Tania Kovats: Watermark | Shezad Dawood: The Box

About

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to present a solo show of new drawings by British artist Tania Kovats, who first came to prominence when she won the Barclays Young Award at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1991. Entitled Watermark, the exhibition will continue the artist’s ongoing exploration into the relationship between water and drawing, whilst also taking into account the enduring significance of drawing within Kovats’ sculptural practice. 

Kovats is renowned for producing sculptures, large-scale installations and temporal works which explore our experience and understanding of landscape. Her work was recently the subject of a major solo exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Oceans, encompassing sculptures and drawings which explored Kovats' preoccupation with the sea. This was accompanied by a new publication by the artist called 'Drawing Water.'

She has often made large-scale works in the public realm, including TREE (2009), a permanent installation for the Natural History Museum; and Rivers (2012), installed in the landscape of Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh, in which Kovats collected water from one hundred rivers around the British Isles and housed the collection in a specially constructed boathouse.

Tania Kovats (b. 1966) was awarded the Henry Moore Drawing Fellowship in 2004 to 2005 and was Visiting Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Oxford University in 2006. Her 'Tree' was selected from 9 other short-listed artists in the Darwin's Canopy project at the Natural History Museum and was commissioned to celebrate Darwin's bicentenary in 2009. She has recently completed a residency in the Astronomy Department at the University of Cambridge, for which she recently undertook a site-specific commission, and is Course Director for MA Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art, London. 

She has shown extensively in the UK and abroad, with solo shows including those at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; Peer Arts, London and Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall. Group shows include those at BALTIC, Gateshead; Hayward Gallery, London; Tate Liverpool; V&A, London; Museum Of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Kettle's Yard, Cambridge; Kunstraum Innsbruck and ICA, London, amongst many others. Her sculptures and drawings feature in numerous public and private collections including the Arts Council, The British Council, Government Art Collection and the V&A. In 2005, she published 'The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing,' which presented her personal exploration of drawing. She currently has a solo exhibition at Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury.