Main event: Manchester Art Gallery - Facing East, Ron Mueck
MOST curators would readily admit that, without the generosity of private collectors, many of the UK’s best loved art treasures would never have been put on display.
Often given on generous loans to public art spaces or gifted to them by gallery enthusiasts, works of art are expensive to collect and a challenge to display.
Celebrating the extraordinary gift of private collectors are two shows opening this week at Manchester Art Gallery.
The first and biggest is Facing East: Recent Works From China, India And Japan, and the second is Artist Rooms – featuring three remarkable sculptures from one of history’s greatest hyper-real artists, Ron Mueck.
Facing East is a rare peek into the private collection of Frank Cohen, one of the most globally influential promoters of contemporary art today. He regularly puts samples of his extensive collection on show, but has selected a particularly special group of works for his homecoming installation.
“I am particularly excited about this exhibition as it will be the first major public exhibition of works from my collection to be held in my home town of Manchester,” says Frank, who made his name as the founder of the Glyn Webb chain of DIY stores.
“I’ve been collecting art from China, India and Japan for about 10 years with the later years focusing on China and India.
“I was looking eastwards and became more and more interested in developments in Asia.
“I am collecting Asian art on the same basis as I collect contemporary art from other parts of the world. The criteria for choosing work by a particular artist are very subjective but there is, for example, an obvious quality to Bharti Kher’s work that transcends the limitations of national culture and has something to say to a wider, international audience.”
Opportunities
Covering a vast territory, the exhibition reflects a global appreciation of art and offers an interesting insight into how territories influence each other: west on east and east on west.
Adds Frank: “Despite their diverse cultural backgrounds, all artists represented in Facing East draw upon common subject matters including youth culture, popular culture and the mass media to express significant conditions in their unique cultures.”
He picks out work by Yoshitomo Nara, whose London Mayfair House is a recreation of her working studio, Yue Minjun, Takashi Murakami and New Delhi-based Kher as favourites, but admits selecting stand-out pieces is a task that collectors are often asked but do not enjoy.
Working with new artists to provide opportunities for them to develop, and allowing his collection to be put on public display are subjects he is far happier to wax lyrical about.
“There are huge numbers of fantastic private collections that are rarely seen by the public which I think is a real shame,” says Frank. “I hope visitors will enjoy seeing my collection in a context that illuminates the relationships between the various artists on show.”
Artist Rooms, meanwhile, is indebted to the generosity of Anthony d’Offay, who donated his collection of modern and contemporary art to the Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland in 2005.
Artist Rooms is an attempt to take this gift to the nation, and various pieces of the collection are shown at multiple national venues with the support of the Art Fund. For their Artist Rooms, Manchester Art Gallery bid to show three Ron Mueck sculptures – and got them.
Mueck came to prominence in 1997 when his piece, Dead Dad, was featured in Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition, but one of his most famous pieces is Boy, a giant crouching child which featured in the Millennium Dome.
Kate Jesson, curator on the project for Manchester Art Gallery, says the works are astonishing and play with our perceptions of space and intimacy.
'Emotional states'
“Ron Mueck was someone who had always interested the gallery here and these pieces are very rarely seen outside of London,” says Kate.
“The three works represent the scope of Mueck’s approach to the human condition; so we have the uneasy intimacy of The Spooning Couple, the vulnerability of the giant Wildman and the enigmatic half smile in Mask III. They very much capture what Mueck is internationally recognised for, which is a powerful, psychological focus both on universal experience of birth, life and death but also on emotional states, such as isolation, fear, tenderness – and there lies the heart of the appeal.”
The sculptures, all created in 2005, demonstrate Mueck’s notorious manipulation of scale – a devise which Kate says is key to our understanding of the works.
“Some are oversized and some are smaller than they would appear. The Spooning Couple is only 65cm long, although it appears as a real life-sized piece, while Wildman is a huge giant, as is Mask III.
“Mr Mueck is without doubt a technical genius and there is a painstaking process employed to create the pieces.
“One single piece can feature as many as 30,000 hairs in individually filled holes, and in addition to this he has to invent and perfect new process for every sculpture.
“If you look closely, they have pores and hairs and mottled skin and cellulite – the technical genius is overwhelming. But the process is only a means to an end – it’s the emotional relationship between seeing these pieces that is key to the experience.”
The exhibition is supported by the Art Fund ‘in order to ensure that the collection can reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly young people’, explains Kate.
“Rather than have this sense of ‘national’ being London, people from Manchester are able to see major works in their city on their doorstep.”
Exhibitions run until April 11, 2010 at Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street.
Published: Fri, 29 January, 2010
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