- Venue
- Oriel Davies Gallery
- Starts
- Saturday, February 9, 2008
- Ends
- Saturday, April 12, 2008
- Address
- Oriel Davies Gallery The Park Newtown Powys SY16 2NZ
- Location
- Wales
Becoming Modern premiers eleven new paintings by Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio, alongside six major works from the Davies Bequest, Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales. The exhibition focuses upon Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, who bequeathed their major art collections to the Museum in 1951 and 1963. Commissioned by Oriel Davies to make new work about the sisters’ lives, Grennan & Sperandio examined diaries the sisters kept during their travels through Italy in 1909. The artists focus upon this year as a turning point in history – just five years before the outbreak of World War I. Their resulting paintings are compelling and puzzling composites which weave together historic and contemporary imagery, scientific diagrams, fashion plates and pattern. As a further twist the pictures have not been painted by the artists themselves, but instead have been painted by anonymous workshop painters. Grennan & Sperandio’s works hang alongside well-known art from the Davies Bequest: two views of Venice by Claude Monet from 1908, Paul Cézanne’s Provencal Landscape, paintings by Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro, and Degas’ bronze study, Dressed Dancer. Seen together, the contemporary and historic works present an exhibition which shows rare art and also poses questions around artistic authenticity and originality, the birth of modernity and our 21st century view of art from the past.
