Projects

Project 1
Date: March 1973

Living cheek by jowl with the vagrants who had begun to doss down in Lenkiewicz's home put enormous strains on the artist’s families, but the Lenkiewicz’s Schweitzerian experiment was only just beginning. ‘... Read more

Project 2
Date: 25 July – 20 November 1974

This exhibition was also shown at Wilmas Galleries in Coventry for ten days commencing 25 November 1974 (exhibition... Read more

Project 3
Date: 25 August - 31 October 1976

The Mental Handicap Project, like Vagrancy before it, and the Old Age Project which followed in 1979, are often remembered with the greatest affection by Lenkiewicz’s admirers. To persuade... Read more

Project 4
Date: 16 - 31 October 1975

Lenkiewicz produced a series of Projects in the 1970s which dealt with the nature of human relationships, such as Love & Romance (1975), Love & Mediocrity (1976), and human physiology in a... Read more

Project 5
Date: 1 - 24 December 1976

Section Five of the Relationship Series was called Love & Mediocrity and it was a dissection of the notion of fidelity. Titles such as Man and woman trying to kiss each other in front of... Read more

Project 6
Date: 20 January - 19 March 1975

This exhibition was also shown at the Blenheim Gallery between 6 May and 20 June 1975.

The purpose of the exhibition was explained in the notes for the 1997 Retrospective at Plymouth City Museum... Read more

Project 7
Date: 1980

Aspects of this Project first emerged in 1977, such as Local Children: Fight by the Mayflower Steps, also known as Barbican Boys - The Fight. However, the final Project was shown... Read more

Project 8
Date: 10 August - 30 September 1977

Addiction to the ‘other person’ and its consequences was explored in Section Eight of the Relationship Series, Jealousy, shown at The Fool in the late summer of 1977. Several of the notebook’s... Read more

Project 9
Date: 10 August - 30 September1978

Orgasm, Section Nine of the Relationship Series, shown in 1978:

Orgasm places some part of our consciousness on a tangent to the rest of it; like a Möbius strip, the... Read more

Project 10
Date: 22 December 1978 - 5 January 1979

Lenkiewicz produced Self-Portrait, Section Ten of the Relationship Series, at the end of 1978, an ironic look at the relationship between the artist and his own self.

I... Read more

Project 11
Date: 26 July - 30 September 1979

Robert Lenkiewicz was raised in the Hotel Shemtov in Cricklewood, London, which had effectively become a home for elderly Jews. The influence of such an environment seems to have been profound and not just... Read more

Project 12
Date: 10 August - 30 October 1980

In the Suicide Project Lenkiewicz put forward the thesis that suicide was in reality “murder through mistaken identity”, where the aim of the suicide was not personal extinction but rather the... Read more

Project 13
Date: 3 - 6 February 1981

The Old Age exhibition was staged to benefit a charity, but the commercial response was disappointing. However, the lesson of art history that an artist’s work is only truly valued after he is dead... Read more

Project 14
Date: 16 August - 30 September 1981

In an ‘aesthetic note’ dated 29 November 1978, Lenkiewicz records a tender scene between himself and Mary which occurred at 11p.m. in his studio.

To ‘consciously’ prepare oneself... Read more

Project 15
Date: 6 October - 22 December 1982

On 11 February 1982 an article appeared in The Western Evening Herald called The Changing Pattern of Dying. The article began:

To make the kind of request that lies at the... Read more

Project 16
Date: 30 August - 10 November 1983

The Sexual Behaviour Project was another sociological survey and took a straightforward encyclopaedic approach to the predilections of the sitters. It was notable in its engagement with the lesbian... Read more

Project 17
Date: 1 April – 30 October 1988

Long in preparation, Observations on Local Education, his seventeenth Project, emerged in 1988 at the painter's Barbican studio. 92 of the works had been previewed between 19 July - 3 August at... Read more

Project 18
Date: 8 - 15 January 1994

Works from what became Project 18, 38 in all, were first shown at the New Street Gallery between 17 December - 28 January 1989. Two further showings of work followed there in January 1990 (47 works) and... Read more

Project 19
Date: 13 August - 30 October 1995

The strain of producing more than a hundred finished canvasses for the 1994 showing of Project 18 at the ICC in Birmingham exacerbated Lenkiewicz’s heart condition. He underwent heart by-pass surgery at St... Read more

Project 20
Date: 2000

In the year after the Landscape Project, Lenkiewicz returned to the theme of vagrancy, restoring and reworking a number of works on sailcloth dating from the original Project. However, new images... Read more

Project 21
Date: 10 June - 1 July 2000

Having visited the monastic tradition for his St Antony and St Jerome themes, biblical inspiration appeared again in Lenkiewicz’s work in the form of studies for a planned Project called The Harrowing... Read more

Project 22
Date: 1941–1972

The early years at the Hotel Shemtov, St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal Academy, 1941–1965

Robert Lenkiewicz was born on 31 December 1941 in Cricklewood in London, non-... Read more

Project 23
Date: 1941–2002

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