POETRY & PERFORMANCE

Celebrating poetry and performance through the work of Ida APPLEBROOG, Henri CHOPIN and Gina PANE, each of whom has held a unique position within the development of performance art over the past 40 years. 

Ida APPLEBROOG's (New York, 1929) diptych Independence Plaza from 1979 is one of her first large scale works on vellum on which she has made her reputation. Originally exhibited in 1980 in Lucy Lippard's curated exhibition Co-Op City held at Printed Matters Inc, the works were installed in the window frames of the gallery, looking out onto the street. The works simulate an actual window, with the passersby spying onto a intimate world of domesticity. It's hard to say what my work is about, Applebroog has said, but for me, it's really about how power works.

Henri CHOPIN (Paris, 1922 - Norfolk, 2008) is one of the key figures of the post-war European avant-garde. He experimented with text, language, performance, film and sound art as well as being an important publisher and promoter of the post war avant garde. Following his internment in a concentration camp during the second world war Chopin came to believe that language was corrupted and inadequate in expressing the raw primeval voice of humanity. The experience led him on a quest to find the purest form of voice / human expression  - a pursuit that led him to swallow a microphone and this subsequently found its form in his typewriter poems, which he called dactylopoems.

Gina PANE's (Biarritz, 1939 - Paris, 1990) performances, or "actions", as she referred to them, are some of the most visually and physically disturbing of all performances during the 70s. In Azione Sentimentale, 1974, she slices the palm of her hand with a razor blade making a reference to the stigmata. Featured on the front cover of Lea Vergine's seminal book Body Art and Performance, 1974. Pane's describes the work in her notes as the red rose, the mystic flower, the erotic flower, transformed into vagina by a reconstitution in its most present state, the painful one. Pane's work is rarely exhibited in the UK and this is a rare opportunity to view some key works.