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Unit (art collective)
Encyclopedia
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
scene. Many of the artists that participated in Unit exhibitions have moved on to achieve international acclaim. The core members were curator Stéphanie Bacqué and artists John Chilver, Stuart Croft
Stuart Croft
Stuart Croft is an artist / filmmaker. He attended Chelsea College of Art in London, graduating with an MA in 1998. His work has since been shown widely in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States....
, DJ Simpson, Ben Tunstall and Neil Zakiewicz
Neil Zakiewicz
Neil Zakiewicz is a British artist. He works primarily in sculpture.In the late 1990s Zakiewicz co-founded the Unit art collective...
.
Initially intended as a one-year gallery
Art gallery
An art gallery or art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art.Museums can be public or private, but what distinguishes a museum is the ownership of a collection...
project space in Bethnal Green
Bethnal Green
Bethnal Green is a district of the East End of London, England and part of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, with the far northern parts falling within the London Borough of Hackney. Located northeast of Charing Cross, it was historically an agrarian hamlet in the ancient parish of Stepney,...
, London E2, Unit later organised a series of exhibitions at various international galleries and temporary exhibition spaces as guest curators.
A notable exhibition in the first year was "World of Painting" (1997) featuring painters John Chilver, Paul Morrison
Paul Morrison (artist)
Paul Morrison is an English painter. He was born in Liverpool in 1966, and received a BA in fine art from Sheffield City Polytechnic. He then continued his studies at Goldsmiths College of Art in London, where he graduated with an MA in 1998. He also spent two years studying at Hugh Baird College...
, Michael Raedecker
Michael Raedecker
Michael Raedecker is a Dutch artist based in London.Raedecker studied fashion at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1985-1990...
and Michael Stubbs.
Unit's exhibitions programme received widespread attention, with reviews in publications such as Time Out Magazine, The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
newspaper, Flash Art Magazine among others.
In 1998 Unit was invited by Chisenhale Gallery, a leading public art venue in east London, to organise the group exhibition "Post Neo-Amateurism", with Stuart Croft
Stuart Croft
Stuart Croft is an artist / filmmaker. He attended Chelsea College of Art in London, graduating with an MA in 1998. His work has since been shown widely in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States....
, Rowena Dring, Michelle Griffiths, Yasu Ichige, Ben Judd
Ben Judd
Ben Judd is a British artist, and lives and works in London. Judd is best known for his undercover videos of specific groups of people, such as trainspotters and Morris dancers, to which he added a voice-over describing an imagined connection or intimacy with the subjects.Delusion is key to Ben...
, Janice Kerbel, Waseem Khan, Klega, Jon Lockhart, Brighid Lowe, Caroline McCarthy, Kate Smith and David Thorpe. In the same year Unit also organised a solo exhibition by the iconic late artist John Latham
John Latham (artist)
John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, was a British conceptual artist who lived for many years in England. He believed that violence and conflict between the people of the world is the result of ideological differences...
at SaliGia Gallery in Clapham
Clapham
Clapham is a district in south London, England, within the London Borough of Lambeth.Clapham covers the postcodes of SW4 and parts of SW9, SW8 and SW12. Clapham Common is shared with the London Borough of Wandsworth, although Lambeth has responsibility for running the common as a whole. According...
.
In 1999 Unit worked with London galleries such as Gasworks Gallery
Gasworks Gallery
Gasworks Gallery is based by the Oval Cricket Ground in South East London. It is part of Triangle Arts Trust, an international network or residencies and workshops offering artists the opportunity develop their practice stimulated by a climate of international exchange and dialogue...
, Mota Gallery, and was invited by Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
gallery Büro Für Kunst to realise "Zauberhaft", an exhibition of 21 international artists that included Eberhard Havekost
Eberhard Havekost
Eberhard Havekost is a contemporary German painter based in Berlin and Dresden. In 1985 he completed an internship as a stonemason. He studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden from 1991-1996, where he became a master student under Professor Ralf Kerbach in 1997...
, Enrico David
Enrico David
Enrico David is an artist based in London. He works in drawing, sculpture and installation, usually involving adaptions of traditional craft techniques. He makes large scale embroidered portraits using sewn canvases, which begin as drawings and collages from fashion magazines. He often uses...
, David Burrows
David Burrows (contemporary artist)
David Burrows is British artist and writer. His work consists of drawings and paint-spattered, debris-littered, haphazard installations. He writes articles on art and aesthetics and is the editor of Article Press at Birmingham City University...
, Liz Arnold and Joël Bartomoléo.