Photo of Alastair Sooke by Richard Cook.

In Conversation: Stephen Chambers RA and Alastair Sooke

Tue 17 April 2018

Howard Theatre

The Heong Gallery at Downing College invites you to an evening with artist Stephen Chambers RA and journalist and broadcaster Alastair Sooke. FInd out more about The Court of Redonda and earlier projects. The conversation will be followed by questions from the audience.

THE HOWARD THEATRE
Doors open 6PM, Tuesday 17 April 2018.
FREE. Booking Essential.



About Stephen Chambers
Stephen Chambers (b.1960, UK), who was elected a Royal Academician in 2005, graduated with a Masters from Chelsea College of Art, London in 1983. He has won many scholarships and awards, including a Rome scholarship, the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust Travelling Award, and from 1998-9 he was the Kettle’s Yard/Downing College Cambridge Fellow. He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Downing College, University of Cambridge, in 2016. He has exhibited widely, with more than 40 solo presentations, including the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the Pera Museum, Istanbul.

His work is held in many international collections including Arts Council England; Deutsche Bank, London; Downing College, Cambridge; Government Art Collection, London; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Pera Museum, Istanbul; Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has collaborated with Ashley Page and Orlando Gough on three contemporary dance productions for The Royal Ballet, London, and with poets – including Jacques Jouet – on a series of artists’ books.


About Alastair Sooke
Alastair Sooke is a writer and broadcaster. Art critic of The Daily Telegraph and a columnist for BBC Culture, he has written and presented many documentaries on television and radio for the BBC, and is the author of three books about art published by Penguin. He joined the Telegraph as a trainee, aged 21, in 2003, and reported regularly for The Culture Show on BBC Two between 2009 and 2014. In 2016, he sat on the British Council’s Venice Biennale Selection Committee and judged the inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. He currently serves on the Courtauld Association Committee and the advisory board of the Classical Art Research Centre at the University of Oxford. He is also a trustee of The Ampersand Foundation. Born in 1981, he was educated at Westminster School, where he was a Queen’s Scholar, at Christ Church, Oxford, and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He lives in London with his family.

Photo: (c) RIchard Cook. Courtesy United Agents.


The Court of Redonda
The Court of Redonda is a vast collective portrait of an imaginary court of maverick and singular individuals. The installation of 101 paintings articulates the role played by artists in envisaging a world not how it is, but how it could be. Featuring subjects drawn from different epochs and cultures and hung with reference to historic portrait collections, the court imagines a utopian society that celebrates the creative and idiosyncratic.

Redonda, an uninhabited island in the Caribbean Sea, was claimed in 1865 by a merchant trader who established an honorary monarchy that has been passed down to the present through a literary lineage. Sparked by a ‘mental collaboration’ with Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who was until recently a King of Redonda and appointed many notable writers and artists to his imaginary court, Chambers has created a collective of individuals, where creativity is honoured over hereditary privilege.

Cost: FREE