Presenting the work of three internationally acclaimed artists, the exhibition explores the nude and in particular how the depiction of skin continues to fascinate modern day practitioners.

Spencer Tunick’s hugely anticipated photographs from the Ferens Art Gallery’s ‘Sea of Hull’ 2016 commission are revealed for the first time. Officially the largest nude installation in the UK, and under the artist’s direction, over 3,200 participants from across the world painted their skin with blue body paint, dramatically transforming Hull’s urban landscape and reflecting  the city’s maritime history.

Art critics have already linked Tunick’s contemporary work with the French Impressionist painter, Edouard Manet and therefore it is particularly exciting that The Courtauld Gallery will lend their study for his masterpiece Le déjeuner sur l’herbe to the Ferens. This infamous painting of men in modern dress seated with a naked woman in a park scandalised 19th century audiences.  It has since acted as a reference point for much of the naked portraiture of the modern world, and sets the scene for the works in SKIN.

Ron Mueck’s striking, meticulously crafted sculptures of the human form, including The Wild Man (2005) Spooning Couple, (2005) and Ghost (1998) will be shown in partnership with ARTIST ROOMS On Tour. Mueck and Freud’s works reflect not only our fascination with surface, but the artists’ ability to convey powerful psychological depth and intensity through their work. Four of Freud’s intimate paintings on loan from national partners include the painting Two Men (1987-1988) Naked Girl with Egg (1980-1981), Small Naked Portrait (1973-1974) and Large Interior, London W9 (1973), which will also explore the relationship between the artist and the model.

 

Hull City of Culture 2017 website

Ferens Art Gallery website

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.