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Courtauld Gallery announces Imagining Islands: Artists and Escape

The Courtauld Gallery, London presents Imagining Islands: Artists and Escape an exhibition on view 20 June to 21 July 2013. The exhibition responds to the Gallery’s Summer Showcase, Collecting Gauguin: Samuel Courtauld in the ‘20s, and draws on works from The Courtauld Gallery and the Arts Council Collection.

Tacita Dean, Bubble House, 1999, 16mm film projection. Courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York
Tacita Dean, Bubble House, 1999, 16mm film projection. Courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York

In 1891 the artist Paul Gauguin travelled from Paris to the Pacific island of Tahiti in pursuit of a haven away from Western civilisation. Artists have long been drawn to the elusive ideals and tantalising fantasies that islands embody. Imagining Islands explores artists’ fascination with other worlds, real and imagined, and the perennial search for utopia. By bringing together works from the 17th century to the present day, the exhibition explores the concept of the island in poetic, evocative, and experimental ways.

Imagining Islands is a trans-historical exhibition displayed in two rooms immediately following the Gauguin showcase. The first introduces the island as a place of escape, isolation, and lost innocence. Upon entering, the viewer is confronted by Ernst Kirchner’s Fehmanküste (1912) and Max Pechstein’s Woman by the Sea (1919). These works create an immediate historical and aesthetic link to those of Gauguin, and were similarly inspired by exotic cultures and landscapes as well as a desire to escape modernity. By contrast, Barbara Hepworth’s Icon (1957) explores the artist’s spiritual and emotional experience of the Greek islands whilst coping with the tragedy of her son’s death. A central feature of the room is a series of major works from The Courtauld Gallery’s prints and drawings collection including an engraving of 1799 of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Adam and Eve in Paradise (1615) and John Everett Millais’ The Parting of Ulysses (c. 1862). These artworks present different perspectives on the island as an object of artistic fascination.

Now in its sixth year, the MA Curating the Art Museum programme aims to produce the art curators of the future. The students, with diverse backgrounds and art-historical interests, have come together to form an ambitious display, shining new light on these prestigious collections. www.courtauld.ac.uk