Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge – serie

“When I was young I wanted art that would lift off – that would levitate, gyrate, bring together different – perhaps contradictory aspects of my being” Gustav MetzgerGustav Metzger(1926-2017) was one of the foremost figures of the post-war avant-garde in Britain, with a career has spanned over 60 years of art and political activism.In 2014 Kettle’s Yard presented LIFT OFF! - an ambitious exhibition bringing together archive, film, sculpture and installations focusing on a less familiar but central area of Metzger’s practice – his auto-creative process driven work – the alter ego of his better-known auto-destructive practice. The exhibition marked something of a homecoming for Metzger, who began his artistic career at the Cambridge School of Art in 1944 and returned to deliver two seminal lecture/demonstrations (1960/1965) at the University of Cambridge.This publication documents the artist’s most ephemeral Auto-Creative artworks of the 1960s, and new works created by Metzger especially for LIFT OFF! It includes new texts by curator Elizabeth Fisher that illuminate this less well known aspect of Metzger’s practice.

This publication marks Anthea Hamilton Reimagines Kettle’s Yard - an installation by Turner Prize nominee Anthea Hamilton at The Hepworth Wakefield, exhibited during September 2016 – May 2017.The ambitious installation included a series of new works, created by the artist in response to works from the Kettle’s Yard Collection. Hamilton is renowned for her art-pop, culture-inspired sculptures and installations that incorporate references from the worlds of art, fashion, design and cinema. Based on her research into the art and objects of the Kettle’s Yard Collection, Hamilton re-appropriated objects from the collection, using unexpected details as starting points for new works.Hamilton invited several British and international artists, with whom she has either previously worked, or whose work is important to her, to contribute to the new installation. These include: French artist Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann; British artist Nicholas Byrne; German artist Daniel Sinsel and the celebrated American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Sunil Gupta is among the most highly regarded photographers of our time. Born in New Delhi, India in 1953 and now living in London, his pioneering contribution to art and photography, championing the queer community and queer rights, is recognised as exceptional. The inventiveness and exhilarating breadth of his work, from street photography to staged portraits, offers a compelling vision in which art and life are inseparable. His enduring belief in the freedom to live joyful lives and to celebrate identity and sexuality shines through every image.With over 170 photographs and five new essays, ‘Life with a Camera’ also includes Sunil Gupta’s insightful introductions to each series of his work from 1970 to the present day. This new publication includes contributions from Natasha Bissonauth, Theo Gordon, Sunil Gupta, Guy Haywood, Andrew Nairne, Tausif Noor, Greg Salter and Gayatri Sinha.The book accompanies a major exhibition of Gupta’s work opening in September 2026 at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, before touring to Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2027) and Leeds Art Gallery (2028).

Handpicked: Painting Flowers From 1900 to Today celebrates the beauty and vitality of flower paintings of the 20th and 21st centuries. Beautifully illustrated, this anthology features essays on paintings by significant figures of the 20th century, as well as contemporary artists working with the genre of flower painting in new and often experimental ways today.Artists: Hurvin Anderson, Vanessa Bell, David Bomberg, Louise Bourgeois, Jai Chuhan, Andrew Cranston, Kaye Donachie, Gigi Ettedgui, Anna Freeman Bentley, Marjory Garnett, Tirzah Garwood, Gluck, Lubaina Himid, Howard Hodgkin, Isak of Igdlorpait, Nerys Johnson, David Jones, Poppy Jones, Joy Labinjo, Doron Langberg, Aubrey Levinthal, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Rory McEwen, Cedric Morris, Cassi Namoda, Mary Newcomb, William Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Chris Ofili, Jennifer Packer, Celia Paul, Bryan Pearce, Emma Prempeh, Bianca Raffaella, Eric Ravilious, Anne Redpath, Henri Rousseau, William Scott, Judith Tucker, Euan Uglow, Charlotte Verity, Édouard Vuillard, Caroline Walker, Alison Watt, Christopher Wood, Clare Woods.

Portia Zvavahera is one of the outstanding artists of her generation. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1985, she has developed a unique combination of print/painting techniques to register a private world of dreams, fantasies and figural constructions. She received her art education in Zimbabwe in the early 2000s, and has become recognised in the past decade as one of the foremost representatives of African figuration, showcased at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and in a number of commercial gallery exhibitions in South Africa, the US and the UK. She has not yet had a solo show in a public museum in Europe. This new publication accompanies a major exhibition, curated by Tamar Garb, which will include reproductions of brand new works created on the occasion of this exhibition alongside a selection of recent and older paintings which reveal the depth and richness of Zvavahera’s practice. The focus will be on the theme of dreams, fantasy and figuration, and large details will highlight Zvavahera’s innovative amalgamation of printmaking and painting techniques that build rich surfaces to create her private cosmology of creatures and contexts.The book will feature a significant new essay from curator Tamar Garb and will centre around an extensive conversation between Garb, Sinazo Chiya, Tandazani Dhlakama and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela discussing Zvavahera’s engagement with eros, intimacy and female-centred experience. The book will open up how Zvavahera’s works emerge from dreams; being figurative without being illustrative, registering a world of feminine experience and fantasy.

Issam Kourbaj was born and grew up in Syria before settling in Cambridge in 1990. Following the uprising in Syria in 2011, Kourbaj has been a constant creative witness to the continuing conflict in his home country, his art increasingly addressing the endemic pain and suffering that accompanies displacement and forced migration everywhere. Published to accompany two substantial solo exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge and The Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge, Issam Kourbaj explores the life and work of an artist characterised by collaboration and endless curiosity. Kourbaj’s art is expressive and alive, suggesting even in the darkest hours the potential for change and renewal.“How can we grasp the remarkable artistic breadth of Issam Kourbaj? Here is an art so full of invention and purpose that its images and ideas reverberate well beyond the walls of any gallery. Kourbaj’s achievement is to make us look, pause and imagine. Engaging with his acute and powerful work makes us consider our responsibility for the conditions of others on our shared planet” - Andrew Nairne, Director of Kettle’s Yard

This publication marks the 2018 exhibition Actions. The image of the world can be different, the first exhibition to be held in at the new Kettle’s Yard following its redevelopment.The exhibition is inspired by a letter Naum Gabo wrote to Herbert Read in 1944, in which Gabo reasserts the potential of art as a poetic, social and political force in the world and his belief that “the image of the world can be different”. Actions reflects the energising diversity and breadth of art in the modern and contemporary period within the UK and internationally.Bringing together work across a variety of forms and media made by artists of different generations from the emerging to the renowned, the exhibition features work by 38 artists including nine new commissions by Rana Begum, Jeremy Deller, eL Seed, Idris Khan, Issam Kourbaj, Harold Offeh, Melanie Manchot, Cornelia Parker and Caroline Walker.

Lucie Rie (1902–1995) is one of the finest modern potters of the 20th century. Born and trained in Vienna, her successful early career came to a halt in 1938 when forced to leave Austria to escape the persecution of Jewish people. In exile in London, Rie established a new workshop and over five decades created highly individual bowls, vases and tableware which continue to amaze and inspire today.With over 150 photographs and five new essays, Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery celebrates an exceptional life of creative invention and experiment.With texts by Edmund de Waal, Tanya Harrod, Helen Ritchie, Eliza Spindel, Kimberley Chandler and Nigel Wood.

Published to coincide with Antony Gormley SUBJECT at Kettle's Yard in 2018, this book features installation shots and drawings alongside texts by Caroline Collier and Jennifer Powell, and Antony Gormley in conversation with architect Jamie Fobert.Devised for the new galleries and spaces at Kettle’s Yard, SUBJECT highlighted many of Antony Gormley’s interests, including how sculpture can activate both the space that it occupies and the body of the viewer. The exhibition offered a series of physical and metaphysical encounters, exploring our relationship to space and our sense of self.SUBJECT encompassed both galleries, the Learning Studio and the Research Space. The exhibition included the first in a new series of works, Subject (2018), from which the title of the show derives, and the first UK showing of Infinite Cube II (2018), made of one-way mirror glass and 1,000 LED lights.

Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends is the first book to document the extraordinary activity at the LYC Museum & Art Gallery in Banks, Cumbria between 1972 and 1983. The LYC was the singleminded effort of the artist Li Yuan-chia, who moved to the rural North of England by way of London, Bologna, Taipei and Guangxi, China. At the LYC, Li organised exhibitions, published books, exhibited archealogical artefacts, arranged workshops and welcomed an array of visitors from local and international artists and art workers to nearby residents and travellers, many of whom became friends. In this book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Kettle's Yard, the curators Hammad Nasar, Amy Tobin and Sarah Victoria Turner, establish Li's work at the LYC as a form of worldmaking, connecting his cosmic conceptual art practice, to his interest in participation and friendship as well as his engagement with nature and the landscape. Nasar, Tobin and Turner's account is accompanied by nine short texts – by Elizabeth Fisher, Ysanne Holt, Annie Jael Kwan, Lesley Ma, Gustavo Grandal Montero, Luke Roberts, Nick Sawyer & Harriet Aspin, Nicola Simpson and Diana Yeh – that trace the diverse threads and ramifications of Li's practice historically and in the present. Richly illustrated, Making New Worlds offers a provocative new way of thinking the history of British art in the 20th century.

Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–92), working in New York in the 1940s, created beautiful, layered paintings as well as experimenting with drawing, photography and sculpture. This publication, produced to coincide with the 2018 exhibition Richard Pousette-Dart: Beginnings reflects new research into the life and work of Richard Pousette-Dart and his significant contribution to American art in the 20th Century.Playing a key role in the genesis of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School, which transformed American art in the post-war years, Pousette-Dart’s contemporaries included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. Jim Ede, creator of Kettle’s Yard, first met Pousette-Dart in New York in 1940. Research exploring their transatlantic correspondence over subsequent decades was a catalyst for the first solo exhibition of the work of Pousette-Dart in the UK, held at Kettle's Yard in 2018. The majority of works on display were borrowed from US museums and collections, and had not previously been seen in this country.

A Way of Life has been put together as lovingly as Kettle’s Yard itself. It takes the form of a guided tour; you enter the door and venture through the house, taking in the rooms one by one, seeing the light play on glass, china, wood, stone and canvas, and seeing how the art and the living-space bring each other alive. A series of remarkable black and white photographs catches the spirit that Jim Ede was trying to evoke, and the text comments on them in his own words. The visit is interwoven with Jim Ede’s account of earlier attempts to create the same wholeness in earlier houses in London and France. He has also placed in the spaces and intervals of the book his choice of poetic texts; an anthology which indicates the spirit in which he has worked. Three influences animate this unique book: the sense of the way of life that Jim Ede created at Kettle’s Yard, the spirit of the house itself, and the gentle but persistently creative spirit of the man who put it all together and then put together this book as the record of his creation in his own words. Originally published in 1984. This edition (reprinted in 2021) contains the introduction by former director of the Tate Sir Alan Bowness first included in the 1996 edition.

Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) is one of the most original and inspiring British artists of the 20th Century. Promoted by the artist Ben Nicholson amongst others, Wallis’s paintings influenced the development of British art between the wars. The directness of Wallis’ vision reflected a lifetime of living by and from the sea. His paintings are of what he knew, remembered and imagined. Yet they are also timeless stories about survival and the nature of our relationship with the world. As Jim Ede commented “Wallis is never local.”With over 70 illustrations, excerpts from letters and texts by Michael Bird, Ben Nicholson and Jim Ede, this book takes a fresh look at this extraordinary artist and his relationship to Kettle's Yard. It includes some of Wallis's best works from the Kettle’s Yard collection including many that are not normally on display, from ambitious paintings such as Saltash to what Wallis knew and loved best: ships and boats.Kettle's Yard, the University of Cambridge's modern and contemporary art gallery, holds the largest public collection of works by Alfred Wallis. Wallis was born in Devon. He was a fisherman and later a scrap-metal merchant in St. Ives. He took up painting in his later years, following the death of his wife in 1922. He was admired by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, who came across his work when visiting St. Ives in 1928 and included it in the Seven & Five Society’s exhibition of 1929. He died in Madron Poorhouse.

Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) is one of the most important and best loved artists in the Kettle’s Yard collection. Nicholson met Kettle’s Yard founder Jim Ede in 1924, and they kept in regular contact over the following decades. Ede credited Winifred Nicholson directly for ‘[teaching] me much about the fusing of art and daily living’ and at Kettle’s Yard he built the largest public collection of her work.This book brings together some of Nicholson’s most eloquent essays with extracts from previously unpublished letters between the artist and Ede, and the words of their mutual friends, the poet Kathleen Raine and collector Helen Sutherland. With an introduction by curator Elizabeth Fisher exploring Nicholson’s relationship with Ede, the book is richly illustrated and included reproductions of all works in the collection, a biography and bibliography.

Christopher Wood (‘Kit’) as he was more commonly known) was born in Liverpool. At 14 he was diagnosed with septicaemia and confined to his bed for three years, during this time he took up drawing. Wood moved to London and worked as an importer of dried fruit, his route to and from work took him through a West End that was still steeped in the bohemian atmosphere of the pre-war years. Inspired by the comings and goings of this exuberant life, Wood would sit sketching for hours. During this time Wood met Alphonse Kahn, one of the best-connected men in the Paris art world, who invited him to Paris.Through extended visits to Paris between 1921 and 1924 he came into contact with the European avant-garde and established himself as a prominent and popular artist winning the admiration of Picasso and Jean Cocteau. Wood was one of the very few British artists to recognise and respond to the new landscape of modernism and have a solo exhibition in Paris at that time. During his Parisian years Wood became addicted to opium and in 1930 was tragically killed by a train at Salisbury station whilst under the influence of the drug.Richly illustrated with over 40 colour illustrations, this is a comprehensive account from the largest public collection of works by Christopher Wood. The book features writings by Jim Ede on Wood, an essay by curator Elizabeth Fisher, the artist John Piper and the poet Max Jacob, alongside previously unpublished extracts from letters between Wood and Jim Ede, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, and his mother Clare Wood.

Megan Rooney: Echoes and Hours is the first monograph to explore the work of one of the most exciting emerging painters of her generation.Rooney’s sensuous and compelling paintings reinvigorate the power of abstraction. They embody a sense of boundless energy and life, whilst reflecting the artist’s deep knowledge of painting and the potential of each viewer’s encounter. Vibrant colour and gesture combine in dense, apparently infinite layers. Each canvas captures the ebb and flow of Rooney’s process, from repetitive overpainting to the use of abrasives to remove pigment.This major new book accompanies Rooney's first solo exhibition in the UK. It explores the variations in her painting practice across a series of new works made for the exhibition. The book illustrates these works including a temporary mural at Kettle's Yard painted directly on the gallery walls, as well as documenting earlier, formative paintings. Three newly commissioned essays and an interview with the artist in her studio explore Rooney's practice and the resonances of her hugely captivating work.

Kettle's Yard is widely recognised as a highly influential master class in curating; a flawless arrangement of art and objects that is still radical in its philosophy of seeking to fuse art with life. For many it is a place that has that rare power of changing how we see the world and our place within it. With a foreword by Jim Ede and an interesting floor plan guide, this book is a notable keepsake for all who love Kettle's Yard, and a fantastic introduction for those yet to discover it.Kettle’s Yard is the University of Cambridge’s modern and contemporary art gallery. The permanent collection displayed in the Kettle’s Yard House boasts works from 20th Century artists such as Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miro, Barbara Hepworth and many more. Contemporary exhibitions are shown in the purpose-built galleries adjacent to the House.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) was one of the leading figures of European avant-garde sculpture. Gaudier played an important role in the development of modern sculpture in Britain, working alongside Ezra Pound, Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis and others. Like many artists of his generation, his career was tragically cut short by the war. Having volunteered for the French army in the summer of 1914, he was killed in action the following year, at the age of just twenty-three.In 1930 Jim Ede, who three years earlier had acquired almost all of Gaudier’s work, published a biography of the sculptor. Entitled A life of Gaudier-Brzeska, the book was re-issued a year later with the title Savage Messiah. Ede’s book played an important role in re-establishing Gaudier’s reputation at a time when he was at risk of fading into obscurity.This new edition, published in 2011 to mark the centenary of Gaudier's arrival in Britain from France, includes previously unpublished material and new essays that re-contextualise the book art historically. It draws from the 1929 manuscript version of Ede's book, now in the archive at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, reproducing many of the drawings and photographs first used by Ede.

This publication was published to accompany the exhibition Homelands: Art from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, at Kettle's Yard 12 November 2019 - 2 February 2020, curated by Devika Singh with Amy Tobin and Grace Storey.Through photography, sculpture, painting, performance and film, tells stories of migration and resettlement in South Asia and beyond, as well as violent division and unexpected connections. The exhibition themes engage with displacement and the transitory notion of home in a region marked by the repercussions of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, as well as by contemporary migration. The artists explore intimate and political histories, often contesting borders, questioning common pasts and imagining new futures.The exhibition included new works and works being shown in the UK for the first time by Sohrab Hura, Yasmin Jahan Nupur, Seher Shah, Iftikhar Dadi & Elizabeth Dadi and Munem Wasif, as well as a commission by Desmond Lazaro working with communities in North Cambridge and a performance by Nikhil Chopra. The publication includes contributions by Nancy Adajania, Homi K. Bhabha and each of the artists.