Apollo and Ordovas Events | Apollo Magazine

About this event

Richard Serra has long been acclaimed for his large-scale, site-specific sculptures. But throughout his career, the foundation for the artist’s work has lain in the direct and intimate practice of drawing: ‘I like to draw,’ Serra has said, ‘It is an activity I rely on, a dependency of sorts.’ To coincide with ‘Richard Serra Drawings’ (until 17 December) at Ordovas in London, Apollo and Ordovas presented a live-streamed discussion on Tuesday 12 October that explored how, for Serra, drawing has consistently been a way of thinking – of achieving a creative solitude and of testing ideas about scale, monumentality and perception.

About the speakers

Pilar Ordovas founded her eponymous gallery, dealing in the best of 20th century and contemporary art with a museum-quality exhibition programme in London and New York, in 2011. Grounded in 25 years of specialist experience, the gallery has organised exhibitions in conjunction with a number of leading institutions, including The Courtauld and Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Previously Pilar worked for 13 years at Christie’s, where she was International Director and Deputy Chairman, Post-War and Contemporary Art in Europe, and two years as a Director of Gagosian Gallery, London.

Martin Gayford is art critic of the Spectator and the author of biographical studies of Michelangelo, John Constable, Vincent van Gogh. In 2016 he published A History of Pictures, co-written with David Hockney and has also written A Bigger Message, a volume of conversations with Hockney. He sat for portraits by both Hockney and Lucian Freud, the latter experience being the subject of his book Man with a Blue Scarf (2010). His other publications include Rendez-Vous with Art, co-authored with Philippe de Montebello, a two-volume study of Freud, a survey of painting in London after the Second World War entitled Modernists and Mavericks and The Pursuit of Art, a collection of travels and interviews. In November 2020, he published Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now, co-written with Antony Gormley. His latest book is Spring Cannot Be Cancelled, co-written with David Hockney, 2021.

Isabel Seligman is the Monument Trust Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawing at the British Museum. Her recent exhibitions and publications include Lines of Thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to now (Thames and Hudson, 2016), Pushing Paper: Contemporary drawing from 1970 to now (Thames and Hudson, 2019) and contributions to The American Dream: Pop to the present (Thames and Hudson, 2017). She was involved with the Bridget Riley Art Foundation project to encourage artists and art students to engage with the Prints and Drawings collection at the British Museum, and is currently working on a project to research and acquire drawings by emerging British artists supported by an Art Fund New Collecting Award.

Thomas Marks is a writer and art critic. He recently stepped down as editor of Apollo, one of the world’s leading art magazines, having held the post since 2013. He has contributed to numerous publications, among them Prospect, Literary Review and the TLS, and has written widely on historical and contemporary art. Marks is a trustee of Art UK (artuk.org), the cultural education charity that exists to open up the UK’s public art collections to global audiences through digitisation and storytelling. He holds a doctorate on Victorian poetry and architecture from the University of Oxford and was a founding editor of The Junket, an online magazine for essays, fiction and poetry that ran from 2011–16.

About this event

Though it was one of the most significant creative friendships of the post-war period, the relationship between Francis Bacon and his friend and muse, the artist Peter Beard, has been little explored to date – and nor do we have a nuanced picture of how it informed their art. To coincide with ‘Wild Life: Francis Bacon and Peter Beard’ at Ordovas in London, Apollo and Ordovas presented a live-streamed discussion on Thursday 6 May 2021 that opened up this friendship and what it made possible, as well as examining how the two artists learnt from each other in their mutual exploration of human and animal life – and death.

The discussion explored how, across painting and photography, and through conversation, correspondence and shared images, the two artists delved into what it means to be human – in both our generosity and our violence to the world we inhabit.

About the speakers

Sophie Pretorius is archivist of The Estate of Francis Bacon collection. Her publications on Francis Bacon include ‘A Pathological Painter: Francis Bacon and the control of suffering’, (Francis Bacon Studies III), and ‘Work on the Barry Joule Archive’ (Francis Bacon Studies IV). The latter includes vital information gleaned from Peter Beard during her interviews with him in Montauk in 2019. Her essay, ‘The Crime of the Century’, concerning the intertwining of both Bacon and Beard’s lives with the concept and the reality of Africa, can be found in the catalogue for Wild Life: Francis Bacon and Peter Beard.

Simon Martin is Director of Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. He has curated many exhibitions and written widely on modern British and contemporary art, including books on Edward Burra, Gluck, John Minton, Eduardo Paolozzi, John Piper, Colin Self, and Clare Woods. A Trustee of the Charleston Trust, he also serves on the Fabric Advisory Committee of Chichester Cathedral, the Courtauld Association Committee, and the Advisory Board of Apollo magazine. He is an alumnus of the University of Warwick and the Courtauld Institute of Art.