Kingstonfirst - Whats On - 27th January 2010

THE END OF LOVE - A NEW FILM BY DAVID AUSTEN

David Austen is a visual artist whose diverse practice fluently encompasses paint, print, drawing, sculpture and, more recently, moving image. His most ambitious film work to date, The End of Love, is a vaudeville performed at the end of the world. The location is the stage of a London theatre. There is no audience.

There are 12 characters, eight men and four women: a dark angel, a betrayed Cyclops, a love-sick dandy, a love-less fat man, an ancient moon, a homeless man, a pair of romantic criminals, a trapeze artist, a lonely astronaut, an imprisoned woman and an aged Jack the Giant Killer. Each scene is delivered in the form of a love letter, employing richly intense language full of contrast and contradiction; from light sweet sentiment to fear and violence, from comedy to sadness, artifice and dream to dark brutality.

This exhibition is accompanied by a concurrent display at the Rose Theatre, Kingston

Stanley Picker Gallery

2nd Dec 6pm - Artist talk
6.30pm - 8.30pm - exhibition launch

Phone: 020 8417 4074

Link: www.stanleypickergallery.org

From:2nd December 2009

To: 30th January 2010

KINGSTON MUSEUM EXHIBITION - SILK, SQUALOR AND SCANDAL: HOGARTH'S LONDON

This exhibition introduces and examines William Hogarth's remarkable career and the range of his work, from polite society portraits or 'conversation pieces' to London street scenes depicting the seedy side of 18th-century life. Though well-known for his brilliant satirical print series, Hogarth was also an accomplished and innovative painter.

Born in the City of London in 1697, Hogarth did not have an easy childhood. Though well-educated and of modest social standing, his father was never able to use his talents to the full and was imprisoned for debt when Hogarth was only 10. For four years, the family lived in debtors' lodgings near the Fleet Prison. Perhaps this experience instilled the determination with which Hogarth approached his own career. Apprenticed to an engraver at 17, by 23, Hogarth had set himself up as an independent copper-plate engraver and enrolled in the Academy of Painting in St Martin's Lane. Throughout the following four decades he pursued both printing and painting with a mixture of skill, innovation and self-promotion, utilising his extraordinary artistic talent as a way of supporting himself.

Phone: 020 8547 6460

Link: www.kingston.gov.uk/museum

From:23rd January 2010

To: 30th April 2010