ART

Steve Wright has reasons to be cheerful about this year’s local art scene.

1 It was Happy Half-Century to Arnolfini, Bristol’s ever-adventurous artspace, which celebrated its 50th year with a raft of exhibitions and events. Arnolfini started above a bookshop on Clifton’s Triangle in 1961 (founders Jeremy Rees, Annabel Lawson – later Rees – and John Osborn).

2 Bristol’s community museum M Shed opened its doors this year and, while there’s plenty more inside to see than mere art, the new ’seum did give us one of the year’s more memorable shows: a retrospective for Martin Parr, long-time Bristol resident and unparalleled chronicler of us Brits at work, rest and play (Clevedon swimmers, pictured top).

3 August’s See No Evil graffiti weekender-cum-block party was a huge and hugely successful undertaking with a lasting legacy. Some 72 graffiti artists from across the globe and down the decades of graff history congregated in central Bristol to cover the unlovely 1960s expanses of Nelson and Rupert Streets in bold, colourful graffiti.

4 Victoria Art Gallery gave us some brilliant shows this year, not least an exhibition of luminous stained glass by Mark Angus and the ever-captivating Bath Society of Artists summer blockbuster. Our favourite, though, was April-June’s ‘Bath Between the Snows’, the biggest show yet for the talented, prolific and oft-sighted Bath landscape painter Pete the Street.

5 Damien Hirst, Louise Bourgeois, Jack Vettriano and Tracey Emin have all adorned its walls and exterior this year, but our favourite artist on view at Bristol’s RWA this year, by a country mile, was the extraordinary Robert Lenkiewicz, subject of a solo show at the gallery back in the spring. A prolific, bohemian and hugely atmospheric painter of daily life, Lenkiewicz died in his adopted city of Plymouth in 2002: love, death, friendship, sex and loneliness were prevailing themes, and Lenkiewicz famously chose the outsider as the subject for his vivid, dramatic, people-thronged studies.

6 Marc Aspland FRPS, chief sports photographer for The Times, was one of the outstanding snappers featured as part of the Royal Photographic Society’s 2011 Members’ Print Exhibition, which toured to the Central Gallery at Bath’s Royal United Hospital in Apr/May. Pictured above: Aspland's 'World Cup Final Save'

7 This year we welcomed back Bath’s Holburne Museum of Art after the three-year restoration of its elegant, parkland-fringed 18th-century mansion, complete with bold and beautiful glass café extension.

8 Pioneering photojournalist John Chillingworth FRPS, at Bath’s Royal Photographic Society in October. Chillingworth’s fascinating set of images, entitled ‘The Innocence of Childhood’, showed children going about their business – playing, gossiping, plotting, loitering – in the bombed-out city centres of post-war Britain.

9 Once again, we loved the output at Bristol’s Lime Tree Gallery this year: beautiful, limpid landscapes from around the British Isles.

10 Mid-size Bath galleries like bo.lee, Edgar Modern, Rostra & Rooksmoor, Beaux Arts and Bath Contemporary have all continued to adventure, intrigue, excite and inspire this year.

11 In one of the more unusual and involving gallery spaces created in Bristol this year, a bunch of artists colonised the gracious old Victorian public convenience/lav/privy/restroom/water closet/call-it-what-you-will on the corner of Woodland Road. Much of the painting, illustration, sonic art, sculpture, print and photography on view took the Victorian era and its key themes – recording and documenting the human figure and form, a fascination with nature and its preservation, and developments in technology – as inspiration.

Copyright Steve Wright 2011; all pictures are subject to copyright.