Art
Preview: Air: Visualising the Invisible in British Art 1768-2017
This summer’s suitably light and airborne exhibition at the Royal West of England Academy celebrates British art’s rich tradition of finding inspiration in the skies above us and the air that we breathe.
Covering four centuries in British art, Air: Visualising the Invisible in British Art 1768-2017 brings some of the nation’s masterpieces to Bristol, including Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (pictured), on loan from the National Gallery – believed to be the first time this masterpiece has been exhibited in Bristol.
Other well-loved works include John Everett Millais’ Bubbles – previously known as A Child’s World, before featuring in the famous advertising campaign for Pears soap and presented to Winston Churchill as a gift for the nation in 1942 – and J.M.W. Turner’s The Thames Above Waterloo Bridge, alongside works by Constable, Lowry, Lanyon and many others.
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Air features explorations of flight, including depictions of the earliest hot air balloon flights, celebrating the eighteenth century’s ‘balloonmania’, in addition to the sinister shadows and trails left by warplanes and the ominous shape of bulbous barrage balloons in works by Eric Ravilious, Frank Dobson and Christopher Nevinson – including the epic painting The Battlefields of Britain.
Air is also explored as ‘the breath of life’, with a number of works featuring musical instruments such as Dora Carrington’s Spanish Boy, Accordion Player, Elizabeth Forbes’ Allegory of Spring: Pied Piper, and Kate Williams’ hand-blown trombone in borosilicate glass, alongside Neville Gabie’s installation Collective Breath featuring ‘the breath of 1,111 people collected together and released to play a single note for 49 minutes.’
The invisible is turned visible by internationally-renowned contemporary artists, including a new work created especially for the exhibition from ‘international man of the clouds’, Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde. Elsewhere, Bristol’s own Luke Jerram is present with his colourless sculpture Avian Flu (H5NI), from his Glass Microbiology series.
“The idea for the exhibition came about four years ago,” explains Stephen Jacobson VPRWA, the exhibition’s co-curator. “I was a new member of the RWA Exhibitions Advisory Group and I proposed a show on skies. I had become fascinated by the sky since moving to the coast in the late 1980s. However, we were already considering proposals for water and fire, so it was suggested I expand the scope to ‘Air’ to maintain the theme around the elements.
“The exhibition deals with interlinked themes: the air we breathe, which can be exhaled to make balloons, music or transient bubbles; the human aspiration towards flight; the fascination of the sky and its clouds,” adds co-curator, Professor Christiana Payne. “It starts in the later eighteenth century, when people were first isolating and naming the different gases that make up the earth’s atmosphere. Their experiments led to the development of air balloons, and to a closer scrutiny of the sky.
“There are paintings of early balloon flights, landscapes by J. M. W. Turner and L. S Lowry that highlight the problems of atmospheric pollution, and war paintings by Eric Ravilious and Richard Eurich that dwell on the exhilaration of flight and the abstract patterns made by fighting planes in the sky.”
Air: Visualising the Invisible in British Art 1768-2017 Royal West of England Academy, until September 3. For more info, visit www.rwa.org.uk/whats-on/air-visualising-invisible-british-art-1768-2017
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