Magnificent obsessions of artists on show at the Barbican
Damien Hirst is a human skulls collector with a strong passion for taxidermy and natural curiosities: no surprise. The Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto collects fossils, antique optical instruments and anatomical prints: for him, fossils and photographs are analogous, since both record and stop things at particular moments in time. While the British painter Howard Hodgkin has been collecting precious art pieces of Indian painting since he was a schoolboy, Sol LeWitt built an autobiography made of photos of different categories of ordinary objects he handled throughout the years.
“Feticism” might be one right key to enter the stunning exhibition at the Barbican Center in London: “Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector“. On show several fascinating samples of private collections gathered up by 15 famous post-war and contemporary artists over decades. Things which are are not just memorabilia or bizzarre curiosities, but could be testimonies of existences as well as passions, or better obsessions.
The geometries and clean architecture of the amazing Barbican’s setting perfectly enable to build an idea of rituality and seriality, that might inspirit any possible collection: that’s the atmosphere that holds you when you visit the exhibition. But the installation becomes really convincing when it tries to suggest enlightenments about the relations the collection has with the artist’s work, even more than with their life.
The heterogeneous materials gathered by these artists follow, stimulate and could even be the source of the artistic work itself. All possible analogies are illuminated, and presented in the color of a perseverance well-turned into positive and fertile obsession.
Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as a collector is on view at the Barbican in London through 25 May 2015.
by Antonella Gasparato
in Focus on Europe
May 18, 2015