Turner Contemporary presents Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing an exhibition on view 24 May 2013 – 15 September 2013 featuring the spectacular and the bizarre, the startling and mysterious, contemporary art alongside historical artefacts, as the gallery becomes a cabinet of curiosities.
Works by contemporary artists including Katie Paterson, Pablo Bronstein, Tacita Dean and Gerard Byrne expose past and present fascinations such as astronomy, animals, maps and humankind’s obsession with collecting, blurring the boundaries of art, science and fantasy.
Historical artefacts abound with intricate pen and ink studies by Leonardo da Vinci; Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated Rhinoceros woodcut (1515); beautiful bird studies by the gallery’s namesake JMW Turner; late 19th century models of aquatic creatures by German glassmakers Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka; the mineral collection of Roger Caillois from the Natural History Museum in Paris, the diarist and botanist John Evelyn’s cabinet, ivory anatomical models from the 17th and 18th centuries, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia with its startingly detailed illustration of a flea, and a penguin collected from one of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions from our neighbour the Powell-Cotton Museum in Birchington-on-Sea.
A Hayward Touring exhibition, in collaboration with Turner Contemporary and curated by Brian Dillon. Also in association with New York art and culture magazine Cabinet. www.turnercontemporary.org