Matthew Darbyshire: An Exhibition for Modern Living
25 September 2015 – 10 January 2016
Press View: 24 September 2015
This September, Manchester Art Gallery will present An Exhibition for Modern Living by
British contemporary artist Matthew Darbyshire. Darbyshire’s largest solo exhibition to
date will include ten of his large-scale environments from the last decade and new
sculptural works for the Gallery’s grand 19th century entrance hall.
Darbyshire’s work critically examines the language of design, sculpture and our relationship to
lived environments. The artist explores the concept of collecting, not only in terms of an
institutional critique, but also the way we amass objects for the home, shop or office and what
these objects say about us. These ideas are explored in Darbyshire’s work that gives the
exhibition its title, An Exhibition for Modern Living (2011). A highlight of British Art Show 7, this
work is inspired by the landmark 1949 exhibition of the same name at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
The 1949 exhibition collected the best of modern ‘design for living’ in the context of the rapidly
changing society of post-Second World War America. The show set an example of how design
could be made available for the masses and achieved legendary status due to the site-specific
custom room installations. At Manchester Art Gallery, Darbyshire will present a contemporary
equivalent that is somewhat more anxious than the 1949 exhibition, presenting an environment
packed with objects varying from valuable collectors’ pieces and handmade sculptures to readily
available high street items. The work succinctly questions the political and economic agendas
that inform our taste and value judgements today.
Whilst the work An Exhibition for Modern Living examines the nature of how and why individuals
collect, Oak Effect (2012) addresses how museums and galleries acquire artworks. For this piece,
Darbyshire displays original wooden objects in a room made from contemporary pieces of flatpack furniture. The artist has re-worked this installation with curators and conservators at
Manchester Art Gallery to present a diverse range of hand-made artefacts fashioned from natural
wood from the city’s collections, challenging Manchester Art Gallery to think about the
provenance and display of their collections in a very different way.
More recently, Darbyshire has begun to explore industrial prototyping and 3D digital printing to
create sculptures using pristine white polystyrene for his Bureau series (2014). The artist has
subsequently built on this research and techniques developed to recreate classical and
contemporary sculptural forms from layers of hand-cut, multi-coloured polycarbonate as part of a
series entitled CAPTCHA. A sculpture from Darbyshire’s CAPTCHA series is currently a highlight
of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Two sculptures have been created specifically for the
exhibition as part of this series, which will be positioned in Manchester Art Gallery’s impressive
Doric entrance hall. Doryphoros and Dyson will take the place of traditional bronze and marble
figurative sculpture on either side of the grand stone staircase, set against the backdrop of casts
from the Parthenon frieze given by George IV to decorate Manchester’s very own temple to
culture.
LISTINGS
Exhibition: Matthew Darbyshire: An Exhibition for Modern Living
Dates: September 2015 – 10 January 2016
Press View: 24 September 2015
Venue: Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street, Manchester, M2 3JL
Tel: 0161 235 8888 Textphone: 0161 235 8893
Hours: Open daily, 10am - 5pm and Thursdays 10am- 9pm
Website: www.manchestergalleries.org
Entry: Free
For further press information and to request images please contact Emma Morgan at
Sutton PR on + 44 (0) 20 7183 3577 or email emma@suttonpr.com
ENDS
Notes to Editors
Exhibition Partners and supporters
The exhibition marks the launch of a partnership with the Zabludowicz Collection which will
showcase some of the very best international contemporary art from their collection in
Manchester. An Exhibition for Modern Living (2011), the work that gives the exhibition at
Manchester Art Gallery its title, has been lent by the Zabludowicz Collection along with works
including Standardised Production Clothing, Versions 1 - 10 (2009) and Smoking Shelter (2012).
The exhibition is supported by the Zabludowicz Collection, The Henry Moore Foundation and
Herald Street, London.
About Manchester Art Gallery
Manchester Art Gallery is one of country’s finest art museums. We welcome over half a million
visitors each year to our home in the heart of the city, a blend of historic and contemporary
architecture that echoes our innovative artistic programme. We mix works from our wonderful
historic collections with the best international contemporary art to bring fresh perspectives to
familiar images, create visual dialogues and encourage conversation and debate.
About Matthew Darbyshire
Matthew Darbyshire (born 1977, UK) lives and works in London. He studied Fine Art at the Slade
School of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Recent solo exhibitions include:
Renaissance City, Stanny House, Suffolk; Public Workshop, Krolikarnia National Museum,
Warsaw, Poland; Oak Effect, Shipley Gallery, Gateshead; Bureau, Herald St, London; Captcha,
Jousse Entreprise, Paris. Group exhibitions include: History is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain,
Hayward Gallery, London; Figure of Speech, National Museum, Warsaw, Poland (both 2015); Air
de Pied-à-terre, Lisa Cooley, New York (2013); Kettle’s Yard Cambridge (2012); You Are Not
Alone, Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre, Thailand (2012); British Art Show 7: Days of the Comet,
curated by Tom Morton and Lisa Le Feuvre, (2011), Tate Britain Altermodern Triennial, curated
by Nicholas Bourriad (2009), and ICA, Nought to Sixty (2008).
About the accompanying catalogue
The publication to accompany An Exhibition for Modern Living draws on the design and format of
the 1949 exhibition catalogue. Ten writers have contributed texts about each of the works in the
exhibition. In place of Saul Steinberg’s iconic New Yorker style illustrations, illustrator Adam Gale
has produced the imagery and a fold-out cityscape depicting architecture and motifs relevant to
Darbyshire’s practice over the past decade. This city scape is reproduced as wallpaper within the
exhibition.
The ten publication contributors are:
Ned Beauman (novelist and journalist); Anna Colin (curator and writer); Lisa le Feuvre
(curator and writer, Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds);
Vincent Honore (curator and Director of the David Roberts Art Foundation); Pablo Larios
(writer and assistant editor of frieze d/e); Tom Morton (writer, independent curator, and
contributing editor of frieze); Elizabeth Neilson (Director, Zabludowicz Collection); Mike
Sperlinger (writer, curator and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art (Critical Studies), Goldsmiths);
Marijke Steedman (Curator, Create London); Agnieszka Tarasiuk (Chief Curator, Xawery
Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture at the Królikarnia Palace, Warsaw); Rob Tufnell (curator
and writer).