Yesterday Charles and I paid a visit to the new gallery, Hauser and Wirth, in Somerset. You’ll be hearing much about this place as Piet Oudolf has designed a garden for it.
This is not a review – the garden is very new (though of course it has already been photographed and featured in the press) and the light was awful – gloooom.
But we had great fun taking pictures and thought they’d give you an oversight of what it’s all about. And maybe you’ll find them fun too.
Anne Wareham, editor.
(‘I like the grasses‘ was a comment we overheard in the garden….)
Just to remind you that this is an art gallery, here is one of the exhibits. You can buy one.
This is what we came to see. Here is the plan.
More familiar territory
And night came on…..
In case you were wondering what the lights were…
With thanks to Charles Hawes for a great day out and the best of these pictures. (I will try and FORCE them to read properly on an iphone next week. (am having the weekend off)
Charles’ photographs on GAP photos
Hmm. Martin Creed had an exhibition this year “What’s the Point of It?” at the Hayward. Interesting review – http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/02/martin-creed-whats-the-point-hayward-review
I hadn’t realised I had so much art work in my waste paper basket.
I love the sense of death and decay from the plants – it feels like a proper winter garden, rather than something trying to be perky at this time of year with shiny berries and alien glossy green leaves. The grass looks slightly incongruous – too green amongst all that straw and brownness.
The gallery looks fun. It reminds me a bit of MASS MoCA in New England, which also goes for that quirky take on contemporary art, although I don’t think it’s ever had knickers as lights. But last time we were there it did have maple trees growing suspended in the air and upside down…
You have just clarified for me, landscapelover, why I so dislike those gardens full of coloured willow stems and other incongruous, unseasonal things. Scrooge like, I find myself thinking: ‘winter interest: bah! Humbug!’
Anne, there are a number of gardens in Paris that just slump into wintry decay and I found myself increasingly drawn to them when we lived there: https://landscapelover.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/sex-and-death-in-the-garden
Like you, I find coloured stems and winter neatness rather jarring. Jill
Golly, why didn’t I think of pants on a line when I was in a conceptual art studio? Well, Alain de Botton says to have art that cheers one up…
Don’t you just love the contemporary art world? Looking at the photographs fills me with a sense of unease (nothing to do with the quality of them I hasten to add – I quite like the blurring.) The most surreal one for me is not the knickers but the dapper Charles the distorted clock and the tree – brilliant composition and tells a story greater than a crumpled piece of paper ever could – you ought to sell it to the gallery !
O, thanks, Paul – that’s mine! #gettingcompetitive Xxx
Anne,
Tell me about those clocks? That clock? Does they tell the time? Or is it/are they stuck at some significant hour? They seem very odd and interesting.
Rory
It’s just one over sized clock telling the real time,I believe (I didn’t check it but we were there around 3.30ish) I wanted to ask people here what they thought it added, but of course, pictures can’t tell you. Even better ones than our gloomy winter ones..
Yes, a fun visit. You know something is going on when you see lines of white pants strung up 15 feet in the air (and then illuminated at night). It was a shame that they closed the galleries at 4 as we didn’t have much time to see the exhibits. Though I did not need more than a minute of two in the company of most of them. As for the garden, well as you say, it is very new and at this time of year, very brown. Not that there is anything wrong with brown.
It was fascinating to see how amazingly vivid the images looked that Anne was taking on her phone, whereas my Canon 5D MK II display kept them remarkably flat and gloomy. As an experiment I put up the camera’s sensitivity to its maximum (ISO 6400) and will look forward to seeing how the resultant pics will look but Anne has whipped these off me without me without my having done anything to them. So I am glad that she hasn’t identiifed which were which.
Fascinating too, to hear from one of my fellow members of the Professional Garden Photographers Association who we met there about the argy bargy going on in relation to who has got rights over the images that people are taking of the garden . It seems that people are falling over themselves to try and control this. Bet you loads of money that it will appear in Gardens Illustrated within a year.
ooh, I wanted to go last night, but was giving a talk nearby in Castle Cary, very frustrating. The gallery looks very inspirational. I have flung my knickers over a lampshade and am crumpling up sheets of A4 paper to put on Ebay.