Virtual Exhibitions: Part 1
Last fortnights newsletter (April 26th) was all about how the pandemic had affected museums across the world. I talk about how museums tried to turn the shut down into something positive, and one of the ways some museums did this was introduce more virtual exhibitions on their websites.
These appeared in a variety of different formats. Some are a paragraph on each room and a short video of the exhibition space. Some are a collection of high resolution images with a bit of accompanying text. Others are more interactive, with options to do a digital “walk through” of the exhibition space, clicking on where to go next and what you’d like to explore and read more of.
I’ll talk about a couple here, and I’ll keep expanding this series with my favourites.
Introductions: Margaux Williamson
Curated by Capucine Perrot, Associate Director, Artist Liaison
White Cube is a contemporary art gallery owned by Jay Jopling with three branches. Two of which are in London: Mason's Yard in central London and Bermondsey in South East London and one in Central, Hong Kong Island.
Margaux Williamson was born in 1976 and is an artist based in Toronto. According to the website, her show ‘Introductions’ will be “focusing on the quotidian – the unremarkable scenes and landscapes of contemporary, everyday life – her paintings depict recognisable subjects, skewed through an intuitive and collaged vision.”
This online exhibition includes high resolution photos of Williamson’s paintings along with the measurements and the medium. Some of the photos take up more space than others, but all include links for “view more details” where it will take the visitor to a new page with more photographs of the painting which can be zoomed in and make enquiries about purchasing the work.
There is a carousel of photographs from Williamson’s studio while she was working on the particular paintings in the exhibition. To include images of the process behind the exhibition is an interesting choice to make and I found it fascinating. There is also one small video which shows close ups of one of Williamson’s paintings.
Introductions is online until May 11th 2021.
Andy Warhol at the Tate Modern
The digital exhibition for Andy Warhol at the Tate Modern is made up of a 7 minute video showcasing the exhibition space and 12 sections - one for each of the rooms in the exhibition.
The sections for each room don’t really describe what is on display in the room or how it is set up but instead there is one image for each of the rooms and the text tells the visitor details about the life of Warhol during these periods of time. For example with Room 3: Pop, the accompanying text says:
“Although he was a successful illustrator, Warhol still wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. Inspired by the new wave of art he saw in New York galleries, in 1960 he started making hand-painted pictures combining advertising imagery with expressive painting. This soon gave way to a clean graphic style now known as Pop Art. Warhol grew up eating watered-down ketchup with salt for soup. His images of consumer items such as Campbell’s soup cans are rooted in his experience of an emerging aspirational culture, selling a dream of economic and social progress.”
The main drawcard of this digital exhibition is definitely the video. For seven minutes the visitor can watch the two curators - Gregor Muir the Director of the Collection, International Art and Fiontan Mora, Assistant Curator - as they talk about Warhol’s life while the video shows the works they are discussing and the rooms in which they’re found.
It’s amazing to see this, and even more so because the exhibition was last year at the time the pandemic shut everything down, so to be able to see even a small part of it and imagine what it was like is special and I hope the Tate continues to expand their selection of these kind of videos.