Yarrow Gallery Viewing Room
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The impulse to collect is not uniquely human; bowerbirds, corvids and crabs are all well-known hoarders. But our curatorial instincts do offer a special insight into who we are and the things and ideas we value – from ancient treasuries to cabinets of curiosities, heirloom chinaware to cherished knickknacks.

 

Historically, acts of collecting and cataloguing have provided us ways of understanding more about the world around us. Examining what, and how, we choose to collect, we also understand ourselves better: our wants and needs, the things that make us ‘tick’, the pleasures and prejudices of our times, and how those times can change.

 

COLLECTIONS has been curated in partnership with the Goldmark Gallery in nearby Uppingham, Rutland. A family business, now in its fifth decade of trading and with a worldwide reach, Goldmark specialises in 20th century art and ceramics, representing the estates of several major artists and international potters. With more than 50,000 works of art in stock, its offerings are rich and eclectic.

 

 

Yarrow Gallery Viewing Room

This exhibition presents six collections drawn from Goldmark’s holdings: selections of abstract art, landscapes, pochoir prints, artists’ posters, urban art, and studio ceramics. They reflect the evolving history of the gallery itself, the diverse tastes of its customers and of the artists whose work they collect. They show how lines of curation can be drawn around many aspects of work: divisions by content or medium, the processes involved in making, even the function an artwork may ultimately serve. Perhaps most important of all, they prove how porous and arbitrary categorisations often are – how art, like so much of the natural world, resists, challenges, and ultimately escapes classification, and how fluid our collecting habits can be.

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