Founded in 2013 thanks to the generosity of Elizabeth and Daniel Peltz, Peltz Gallery is home to artists, researchers, and art enthusiasts from the the world over. Their exhibitions, which take place at the Birkbeck School of Arts in Bloomsbury, combine creative activity with academic study and are inspired by cultural issues.
Peltz Gallery is housed within Birkbeck's School of Arts on Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, London. Their exhibitions highlight the School's professors' and postgraduates' creative, multidisciplinary, experimental research, as well as the work of emerging and established artists from the UK and beyond, thus bringing uncommon and underexplored issues to the public's attention.
Some of the Peltz's recent exhibitions include Refugees, Newcomers, Citizens: Migration Stories from Picture Post, 1938-56, Leonardo da Vinci and Perpetual Motion: Visualizing Impossible Machines, and Art at the Frontier of Film Theory: Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. This years exhibition was named Mending the Psyche: Art as Reparation. It focused on the effects of grief on the individual as well as the continual process of mourning after a loss.
The Gallery has grown from strength to strength since its inception, with a diverse schedule of exhibitions and events. They are getting a reputation for delving into the important role of visual art in controversial political and historical issues, as well as humanitarian issues.
Mending the Psyche: Art as Reparation set out to show the reparative impacts of art on the self, emphasizing creativity as means of healing as an entity, challenging the socially manufactured narrative of sorrow as a time-limited experience. This relationship is illustrated through the personal adventures of artists Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill.
Fay's drawings span the evolution of her work, from early plant renderings through a ten-year quest for her missing mother, who died in 1964, to recent circle drawings picked from a wider series of over fifty. Following journeys to Morocco and Iran in 2019, these paintings were created to represent the prospect of some sort of resolution or becoming after meeting her mother again.
On the other hand, Judy's most recent images and videos focus on fundamental themes, ranging from deathbed experiences to the makeup of the planet itself. They're all about state changes, both in the body and in the earth's volcanic material. Her subjects here span from her father's ultimate sickness and death in an iron lung- symbolized as disembodied breath - the sounds and images of which she was affected by when she was one year old; to the fantastically distant light and gas conveyed over interstellar space.
Both artists' creative journeys reveal the evolving nature of sorrow and the numerous ways in which art allows the bereaved person to interact with their experience. Their works, both implicitly and explicitly, explore pain on a personal and global scale, entwined with technological advancement, empire and war, the domestic and the cosmic.
I was definitely fascinated by the way that the artists were able to combine their artistic practice with their personal journeys. I can only imagine that it would have been difficult for them to express their personal loss and grief in a way that would not have been clouded by their self-importance. However, I believe their works are beautiful, nuanced, and thoughtful, and I look forward to seeing what they will create next.
