Whitworth Art Gallery: Artists’ Wallpaper Exhibition
Wallpaper – more of a back drop than the main event, right? Not so according to the Whitworth Art Gallery, which this spring launches a unique artists’ wallpaper exhibition.
As this show demonstrates, wallpaper, although often sidelined as just a decorative, domestic product, has long been exploited by the likes of Sonia Boyce, Niki de St. Phalle, Michael Craig-Martin and Damien Hirst for more artistic purposes.
Take Thomas Demand, one of the foremost conceptual artists working today. For this exhibition, he has covered the entire South Gallery of the Whitworth (a gallery whose floor-to-ceiling windows open out onto the Whitworth Park) with his Ivy wallpaper – intricate pieces of paper cut out and photographed that, together, form a work of lifelike beauty. Or consider Sonia Boyce, whose Clapping (a repeated black-and-white handprint) creates a pattern that is somehow far more menacing. The Walls Are Talking isn’t all about high art, though. As well as looking at how 30 international artists have used wallpaper to explore themes of racism, culture, gender and sexuality, the exhibition also features wallpapers produced for the commercial market – such as a Spice Girls paper – which creates a historical and cultural frame for the artists’ works.
The Whitworth is a fitting gallery for an exhibition of this nature. It is the only place in the country where wallpaper is always on display, while its own collection contains thousands of samples of wall coverings. And it’s not just wallpaper that the Whitworth is renowned for. The Gallery’s textiles collection is second only to the V&A, while its historic British watercolours are hung in park-side galleries in thoughtful, intriguing displays. The Gallery, meanwhile, is testament to Manchester’s industrial past. It was part of a bequeath to the city by Sir Joseph Whitworth, a Victorian entrepreneur who made a mint during the Industrial Revolution and chose to spend his money on philanthropic acts – he helped found the Manchester School of Design, for example, and backed the Mechanics’ Institute in Manchester (which went on to become UMIST, now part of The University of Manchester). When it opened in 1889, the Whitworth Institute (as it was known then) set out to ‘secure a source of perpetual gratification to the people of Manchester and cultivate taste and knowledge of the fine arts of painting, sculpture and architecture’, which, as its current director notes, ‘seems no bad aim today’. The Walls Are Talking includes loans from the V&A, private collectors and work direct from artists, and it underlines just what the Whitworth (and Manchester at large) is best at: treading the fine line between high and popular art, and between the historic and the contemporary.
Read Jessica Lack’s in-depth review of The Walls Are Talking in our features section. For another contemporary show, try the Frank Cohen Collection exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery – and find out more about one of the UK’s most prolific art collectors at the same time.
The Walls Are Talking, Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Road M15 6ER (0161 275 7450). Until 3 May. Open: 10am-5pm Mon-Sat; 12-4pm Sun. Free.
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The Whitworth Art Gallery is on Oxford Road, Manchester’s cultural corridor that links the city’s universities with its museums, galleries and the city centre. Just a little further down Oxford Rd from the Whitworth, for example, you’ll find The Manchester Museum...
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