The first of the Gallery’s Bicentenary acquisitions for other museums, works by the Gallery’s first Contemporary Fellow, Nalini Malani, go to the Holburne Museum, Bath, funded by the Art Fund; while those by the 2023 artist in residence, Céline Condorelli, join the collection of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter (RAMM), funded by the Contemporary Art Society. Condorelli's works are the first to enter a public collection in the UK. The acquisitions form part of or are inspired by recent residencies and presentations of the artists' work, both at the National Gallery and at these partner museums across the UK. The Contemporary Fellowship with Art Fund and the Artist in Residence, in association with the Contemporary Art Society, are elements of the National Gallery's modern and contemporary programme, which includes the acquisition of a work by the artist for its partner venues.
Nine Prints to Celebrate the National Gallery
These digital pigment prints, based on nine frames from her ‘animation chamber’, My Reality is Different, shown in both Bath and London in 2022-23, were drawn in pencil, ink and acrylic to expand on the themes explored in the animations of her immersive video installation.
The selection of nine stills from the animations was made to respond to the collection of the Holburne Museum. The selection of still images from the animations includes portraits of imaginary figures and details of the painting by Johan Zoffany (1733-1810) from the Holburne collection along with other iconic paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), Caravaggio (1571-1610) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)..
The selection of works and the use of iPad
Through her research during the Contemporary Fellowship, Malani selected 25 paintings from both the National Gallery and the Holburne Museum, Bath, as the basis for over 80 individual animations. Using an iPad, Malani drew directly over reproductions of the paintings to produce digitally drawn animations that obscured or brought new focus to the details he was focusing on. His animated figures and imagined forms appear to interact with elements within the paintings, including Rubens’ Samson and Delilah, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, and Johan Zoffany’s group portrait of the Auriol and Dashwood families. Interspersed throughout the cycle of animations are portraits of imaginary people from Asia and Africa, described by Malani as members of the subaltern, whose faces again disappear behind the colorful stock market graphs. They reflect those marginalized by society, today and in the past, but whose labor underpins the global economies that connect us all. The animations were played in a loop on nine channels that, when projected onto the gallery walls, overlapped with each other to create a 40-meter-long panorama of unexpected and infinite juxtapositions and connections.
“Bulk, Everspiring Colour” by Céline Condorelli has been presented to the collection of RAMM (Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter) by the Contemporary Art Society through a partnership with the National Gallery’s Artist in Residence 2023 programme, supported by Anna Yang and Joseph Schull, 2023/24. This artwork was presented as part of the artist’s exhibition at the National Gallery.
A carpet to lie down on to experience the works directly
The carpet has been used in place of the gallery’s chairs, inviting visitors to lie on it and experience the Gallery in a different way. The graphics, printed on the carpet, were produced from technical images of all the materials in the Gallery – such as marble, wood and wall fabric. They were made with the National Gallery’s Science Department using scanning methods usually applied to paintings. Condorelli combined these scans with microscopic photographs of pigments found in paintings from the collection hanging in the room, digitally creating new ‘paintings’ that came to represent all these materials. Another work by Condorelli acquired for Exeter is the print ‘Pentimenti (0751)’, a series of prints produced by the artist in which he removes the foreground figures of 1488th-century portraits to reveal the hanging fabrics as backdrops behind them. For this selected print, he worked with Giovanni Santi’s The Virgin and Child (possibly c. XNUMX), using software to digitally remove the figures and reconstruct the background fabric and landscape. It creates a strong connection with her interest in textiles and their role within the art gallery to frame and facilitate the act of looking.
Cover image: Bulk, Everlasting Colour' from 'Céline Condorelli: Pentimenti (The Corrections)' in Room 31 of the National Gallery 2023 © Céline Condorelli
