Stansfield Hooykass
Celebrated collaborative art duo Elsa Stansfield and Madelon Hooykaas are soon to have some of their best work exhibited at Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts and Street Level Photoworks.
The pair, who worked together from the early 1970s, made works and installations in a wide range of media and sought to redefine how art was presented beyond the gallery context. They are best remembered, though, for their innovation and pioneering spirit in the multimedia art world.
Held by contemporary critics to have paved the way for the New Media artists of today, the video project work made by the two is considered groundbreaking.
Revealing the Invisible: The Art of Stansfield and Hooykaas from Different Perspectives will showcase works from the pair’s impressively wide-ranging career and coincides with a lecture given by Hooykaas on November 26 at the Glasgow School of Art, where fellow artist Elsa studied between 1962 and 1965.
CCA is a fitting venue for the show. Formerly the Third Eye Centre, it is the same venue where Stansfield and Hooykaas showed their very first video installation, What’s it to You, in 1975. This event, a keystone in the evolution of the duo’s collaborative work, will be commemorated by the exhibition.
Elsa, who was born in Glasgow and later studied film at the Slade School of Fine Art, died in 2004 in the Netherlands. Dutch artist Madelon lives and works in Amsterdam and continues to produce work in the duo’s tone.
The pair worked mostly in London and Amsterdam but over the years they showed their work, which included films, installations and public sculptures, all over the world in places including New York, Tokyo, Sydney and Montreal.
Visit www.streetlevelphotoworks.org for more information.
