Multitude Launch

The opening of Multitude was a roaring success! With over 250 people attending during the evening. Social Club Salon 2008 went really well with a great response to the overall 'feel' and atmosphere, and yes it was a really good space to be in during the evening.

All the works can be seen here at the Flickr Salon!
They are also for sale, a catalogue price list will be linked soon, but in the meantime why not select your 'Peoples Choice' or have a read of what the Salon 2008 was all about:

Salon
An enterprising exhibition of artists’ work
Forming part of East Street Arts’ third Social Club project Multitude
Autumn 2008

The history and context for the original Parisian Salon exhibition is fascinating in that at the heart of its concern was the need to create opportunities for young artists to show new work and to develop the audiences for ‘contemporary’ art.

‘All those with a vested interest in the Salon exhibitions were thus faced with the task of defining what sort of public it had brought into being. The Salon exhibition presented them with a collective space that was markedly different from those in which painting and sculpture had served a public function in the past.’1

Around the 1730’s the Salon exhibition became a regular event and its effect on the artistic life of Paris was immediate and dramatic. It was the first regularly repeated, open and free display of ‘contemporary’ art in Europe to be shown in a completely secular setting and for ‘the purpose of encouraging a primary aesthetic response in large numbers of people.’

The first Salon d’Automne (Autumn Salon) was organised by Georges Rouault, André Derain, Henri Matisse and Albert Marquet in 1903. It was as a reaction to the conservative policies of the official Paris Salon. The exhibition almost immediately became the showpiece of developments and innovations in 20th century painting and sculpture.

To mirror this seminal exhibition, during the autumn of 2008 ESA is presenting the organisation’s first Salon event in Leeds. It represents not so much a reaction to the ‘official’, but a continuing exploration into the presentation of practitioners’ work to an engaged and developing audience.

ESA invited practitioners from all walks of life to show their work for the Salon, with the ethos of the exhibition being: ‘no Judge, Jury nor Prize! You are all winners’.

Salon 08 has over 180 pieces of work by practitioners that have found inspiration, passion, and a need to express their ideas, thoughts and feelings. All work therefore is unique and stands as a testimony to a particular time and environment. The browser, buyer, and collector will be the judge.

To view the artworks please visit www.flickr.com/photos/east-street-arts/. There you can see every piece and vote for it by leaving a comment and the winner will receive the mystery prize.

1. Tomas E. Crow (1985) Painters Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris. New Haven and London, Yale University Press.