhibition, retain a peculiar tension. As the exhibition progresses we see Shaw take an investigative journey, typically making something out of nothing, as beauty is found in the mundane. The ‘Ash Wednesday’ series (2004-5) depicts the estate hour-by-hour on a single day. Other paintings, such as ‘The Age of Bullshit’ 2010 (a demolished pub) and ‘The Assumption’ 2010 (the local school), offer a curious record of British social and class life. Shaw’s painting ‘Scenes from the Passion: The First Day of the Holidays’ 2003, can be seen on a large-scale banner on the North face of BALTIC’s exterior building for the duration of the exhibition. Both George Shaw exhibitions run concurrently through May 15th at the Baltic.
“Jesper Just: The Nameless Spectacle”, also from February 18th to May 15th features the New York-based Danish artist Jesper Just’s short films. These films have the formal qualities and gloss of Hollywood productions while resisting their narrative conventions. His lavish visual language, overlapping musical, literary and cinematic references deliver a framework onto which the viewer can attach personal memory. Despite its often highly charged emotional content, Just’s work is ambiguous, uncertain and never reaches the moment of ‘closure’. The exhibition at the Baltic is Just’s first in a public gallery in the UK and includes three works: , “A “No Man Is An Island”, 2003 (video); Vicious Undertow” 2007, and new work “Sirens of Chrome” 2010. “Lindsay Seers: It Has To Be This Way 2” (until 12th June 2011) explores the complexities and uncertainties of history and memory. The installation resumes the story of the disappearance of the artist’s stepsister, Christine Parkes. Presented on a circular screen within a structure derived from forts on the West African Gold Coast, Christine’s stepmother narrates her tale while the film retraces her travels through West Africa. The complex and unsettling story takes the viewer on a journey that navigates the occult, the subconscious and the fragmentation of personal memory. ‘I was her mother but she was never my daughter and now she has gone missing, I can honestly say that I never loved her.’ This sentence, which opens the film at the heart of “It Has To Be This Way 2”, crystallizes the ambiguities, the contradictions and the play between past and present which constantly reshape our memories. Memory of the past illuminates our present actions and experiences. Lindsay Seers’ work explores the complexities and shifts at play in any understanding of past and present. She begins with an exploration of the image; a recurring interest into the act of photography, the workings of the lens and the apparatus of the camera. She develops narratives from her family life, engaging chance, the occult and the subconscious to restage periods from her own history and the histories of her parents and siblings.
Throughout its short history, the Baltic has become famous for the quality of the exhibitions it has hosted. A major retrospective of Anselm Kiefer’s work ended in January 2011. This exhibition, the largest of the artist’s in the UK for many years, spanned forty years of his work. Major paintings were presented over two floors of the Baltic’s galleries, alongside the monumental installation “Palmsonntag”. In 2009, “Yoko Ono: Between the Sky and my Head” highlighted works from a career spanning nearly 50 years with two floors dedicated to works from the 1950s to the present. A 2007 exhibition of work by Beryl Cook divided art critics, who could not decide whether her (very popular) self-taught paintings of people going about their daily activities deserved space in an art gallery. “Package Holiday by Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg in 2005 gave visitors the chance to have themselves photographed in the fictitious and digitally-created Gleissenhorn mountain region. In 2004, the Baltic presented a large selection of recent and new paintings by Elizabeth Magill. “Domain Field; Allotment; Body, Fruit, Earth” in 2003 was an extensive solo exhibition by Antony Gormley, creator of the North East landmark ‘Angel of the North’ which included a major new commission plus existing works. Also in 2003, “Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam” was the first major show in the UK of the Cobra movement and presented works by 20 artists, including paintings and drawings by key figures of the movement Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Constant, Asger Jorn and Carl-Henning Pederson, alongside a selection of film, publications and manifestos. As part of B.OPEN, the Baltic’s inaugural exhibition, Julian Opie was commissioned to make new work for both inside and outside of the building. Julian Opie adorned the Level 2 art space and Level 5 Viewing Box, as well as the two glass boxes outside the Baltic on each side of the Millennium Bridge, with outlines of human bodies. these figures, represented in Opie’s distinctive graphic style as simple silhouettes in black vinyl (one male, one female) were positioned opposite one another and sometimes together on the gallery walls and surfaces on Levels 2 and 5 as well as on opposite banks of the River Tyne. Other exhibitions have featured local North East, British and international artists (often featuring works with a distinct ‘North East’ tone to their works, such as Chris Burden’s scale model of the Tyne Bridge in Meccano or Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photographs of industrial wreckage on North Eastern beaches).
