Visitors hoping to revisit a favourite work in the collections of the Leeds Art Gallery are likely to be surprised for the next three months, as the gallery has been completely emptied out to welcome the 42 artists showing in the eighth edition of the British Art Show.
Sarah Brown, the programme curator at the museum, explains that the show, organised by London’s Hayward Gallery every five years and travelling to Edinburgh, Norwich and Southampton, needed a one-venue presentation on one leg of its tour. “With the Hayward being closed, there wasn’t really a chance to see the British Art Show in its entirety,” she says. “I was quite keen that there was that opportunity and once I began to tot up the spaces that we actually had, it was clear the Leeds Art Gallery was substantial enough to take the exhibition.”
Brown says that as a result, much of the city’s collection is out on loan. “Leeds lends phenomenally, so we’ve just done more. We’ve said yes to a lot of loans. Paula Rego to São Paulo—yes! Yes to Tate. Yes to [loans of works by] Stanley Spencer. So key works are out on loan and others are in storage.”
Brown welcomes the chance to introduce local people to the latest developments in contemporary art. It is important that 25 of the artists have made work on site, so this is not “a show that just comes off a truck and is put up”, she explains. Brown adds that she really enjoys seeing the Victorian municipal gallery, originally built in 1888, “filled with contemporary artists’ work and seeing the gallery becoming a site of production”.
Anna Colin, the co-curator of the show with the Whitechapel Gallery’s Lydia Yee, says that a few themes and features “travel through quite a few of the artists’ work, and across generations, across the country and across media, as well”. Among them are the abundant presence of craft, with ceramics, textiles and printmaking at the fore, and a prominent sense of “collaboration and the building of social relations” running through the work. “We have, if you can call it that, a ‘friendship room’ where we have artists and designers who have worked together for many years: Ryan Gander, Martino Gamper, Bedwyr Williams, Abäke, Will Holder,” Colin says. “These are artists who’ve collaborated before, but they may not have exhibited all together in the same room, so we were interested in bringing these enduring relationships to the larger public.”
One project that extends out into the city of Leeds is Ahmed Ogut’s Day After Debt (UK). “He has invited three British Art Show alumni to make sculptures which also function as donation boxes,” Colin says. Designed by Susan Hiller, Liam Gillick and Goshka Macuga, these are “very formal objects”, she adds, as well as receptacles for cash.
• British Art Show 8, Leeds Art Gallery, 9 October 2015-10 January 2016, http://britishartshow8.com
