'Look Again' at The Courtauld Gallery, London
Nicola McCartney, Monday, 21st February 2011
The Courtauld is one of several UK institutions taking part in the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Spread over four years, it is designed to give everyone in the UK a chance to be part of London 2012 and inspire creativity across all forms of culture, especially among young people.
For their part, the Courtauld’s Education Department invited 21 students, from families who have not previously participated in higher education, to spend time with its permanent collection, exploring themes of image and identity within portraiture before photography. The students, all with a keen interest in art, had never visited the Courtauld before. Since June 2010 they have attended a series of evening lectures and a summer school programme devised especially for their engagement with the collection. After working closely with curators, academics and artists, the students created photographic portraits of themselves inspired by the course.
It was interesting to see how young people have interpreted the works of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec for the first time and inserted these into a contemporary context, and even other cultures. Kathleen Lerona photographed herself in traditional Japanese dress whilst Duane Uba disguised himself as a London biker and Peter Patel masked himself with his own drawing, all in homage to van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889.
Another evident favourite of the students’ was Manet’s A Bar at the Foiles-Bergére, 1881-82. Claudia Gardner-Pickett emulates the famous barmaid’s pose sitting among her own art supplies in a studio, whilst Champagne Reid presents herself in a coming-of-age portrait, caught between girlhood and becoming a woman. She wears a corset and stands among objects of sentimental value (see above).
‘Look Again…Stories of the World’ opened the same night as ‘Life, Legend, Landscape: Victorian Drawings and Watercolours’, another temporary exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London, and is on display until 13 March 2011. There will be an opportunity to meet the young artists for tours, talks and workshops at a special late event on 10 March 2011.
Image credit: Champagne Reid, A Bar at the Folies-Bérgere, Photographed by Marysa Dowling, 2010
For more information, visit www.courtauld.ac.uk
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