Rank: Picturing The Social Order 1615-2009
Leeds City Art Gallery
14 February – 26 April 2009
This fascinating and unusual exhibition, which looks at how artists have
pictured the shape of society from Renaissance times to the present, opens its
UK tour at Leeds Art Gallery. A society without stratification is barely
imaginable, but how do we picture our own system of hierarchies, of
difference? British writers, political theorists and artists have used numerous
images to picture ‘who we are’: describing us through ‘orders’, ‘estates’,
‘classes’, ‘stations’, ‘degrees’, or ‘ranks’. But only this latter term has kept the
same meaning over six centuries. With over 100 exhibits, new work from
leading contemporary artists and the presentation of new social research from
academics and government agencies, the exhibition will include loans from
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan,
1651, British Museum
Tate, The British Library, British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Arts Council Collection, Working
Class Movement Library, and the Saatchi Gallery, as well as private collections.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 140pp fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Polly Toynbee;
Professor Keith Wrightson, Yale University; Professor Daniel Dorling, Sheffield University; Dr Gordon
Image details: Abraham Bosse and Thomas Hobbes '1660 print 'Leviathan',
on loan from British Museum
Fyfe, Keele University; and its curator Alistair Robinson from the Northern Gallery for Contemporary
Art, Sunderland
images: Ant Macari 2009
Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery
http://www.leeds.gov.uk/artgallery/Leeds_Art_Gallery/2009_Exhibitions.aspx
Posts
