Refurbishment work is currently taking place to the main sculpture galleries at Leeds Art Gallery. This work will include the upgrading of electrical systems and the installation of energy efficient lighting. While these display spaces are closed visitors can enjoy a display of key works from the sculpture collection, including works by Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Jacob Epstein as part of the Art In Our Time display of 100 years of collecting by Leeds Art Fund.
The project has been made possible with generous support from the Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation.
Art in Our Time – 100 Years of Collecting by Leeds Art Fund
23 March – 26 August 2012
The organisation responsible for some of the most significant works of art in the collections of Leeds Museums & Galleries this year celebrates 100 years of collecting with a new exhibition, entitled ‘Art in Our Time’. At Leeds Art Gallery from 23 March – 26 August 2012, the exhibition brings together for the first time paintings and sculpture acquired by one of the UK’s oldest regional supporting agencies for the visual arts, that have made such a significant contribution to what is recognised as one of the best collections of fine and decorative arts in Britain. The Fund continues to make an important financial contribution to the work of Leeds Museums and Galleries supporting new acquisitions and our exhibition programme. The Leeds Art Fund centenary is being sponsored by private bank Brown Shipley.
Over the last century the Leeds Art Fund has acquired over 430 pieces of art for the collection. Established in 1912 by ground-breaking educationalist, Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University and one of the foremost art collectors of his day, Sir Michael Sadler, and leading art critic, curator of the Gallery and activist Frank Rutter, the Fund was set up to acquire adventurous art for the city which had no other dedicated public funds available.
The LAF have put together an interesting series of special events to accompany the celebration. To book for these events or find out more about joining the Fund contact the Art Gallery on 0113 2478256.
Fiona Rae: Maybe you can live on the moon in the next century - Opening at Leeds Art Gallery, from 11 May until 26 August 2012
Leeds Art Gallery is to present an exhibition of 17 paintings by Fiona Rae from the last decade. Over the last 25 years Fiona Rae has established herself as one of the leading painters of her generation with a distinctive body of work, full of restless energy, humour and complexity, which has set out to challenge and expand the modern conventions of painting.
This Leeds Art Gallery exhibition starts when Rae’s paintings had begun to reference a world keyed to the computer screen, echoing in painterly analogues many of the new visual conventions familiar to a post-Photoshop generation. Fonts, signs and symbols drawn from contemporary design and typography appeared, whilst more familiar abstract marks and spontaneous gestures worried the autonomy, legibility and function of these graphic shapes, debating a new synthesis of painterly languages.
In 2004, when Rae visited Tokyo and reconnected with visual aspects of her peripatetic childhood in Asia, her lexicon further broadened to include small figures or cartoons whose status is left intriguingly ambiguous. Like Caspar David Friedrich’s human presences in an overwhelming landscape, they serve to point up the metaphysical and artificial dimensions of abstract painting, whilst also providing an empathetic point of identification for the viewer that invokes a more personal reading.
In using elements that might be considered girlish or otherwise unserious, Fiona Rae looks to re-examine their meaning and expressive possibilities from what could be seen as a feminist perspective. In more recent paintings, these ludicrous yet gnomic images might be thrust into passages of expressive brushwork, layered and dense, or caught in black calligraphic drawing inspired by Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcuts, to produce dramatic and emotive compositions. Her recent titles often purport to be exclamations or statements, but like her paintings, they elude definitive explanation and can appear simultaneously dark and charming, anxious and insouciant.
An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with an essay by Gilda Williams.
For a quick look at events linked to the exhibition in the next three months, take a look at our what's on guide.