I have chosen to visit the newly refurbished Art Gallery & Museum in Warwick as I have never been here before and wanted to go somewhere for a completely open minded and fresh look. I was originally going to go to the gallery in Leamington but I've been here so many times before and already have opinions on what works and what pieces I like etc.
The gallery has been closed for several months and reopened at the end of March.
I have chosen for this visit to only look at the gallery part, and not the museum area.
The rectangular building is built in stone with large arched windows on all sides. The modern glass entrance leads into the shop and directly into the small gallery area. Walking past the open plan gallery exhibition it goes into the museum area.
The gallery is small, only approx 5m wide x 10 m long. The core of the building is taken up by a stone wall that originally would have been the market 'offices' and the gallery and museum work around this.
As the gallery space is hemmed in on two sides by outer walls that are almost completely glass, one side opens into the museum and the other long side is part stone wall and partly opens into the shop, there aren't any walls on which to display work. They have overcome this by using tall white exhibition/display boards.
The gallery doesn't have a permanent collection, only regular temporary exhibitions (I actually think this is quite good as it would encourage me to go back again although they didn't have a leaflet of the forthcoming exhibitions for me to take away), and so the boards would enable them to arrange the space accordingly. The exhibition currently on is for two artists and the boards had been arranged in such a way that the work of each artist is kept separate but also does link to each other. I was told that the exhibition to follow is sculptural work and so they could take the boards out all together to accommodate this.
The current exhibition is titled 'The Material Life of Things' and features work by Kathy Webster and Jill Irving.
Kathy Webster's work is the first to come to and is a series of still life acrylics of various fruit, flowers and pots. The works have been clearly displayed in groups based on the subject matter. Slightly different subjects have been displayed next to each other but with a gap between them to demonstrate that there is something different. For example, two pictures of food items are next to a group of three pictures, also of food items but these are on cloths. There is a feeling of continuity throughput the display.
On the other side if the board, pictures of flowers have been displayed separately, and some use of the walls between the windows has been made to show 2 charcoal drawings, again, separated because of the difference in medium but still close enough to feel part of the main display.
All of the works had backgrounds in black tones, mainly black/green or black/red, and this really helped to unify all the pieces together. It also allowed for the colours of the focal object to stand out boldly.
As it is quite hard to describe the layout of the boards and the works, I have done a quick diagram;
The black lines in the middle are the display boards. The ones closest to the shop/entrance were used to show Kathy Webster's work and the boards by the museum end were used to show Jill Irving's work. The square display pillar by the window also had Jill Irvings's work on and the other square is to show the display cabinet with items relating to both artists.
In the square created where the two sets of boards meet, the gallery have made a link between the two artists. On the two boards at the end of Kathy Webster's section, a piece from each artist has been chosen to face each other. The works, I feel, are good 'summary' pieces for each artist and also, through the colour schemes and floral subjects, they have a connection to each other.
On the two boards at the end of Jill Irving's section, A3 information cards for each artist are shown. They correspond to the paintings opposite and gave a quick outline of the artists' history, a little bit to explain the works on show and also how they work and are inspired. I thought that it was a good idea to have these cards shown in the middle of the display as having them near the entrance would possibly have influenced the viewer, rather than letting them see the works first and then find out about the background and the artist.
The general layout of the boards was very well done. Even though the most part was in a straight line, by having the end boards at the ends on an angle, it encouraged me to walk around and 'explore' the display.
Jill Irving's work is printed images of insects and flowers. She uses a combination of mono print hand drawings, prints from botanical books and lino print silhouettes of insects. Mixed into this, she often hand writes or uses text from books to label the flowers and some info about them. The softness of this text, sometimes so soft it's illegible or the hand written mono print ones are backwards, means that they complement the imagery and aren't too obvious.
Scales and proportions between the prints have been disregarded. Some prints showed tiny delicate flowers next to a much larger beetle or ant, which did look playful. The paper used also varied from white, cream or grey, and also the use of textured paper with flowers pressed in. The pictures on this floral paper looked more like test prints to me rather than a purposefully planned piece. The ones on the grey or cream smooth paper were quite striking and gave another element to the overall effect of the piece. They almost made the prints on white backgrounds look a bit boring.
On the side by the window were some works that were exclusively lino prints and were more graphic in style. The more tropical animals, the sharp outlines and the colours and layers of paint had a slightly African feel to it, much differant to the other works.
The large wall of windows and bright sunshine streaming in made it difficult to view Jill Irving's work on this side as the had been mounted with glass and had glaring reflections. I had to stand really close and at an odd angle to the side of each piece to view it and found myself moving on much quicker.
Personally, I didn't think Jill Irving's work was as good and I think it is because the pieces are a combination of elements and don't form a complete picture. The individual elements are quite pretty and have been arranged well on the page to create a sense of movement, but I do prefer to see an overall image.
The display cabinet at the end linked the gallery space into the museum display. It contained items from both artists that were a mixture of props, research items and books. It also had some printing blocks in to explain briefly the method used in Jill Irving's work.
Something noticeable that I found with both artists was the obvious mismatch of frames for the pieces. Kathy Webster's were mostly in plain black frames but there were some fancy gilded ones, some with no frame and some modern silver ones. Jill Irving's were mostly white wooden but there were some that were black, plain wood and coloured. For both, as the majority of pieces were unified by the frames, the odd ones really stood out and I couldn't see that they were for any particular purpose.
The gallery's other slightly unusual feature was the use of cafe style music in the background. I don't think this had any particular relevance to the display but it was quite relaxing. Without it I feel the building, with so much stone, would have felt almost hollow and unwelcoming. I sometimes feel in galleries that I am being watched and I can't relax and spend time looking, but here I was very relaxed and was amazed to discover that I had spent an hour and half just looking at this small display.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this visit. It gave me the ideal opportunity to visit a new gallery and to see works by artists I hadn't heard of before. The gallery was very welcoming and the regular change in displays makes me want to go back regularly. The work done to the building to modernise has been done very well and wihout losing the old historic feel.
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