Never judge a book by its cover. This familiar saying has been drummed into our heads since childhood until it has become a cliché. Nevertheless, the opposite is often true. An attractive cover catches attention as much as the promise of the story inside. This theory holds in almost every field of art, where impression is paramount.
A gallery is not only a cover. Its main purpose is to provide a place where artists can showcase their work to the public. A proper gallery, however, is not mere space for hire. It also serves to support the artwork, either in complement or juxtaposition. Whether an exhibition is successful or not is often a question of arrangement and how to make the artworks stand out in this or that particular setting.
In other words, how to drench art in art and make it work.
♦ Floating in Nature
Fuzhou, Fujian, China
Never judge a book by its cover. This familiar saying has been drummed into our heads since childhood until it has become a cliché. Nevertheless, the opposite is often true. An attractive cover catches attention as much as the promise of the story inside. This theory holds in almost every field of art, where impression is paramount.
A gallery is not only a cover. Its main purpose is to provide a place where artists can showcase their work to the public. A proper gallery, however, is not mere space for hire. It also serves to support the artwork, either in complement or juxtaposition. Whether an exhibition is successful or not is often a question of arrangement and how to make the artworks stand out in this or that particular setting.
In other words, how to drench art in art and make it work.
♦ Nomadic Museum
USA, Mexico City, Tokyo
True to its name, this museum does not stay put in one place; instead, it travels the world, visiting cities in three continentsand taking the meaning of supporting the artworks to another level entirely.
Acclaimed architect Shigeru Ban designed the museum specifically to house the exhibition of photography by George Colbert titled Ashes and Snow. In order to meet the unusual demands of an exhibition tour, the museum has to be practical as well as effective—and that means easy enough to construct without sacrificing its artistic side.
Stacks of shipping containers form the external walls, arranged in checkerboard pattern. Sloping sheets of white plastic polymer fill the spaces in between. The lofty roof, also made of polymer, is supported by two rows of paper tube columns, each thirty inches in diameter. The result is acathedral-like space, with wooden planks underfoot to form a walkway between the columns, and river bed rocks on either side of the walkway. The exhibition is mounted on the walls, illuminated with spotlights while most of the cavernous space remains in shadow to keep the focus on the art.
Naturally, structural and configuration changes were inevitable across the various locations, considering the limitations in each. In New York, for example, the building was constructed on an old pier that couldn’t support the weight of a crane. Therefore, the materials had to be installed one by one using barges from the Hudson River. Santa Monica posed a different challenge. The city’s strict regulations concerning earthquakes required the external walls to be mounted on pipe columns that were drilled deep into the ground.
Photos by INUCE, PAOLOMAZZOLENI