Wallace Collection Presents Series Of Site-specific Works By Britain’s Tom Ellis

Wallace Collection

The Wallace Collection is presenting a series of new site-specific works by British artist Tom Ellis (b.1973), this September. The exhibition consists of a newly commissioned series of works pairing his enigmatic figurative paintings with self-made furniture. The combination reflects the unique and eclectic profile of the Wallace Collection, which holds a collection of both fine and decorative art. The Wallace Collection presents paintings, porcelain, sculpture and furniture alongside each other, displaying the works so as to enrich the experience of the audience rather than dividing the pieces by media, era or country of origin.

Curated by Dr Christoph Martin Vogtherr Director of the Wallace Collection, Simone Stewart and Derek Purnell, Ellis’s response to the commission is the result of the artist’s four-year consideration of the museum’s unique and eclectic displays. The exhibition includes works on an ambitious scale representing the range of techniques he employs, comprising sculpture, figurative paintings and furniture hybrids shown in combination. Visitors to the Wallace Collection will be able to encounter his work across three spaces: the Front State Room, the exhibition galleries, and on the front lawn of Hertford House which overlooks Manchester Square in Marylebone. Ellis emphasises his presence as a ‘guest’ at the Wallace Collection, sensitive to the building and the aesthetic complexity of its elegant fixtures and fittings. 

As part of his intervention, Ellis will install large-scale paintings on runners in the Front State Room. These runners, as a support for the paintings, will recur throughout the exhibition galleries alongside a series of Ellis’s furniture. The exhibition title The Middle is open to multi-layered meanings and responses. It reflects Ellis’s fascination with creating objects which are deliberately unresolved and have an indeterminate position. For example, Ellis’s transformative tables and chairs resonate with the furniture the museum holds in its Boudoir, such as Jean-François Leleu’s Secrétaire and Writing Table which date from the eighteenth century. These pieces start in one form and, through a process of opening up, become something else. The title also reflects the museum’s position between the public and the domestic. Figurative motifs inspired by seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish painters permeate Ellis’s subject matter. An arresting image of a shoemaker, which originates from a work by Teniers the Younger, reoccurs as a motif in the exhibition. For Ellis, the repetition and appropriation of imagery is a way to explore the possibilities of indeterminacy and detachment. Many artists have used this approach, most notably Andy Warhol. However, to Ellis, his repetition of the motif resonates more strongly with the methods of the eighteenth-century painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard who repeated his works and produced versions which were circulated amongst collectors. In the process of developing this commission, Ellis has discovered unexpected parallels with Samuel Beckett – a writer who was fascinated by the unresolved and open-ended possibilities of artistic endeavour. Beckett, coincidentally, was a regular visitor to the Wallace Collection in 1935. Ellis and Beckett also share an admiration for Dutch paintings recorded in Beckett’s notebooks on visual art, both adopting such paintings as templates for observing life and the outside world. The Wallace Collection has been exhibiting contemporary art in dialogue with its historic collection for over a decade. 

Dr. Christoph Vogtherr, Director of the Wallace Collection, says, “The Middle highlights how an engaged partnership with a contemporary artist over a long period can broaden and enrich the Wallace Collection’s research and invite reappraisal of its outstanding collection.” In addition to the exhibition The Middle, Tom Ellis and the Wallace Collection are working in partnership with the charity Paintings in Hospitals to create a display titled Works Like People II which will be displayed in GP practices and waiting rooms. This project, which mirrors The Middle in its placement of contemporary art in unexpected and often complex spaces, will run from June 2016 to the end of November. 

Tom Ellis is a British artist living and working in London whose work includes paintings, sculpture and furniture. Ellis was born in London in 1973 and studied at Wimbledon School of Art from 1992–95. He has exhibited widely at galleries and museums around the world including solo exhibitions at Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens (2013); MOT International, London (2012, 2011, 2007); Bloomberg Space, London (2011); Kunsthalle Winterthur (2010); SPACE, London (2009); and Freight and Volume, New York (2007). He has participated in group exhibitions such as Rift, Baltic 39, Newcastle (2014); Eros and Thanatos, Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig (2012); Multiple Takes, 68 Square Metres Art Space, Copenhagen (2011); and Newspeak: British Art Now, The Saatchi Gallery, London (2010).

Photo: P C Robinson © artlyst 2016

The Middle – Tom Ellis at the Wallace Collection 15 September – 27 November 2016 Free Exhibition

Tags

,