SKIN: Freud, Mueck and Tunick - Ron Mueck in Partnership with Artist Rooms
Saturday 22 April - Sunday 13 August 2017
Description:
Presenting the work of internationally acclaimed artists, the exhibition explores the nude and in particular how the depiction of skin continues to fascinate today.
Spencer Tunick’s hugely anticipated photographs from the Ferens Art Gallery’s Sea of Hull 2016 commission are revealed for the first time. Officially the largest nude installation in the UK, and under the artist’s direction, over 3,200 participants from across the world painted their skin with blue body paint, dramatically transforming Hull’s urban landscape and reflecting the city’s maritime history.
Mueck and Freud’s works reflect not only our fascination with surface, but the artists’ ability to convey powerful psychological depth and intensity through their work.
Ron Mueck’s striking, meticulously crafted sculptures of the human form, including Wild Man (2005), Spooning Couple, (2005), are drawn from the ARTIST ROOMS collection of modern and contemporary art.
Four of Freud’s intimate paintings on loan from national partners include the painting Two Men (1987-1988) Naked Girl with Egg (1980-1981), Small Naked Portrait (1973-1974) and Large Interior, London W9 (1973), which will also explore the relationship between the artist and the model.
Art critics have already linked Tunick’s contemporary work with the French Impressionist painter, Edouard Manet and therefore it is particularly exciting that The Courtauld Gallery will lend their study for his masterpiece Le déjeuner sur l’herbe to the Ferens. This infamous painting of men in modern dress seated with a naked woman in a park scandalised 19th century audiences. It has since acted as a reference point for much of the naked portraiture of the modern world, and sets the scene for the works in SKIN.
Work from the art gallery’s rich permanent collection will also be on display as part of the exhibition including 20th century naked portraits from Stanley Spencer’s painting of his second wife Nude, Portrait of Patricia Preece (1935) to John Coplan’s photographic Self Portrait Upside Down (1992).
ARTIST ROOMS is jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate and is shared across the UK in partnership with Ferens Art Gallery, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Art Fund and by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
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