‘NO ONE’S LITTLE GIRL’
GINA BIRCH
Curated by Sean McLusky & DuoVision

Exhibition Dates

OPENING
FRIDAY 1ST DECEMBER 2023
6 – 9PM

Show until Saturday 16TH DECEMBER

Artist Tours & Talks
Saturday 9th December 3pm – in conversation with Louisa Buck

 

Saturday 2nd December
From 3 – 5PM
Cold Lips present:

Gil De Ray
Acoustic of new album
Concrete Portrait (Cold Lips)

Hakon
Reading from Broken Days (Far West Press)

Jeffrey Wengrofsky
Reading from The Wolfman of Rego Park (Far West Press)

With Richard Cabut (reading) & Kirsty Allison (performance)

 

 

Tuesday – Saturday
12.00 – 6.00 pm

Sunday
1 – 5.00 pm

Or by appointment

Check details on Insta for opening times

Gina Birch

Artist and musician GINA BIRCH is among the extraordinary women to come out of England’s original punk movement. But while she is perhaps best known as one of the founding members of the post-punk band THE RAINCOATS, like many other musicians in this era her interests in music emerged of a piece with her visual art studies and practice. Birch’s exhibition at GALLERY46 references, layers, and analyzes all these influences as they have variously crept and exploded into her creative life, but which she reels off today in the order she first encountered them: “The Slits. Derek Jarman. Painting.”

Like many creative young people, Birch was drawn to the vibrant, anything-goes possibilities of UK art schools in the 1970s, and pursued foundation studies in her hometown of Nottingham, relocating to Lon- don to continue her studies at HORNSEY COLLEGE OF ART. As Birch’s fellow Hornsey alumna
VIV ALBERTINE put it, by the mid-1970s Britons of their generation simply knew: “It’s just what you do if you’re into music, you go to art school.” Albertine was also quite famously the guitarist and a songwriter for The Slits, London punk’s first and most audacious all-woman band, and Birch recalls encountering one of their early, effervescently shambolic performances after arriving at Hornsey: “As soon as I saw them, I knew that’s what I had to do. And it’s bizarre, the way that these things just unleashed a freedom in you that you hadn’t recognized before.”

The works in her GALLERY46 exhibition all come from this recent, exceedingly productive period in Birch’s career, even as they loop back around to the concerns, narratives, and specific works from earlier in her life. While her unabashed joy over the surfaces and textures of her rediscovered medium is evident in the paintings’ swooping, gestural strokes and built-up surfaces, the subjects and compositions pointedly return Birch to her past—not just in terms of the autobiographical narratives,     or reframed images and memories now viewed through the perspective-shifting lens of time, but also, more subtly, through the return of her fundamental influences in how she lives and works today.

In all these works, Birch seems to contemplate the past and present simultaneously. But, at the same time, her evident delight in having “become a painter” decades after she began her creative practice additionally documents her future unfolding in this marvelous new act of her life.

Maria Elena Buszek
Professor of Art History
The University of Colorado Denver

 

Artists performing

Exhibition Dates

OPENING
FRIDAY 1ST DECEMBER 2023
6 – 9PM

Show until Saturday 16TH DECEMBER

Artist Tours & Talks
Sat 9th December 3pm – in conversation with Louisa Buck
Sat 16th December

 

Tuesday – Saturday
12.00 – 6.00 pm

Sunday
1 – 5.00 pm

Or by appointment

Check details on Insta for opening times

Gina Birch

Artist and musician GINA BIRCH is among the extraordinary women to come out of England’s original punk movement. But while she is perhaps best known as one of the founding members of the post-punk band THE RAINCOATS, like many other musicians in this era her interests in music emerged of a piece with her visual art studies and practice. Birch’s exhibition at GALLERY46 references, layers, and analyzes all these influences as they have variously crept and exploded into her creative life, but which she reels off today in the order she first encountered them: “The Slits. Derek Jarman. Painting.”

Like many creative young people, Birch was drawn to the vibrant, anything-goes possibilities of UK art schools in the 1970s, and pursued foundation studies in her hometown of Nottingham, relocating to Lon- don to continue her studies at HORNSEY COLLEGE OF ART. As Birch’s fellow Hornsey alumna
VIV ALBERTINE put it, by the mid-1970s Britons of their generation simply knew: “It’s just what you do if you’re into music, you go to art school.” Albertine was also quite famously the guitarist and a songwriter for The Slits, London punk’s first and most audacious all-woman band, and Birch recalls encountering one of their early, effervescently shambolic performances after arriving at Hornsey: “As soon as I saw them, I knew that’s what I had to do. And it’s bizarre, the way that these things just unleashed a freedom in you that you hadn’t recognized before.”

The works in her GALLERY46 exhibition all come from this recent, exceedingly productive period in Birch’s career, even as they loop back around to the concerns, narratives, and specific works from earlier in her life. While her unabashed joy over the surfaces and textures of her rediscovered medium is evident in the paintings’ swooping, gestural strokes and built-up surfaces, the subjects and compositions pointedly return Birch to her past—not just in terms of the autobiographical narratives,     or reframed images and memories now viewed through the perspective-shifting lens of time, but also, more subtly, through the return of her fundamental influences in how she lives and works today.

In all these works, Birch seems to contemplate the past and present simultaneously. But, at the same time, her evident delight in having “become a painter” decades after she began her creative practice additionally documents her future unfolding in this marvelous new act of her life.

Maria Elena Buszek
Professor of Art History
The University of Colorado Denver

 

Exhibition Dates

OPENING
FRIDAY 1ST DECEMBER 2023
6 – 9PM

Show until Sunday 16TH DECEMBER

Artist Tours & Talks
Sat 9th December 3pm – in conversation with Louisa Buck
Sat 16th December

 

Tuesday – Saturday
12.00 – 6.00 pm

Sunday
1 – 5.00 pm

Or by appointment

Check details on Insta for opening times

Gina Birch

Artist and musician GINA BIRCH is among the extraordinary women to come out of England’s original punk movement. But while she is perhaps best known as one of the founding members of the post-punk band THE RAINCOATS, like many other musicians in this era her interests in music emerged of a piece with her visual art studies and practice. Birch’s exhibition at GALLERY46 references, layers, and analyzes all these influences as they have variously crept and exploded into her creative life, but which she reels off today in the order she first encountered them: “The Slits. Derek Jarman. Painting.”

Like many creative young people, Birch was drawn to the vibrant, anything-goes possibilities of UK art schools in the 1970s, and pursued foundation studies in her hometown of Nottingham, relocating to Lon- don to continue her studies at HORNSEY COLLEGE OF ART. As Birch’s fellow Hornsey alumna
VIV ALBERTINE put it, by the mid-1970s Britons of their generation simply knew: “It’s just what you do if you’re into music, you go to art school.” Albertine was also quite famously the guitarist and a songwriter for The Slits, London punk’s first and most audacious all-woman band, and Birch recalls encountering one of their early, effervescently shambolic performances after arriving at Hornsey: “As soon as I saw them, I knew that’s what I had to do. And it’s bizarre, the way that these things just unleashed a freedom in you that you hadn’t recognized before.”

The works in her GALLERY46 exhibition all come from this recent, exceedingly productive period in Birch’s career, even as they loop back around to the concerns, narratives, and specific works from earlier in her life. While her unabashed joy over the surfaces and textures of her rediscovered medium is evident in the paintings’ swooping, gestural strokes and built-up surfaces, the subjects and compositions pointedly return Birch to her past—not just in terms of the autobiographical narratives,     or reframed images and memories now viewed through the perspective-shifting lens of time, but also, more subtly, through the return of her fundamental influences in how she lives and works today.

In all these works, Birch seems to contemplate the past and present simultaneously. But, at the same time, her evident delight in having “become a painter” decades after she began her creative practice additionally documents her future unfolding in this marvelous new act of her life.

Maria Elena Buszek
Professor of Art History
The University of Colorado Denver