Walls Are Talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture
The first major UK exhibition of artists' wallpapers with work by over 30 artists including Andy Warhol, Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst. Kitsch ideas of home decoration are turned upside down as artists subvert the stereotypes of wallpaper to hit home messages about warfare, racism, cultural conflicts and gender.
The exhibition is grouped around themes: subversion, commodification, imprisonment and sexuality. In Sonia Boyce's work Clapping, a feeling of claustrophobia and menace is strengthened by the repeated design of the black and white hand print. Zineb Sedira uses wallpaper patterns to illustrate social inequalities and gender difference from her French-Algerian Islamic perspective.
Thomas Demand, one of the foremost conceptual artists working today, covers the entire South Gallery in his Ivy wallpaper - intricate pieces of paper cut out and photographed make up a lifelike work of imprisoning beauty. Whether amusing, like David Shrigley's Industrial Estate, or startling, like Bashir Makhoul's Points of View, the rolls of paper in this exhibition provide an unprecedented insight into a bold and progressive contemporary art form.
Continuing to 16 January 2011: Repeating Patterns
What do Barbie, Batman, James Bond and the Spice Girls have in common? They can all be seen on classic 'boys' and 'girls' wallpapers from the Whitworth's own collection. These papers and many more continue on display in an exhibition that explores wallpaper's connections to gender and sexuality.
As well as featuring stereotypes and celebrities, the display includes many one-off or limited edition artworks. Artists such as Robert Gober, Niki de Saint Phalle and Allen Jones knowingly play with ideas about sex and gender. Visual representations of sex, celebrity, machismo, pornography and childbirth surge across the patterned surfaces. Wallpaper is the perfect medium for these artists; made for a domestic setting where gender roles are played out, it is at the same time used to highlight and question the endless repetition of sexual imagery in the media today.
Wallpaper has long been thought of as a backdrop to the main event. With
so many prominent designers and artists using the medium as their
primary method of expression, Walls Are Talking, along with it's collection display Repeating Patterns, provides a timely
exploration of the possibilities and power of print.