Rare chance to see key works by Performance artists

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'Poetry & Performance: Ida Applebroog, Henri Chopin, Gina Pane'

From 18 July, Richard Saltoun Gallery is showing ‘Poetry & Performance: Ida Applebroog, Henri Chopin & Gina Pane’.  Each of the artists holds a unique position with the development of performance art of the past 40 years.

Ida Applebroog’s (b. New York, 1929) diptych Independence Plaza from 1979 is one of her first large scale works on vellum, the medium with which she has made her reputation. Originally exhibited in 1980 in Lucy Lippard’s curated exhibition ‘Co-OpCity’ 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. Chopin believed language to be inadequate in expressing the raw primeval voice of humanity: a belief borne out of his internment in a concentration camp during the Second World War. The experience led him on a quest to find the purest form of voice – human expression- and this subsequently found its form in his typewriter poems, which he called dactylopems

Gina Pane (Biarritz, 1939 – Paris, 1990) gave performances, or ‘actions’, as she referred to them, which are some of the most visually and physically disturbing of all performances of the 1970s. In Azione Sentimentale, 1974, she slices the palm of her hand with a razor blade making a reference to the stigmata. This was featured on the front cover of Lea Vergine’s seminal book Body Art and Performance (1974). Pane 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 an opportunity to view some key works.

Visitor information

Richard Saltoun
111 Great Titchfield Street
London W1W 6RY
Tel: 44 (0) 20 7637 1225

Gallery hours: Monday to Friday 10:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. or by appointment