Installation by Graham Larkin (Curator)
with Ellen Treciokas (Senior Designer)
National Gallery of Canada, 3 Nov 2007 – 10 Feb 2008
Art Gallery of Windsor, July – Sept 2009
The Rooms, St. Johns, June – Sept 2011
An exhibition of 18 works — serigraphs, lithographs, photo-based prints, collages and a few related artifacts by the pop pioneer Richard Hamilton (British, 1922–2011). This exhibition inaugurated the creation of an upper-level prints and drawings Gallery alongside the garden court. During cyclical maintenance of 20 galleries in my capacity as Curator of European & American Art, I removed two half-walls and installed a full wall with central doorways, thereby creating a contained space and an enfilade in keeping with the classical layout.
The exhibition opens with the spectacular 1974 collotype Mirror Image, depicting the artist on a surface that also allowed the viewer to see him or her self. Beside this is a vitrine showing a brochure with Hamilton’s own descriptions of many of the works on exhibition, written for a National Gallery of Canada exhibition in 1970. The same text, plus my supplementary text, was reproduced in a lavish in-house guide (in French and English) with a mirrored surface. The entire wall is effectively treated as an inscribable surface, with scattered quotations by the artist and a timeline marking the dates of the works below. The timeline loops around to the 1974 self-portrait.
Note the mirroring French and English introductory text on either side of the entrance. When renovating the surrounding 20 galleries of paintings, sculptures and decorative arts we knocked out a lot of walls, and built a few. In this case — a gallery alongside the garden court — the space had been converted into a dead zone by the addition of enclosing half-walls. I removed those and installed walls with a central doorway to produce an enfilade, ultimately book-ended by full-length nudes on the far walls to help orient visitors. At the time these photos were taken, only the Cranach Venus was in position, but the plan was to have a Klimt nude on the far-facing wall.
