Nationality British Name Charles Asprey | Role Artist | |
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Born 25 March 1971 (age 52) ( 1971-03-25 ) London, England | ||
#ArtissimaRewind: Charles Asprey & Sam Thorne
Charles Asprey is the publisher of the quarterly journal PICPUS and the founder of ArtSchool Palestine., as well as being one of the trustees of The Henry Moore Foundation and the Michael Clark Company. For many years he was the co-owner and co-director of aspreyjacques, a London art gallery, with Alison Jacques, which introduced British audiences to young, emerging German artists. These included Thilo Heinzmann, Manfred Pernice, Christian Flamm and the late Michel Majerus. Since 2005 he has concentrated on curating and collecting; in 2009, he was invited to show part of his own art collection at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. More recently, in collaboration with the directors of Cabinet gallery and Trevor Horne Architects, he has co-designed and financed a building for the gallery which opened in the Autumn of 2016.
Contents
- ArtissimaRewind Charles Asprey Sam Thorne
- ArtSchool Palestine
- PICPUS
- Randolph Cliff residency
- Cabinet gallery building
- CuratingGallerist
- References
ArtSchool Palestine
ArtSchool Palestine (ASP), which Asprey co-founded with Sacha Craddock and Samar Martha, was set up in 2005 to promote and support Palestinian artists and aid their participation in international Contemporary Art exhibitions and biennales. ASP has held many events and exhibitions, including As If By Magic, to which the British artist Damien Hirst lent his support. In addition to this, Asprey personally put together a library of 1,500 art books with the help of the bookdealer and publisher Walther Koenig and his son Franz Koenig of Cologne, which he donated to Bir Zeit University near Ramallah in Palestine.
PICPUS
Asprey and his fellow editor Simon Grant founded PICPUS is a free, quarterly journal with a focus on the arts, story-telling and criticism, claiming that it is part of a long tradition of small, independent British arts journals and periodicals that attempt to fill a gap left by mainstream arts publications. The pair cite as examples Coterie (1919–1921); Ray Magazine (1926–1927); The Apple (1920's) and ZG magazine from the 1980s.
Randolph Cliff residency
Randolph Cliff was an artist residency programme established by Asprey and Dr Clémentine Deliss in the heart of Edinburgh. Artists who have used the facility include Tom Burr, Marc-Camille Chaimowicz, Frances Stark, Manfred Pernice, Joseph Kosuth, David Schutter, Dexter Sinister, Sean Snyder, Christian Flamm, Thomas Struth, Mark Wallinger and Anna Bariball.
Cabinet gallery building
In Spring 2016, Cabinet gallery moved to a new building on Tyers Street in the heart of Vauxhall. The original plan to relocate dates back nearly a decade when Cabinet directors Martin McGeown and Andrew Wheatley began a conversation with the artists with whom they work and Charles Asprey about designing a permanent location for the gallery.
Trevor Horne Architects in collaboration with Asprey, who financed the development, Cabinet’s directors and several of the gallery artists, conceived a twelve-sided detached brick building which neighbours Vauxhall City Farm to the south with westerly views across Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens to The Royal Vauxhall Tavern.
Charles Asprey Tyers Street, a project space, is also housed inside the building. Its first show was a presentation of book designs and works on paper by Paul Nash.
Curating/Gallerist
Asprey has been an active curator since 1994. He co-founded Ridinghouse Editions, a project space dedicated to the production of limited editioned works by mainstream artists, with Karsten Schubert and Thomas Dane. Its opening exhibition was with Jake and Dinos Chapman and was followed by shows with Keith Coventry, Peter Doig, Abigail Lane, Corban Walker, Alan Charlton and Michael Landy, among others.
In 1998 he co-founded the contemporary art gallery aspreyjacques. It is best remembered for its prescient introduction of young art from Berlin to the capital, giving many well-known German artists their first exposure in the UK. These included Daniel Pflumm, Manfred Pernice, Antje Majewski, Nader Ahriman, Christian Flamm, Thilo Heinzmann and Michel Majerus (1967–2002). Other notable artists represented included Paul Morrison, Graham Little, Ian Kiaer, Alessandro Raho and The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe.
In 2006 Asprey and Kay Pallister curated "As If By Magic" at The Peace Centre in Bethlehem. This show enabled world-famous international artists to show in a besieged part of the West Bank by inviting each of them to produce an idea for an artwork that could be remade on site, thereby getting around the Israeli Army checkpoint controls and circumventing the need to ship valuable art work in and out of the country. Artists who gave work to this project include Damien Hirst, Douglas Gordon, Martin Creed, Wolfgang Tillmans, Isa Genzken, Michael Fullerton, Jim Lambie, Michael Craig-Martin, Gary Rough, Nathan Coley, Simon Periton, Andreas Slominski.
In 2008 Asprey curated the exhibition of new work by Alessandro Raho at Thomas Williams Fine Art on Old Bond Street, London.
More recently he presented "Two Horizons: work from the collections of Charles Asprey and Alexander Schroeder” at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in 2009 and curated "The Ground Around: idylls, earthworks and thunderbolts” at Vilma Gold Gallery in London (2010).
In April 2013 Asprey curated an exhibition, Michel Majerus: Beautiful Way, 25–28 April, at Knaackstrasse 12, Berlin