Manchester’s The Whitworth is set to host Elizabeth Price Curates, an innovative exhibition of works by over 70 artists brought together by the Turner Prize winning artist.
The exhibition, titled In A Dream You Saw A Way To Survive And You Were Full Of Joy, explores the power of the horizontal in art.
In this highly innovative exhibition Elizabeth Price will stage an ‘austere melodrama’, encompassing a vast repertoire of images of the reclining or recumbent body. On display for the first time at the University of Manchester’s Whitworth, this is the latest in a series of Hayward Touring exhibitions curated by artists.
Exploring the power of a horizontal and its effect on our psychology, sculptures, drawings, photographs film and video will be arranged in four thematic sections: Sleeping, Working, Mourning and Dancing. Works by seventy artists including, Constantin Brancusi, Edward Onslow Ford, Henry Fuseli, Rodney Graham, Jenny Holzer, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Andy Warhol, and Francesca Woodman, dating from the 18th century through to the present day have been hand selected. Major institutions, art galleries and private collections will loan to the exhibition including a large partnership with Manchester museums – the Whitworth, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester Museum and the John Rylands Library.
Galleries in the Whitworth will provide an immersive backdrop for the viewer as a vast repertoire of images of the reclining or recumbent body unfold. The first section of the exhibition titled Sleeping will consider the act of sleep and its manifestations as rest, luxury, leisure, pleasure, intimacy, vulnerability, loneliness and exposure, including an excerpt from Andy Warhol’s five-hour long film, Sleep (1963).
Edward Onslow Ford’s marble sculpture Snowdrift (1901) draws the visitor from Sleeping to Working. In this section the horizontal in landscape and weather will make reference to the social economic forces that are governed by our own environments. 18th century drawings made by whalers of the arctic coastline are presented alongside Giulio Paolini’s sculpture Nécessaire (1968), a stack of blank sheets of paper. This association of layered snow with stacked paper is the first of a series of connections which articulates various forms of labour through the horizontal line, whether written, scored, cut, folded, ploughed, shaped, twisted or wound.
Representation of the static line and the horizontal in memorialization will be explored in Mourning. The plaster cast of the life sized sepulchral Effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine (19th century cast of 13th century sculpture) is shown alongside John Flaxman’s drawings of mourners.
Dancing, the final section of the exhibition will energise the galleries with works that have action, flow and rotation. Photographed and filmed performances by Cosey Fanni Tutti and Carolee Schneemann, are presented alongside groups of photographs, drawings and sculptures creating a single choreography of expressive gestures of pleasure, protest, parody and lament.
Elizabeth Price Curates … at the Whitworth is exhibited from 10 June to 30 October 2016.
