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Last Dreams of the Millenium November 7, 1998December 27, 1998 The exhibition Last Dreams of the Millennium was created by Stephen Solovy, Chicago art dealer, collector, and advocate for contemporary art. Solovy created the Stephen Solovy Art Foundation with the express purpose of supporting young emerging artists. He wanted to build a collection that could be shared with a large and diverse audience. Following an exploration of the European art world that led him to the established centers in Germany and Italy, he turned to the relatively unknown shores of the British art world and found a "passionate obsession" awaiting. The exhibition displayed Solovy's personal taste for "canvases that luxuriate unabashedly in their painterly form, quietly echoing elegiac, dreamlike sonatas of a distant, idealized past." Solovy selected artist David Olivant to curate the exhibition and he also wrote the essay exploring the state of British painting. He states, "The result tends to be either an academy of newness where newness is the shape of the new without anything new to which the shape corresponds, or, as we find so much in British painting, an academy of oldness, where likewise the old has been stripped of whatever vitality it once possessed to render it polite, respectable, and eminently teachable."The artists represented were Tony Bevan, Simon Edmondson, Bruce McLean, Ian McKeever, Hughie O'Donoghue, David Olivant, and John Virtue. The twenty works in the show represented the artists with major large scale paintings, as well as some drawings and prints. |