Latest news
June 08
Gallery update
Opening in July, New Ends, Old Beginnings is part of Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival and takes place at Open Eye Gallery and the Bluecoat. The two venues have worked together in the past on projects including the group exhibition Veil (2003) and Tom Wood’s All Zones Off Peak (1998). We’re delighted to continue that tradition and look forward to future collaborations. Opening in September, our Liverpool Biennial exhibition is part of a city-wide festival of contemporary art, now in its fifth edition. MADE UP is an exploration of the power of the artistic imagination, involving galleries from across Liverpool as well as many new commissions in unexpected places around the city.
In spring 2009 we will close our doors and prepare to move to new premises on the Liverpool waterfront - more specifically to Mann Island, which is between the Pier Head and the Albert Dock. In the coming months we’re particularly keen to hear your thoughts about what we currently do and your ideas for the future. We’ll be gathering feedback in a number of ways, but please feel free to contact us directly on info@openeye.org.uk - we look forward very much to hearing from you!
April 08
Projects and exhibitions update
Launching in spring 08, Open Eye Projects is a new programme of activity that finds its focus outside the gallery's walls. Sitting alongside an experimental exhibitions programme, it is intended to open up routes of engagement with photography that test the boundaries of how the medium is traditionally presented and received. As well as producing off-site projects and events, Open Eye Projects will also be supporting artists and helping them to produce new work.
Our 2008 gallery programme continues with two exhibitions that use radically different artistic means to approach questions of personal identity. Anne Collier's work is rooted in conceptualism. She makes photographs of photographs, encouraging us to reflect on the images that saturate our environment, on the ways in which we occupy and are occupied by them. Pieter Hugo sits squarely in a tradition of straight photographic portraiture, an idiom of direct, unblinking reportage. His photographs surprise and educate us; they remind us that there are other worlds and other lives beyond our field of experience and vision.
October 07
08 exhibitions and gallery news
As we approach the end of our 30th birthday year, we look forward to an exciting and eventful future. John Stezaker (Nov 07 - Jan 08) launches a series of exhibitions that we hope will be amongst the most memorable of Liverpool's Capital of Culture year. Highlights later in the year include the Liverpool Biennial (Sept - Nov 08) and a major project, produced in partnership with The Bluecoat, about the changing cities of the contemporary Arab world.
An important step for us in 08 will be the launch of Open Eye Projects, a programme strand that focuses on commissioning new work and making things happen outside the gallery. Open Eye Projects will create off-site exhibitions and events that invite people to get involved in making art, not just looking at it. It will be experimental and playful, mixing up different approaches and ingredients in unexpected and, we hope, inspiring ways.
As well as looking to the future, we're celebrating some achievements of the past year. In 2007 we made two major acquisitions for our archive of photographs, which was established in 1980 and now contains more than a thousand works. Twelve portraits have joined the collection from Michelle Sank's exhibition The Water's Edge (Apr - Jun 07), along with a body of work by British photojournalist Bert Hardy, generously donated by Getty Images. Taken in the early 1940s for Picture Post magazine, it provides a rare glimpse of the world of Liverpool's Chinese seamen (see picture).
April 07
Open Eye Gallery Plans Move to Waterfront
In 1977 Open Eye Gallery, one of the UK's first photography galleries, opened in the former public bar of the Grapes Hotel. 30 years later we are planning a move to new premises, our fourth city-centre home, and sharing a birthday with the city of Liverpool (the charter for which was signed in 1207).
Much has changed at Open Eye Gallery over the years, and our next move will be accompanied by a number of significant developments. Our new premises on Mann Island (between the Pier Head and Albert Dock) are in the heart of Liverpool's historic waterfront, a world heritage site visited by millions every year.
Re-launching in our new home in 2009, building on our track record as a world-class gallery, we hope to become one of the UK's leading centres for photography. We will have more exhibition space, in which we will present artists’ projects and collection displays alongside our acclaimed gallery programme. We will also have room to develop our learning and participation activities, with regular workshops and courses for anyone who wants to develop their skills in photography, whether they see it as a creative pastime, a serious hobby or a professional career. Add to that an expanded programme of screenings, artist talks, off-site and participative projects and we will have a more vibrant, open and popular Open Eye Gallery, one that will play a major role in the city’s cultural life for years to come.
