The Courtauld Institute of Art’s MA Curating the Art Museum students announce their annual exhibition, titled Both Sides of Here: Artistic Encounters at the Threshold. Organised by ten emerging curators from across the UK, Europe and the US, Both Sides of Here is a digital exhibition, accompanied by a public sculpture trail in and around London.
Created during lockdown, the exhibition features works across painting, drawing, print, sculpture, film and video from The Courtauld Gallery Collection and the Arts Council Collection.
The Courtauld is currently undertaking an ambitious transformation project to make its world-class artworks, research and teaching accessible to more people. The Courtauld’s permanent home in historic Somerset House is closed for a major programme of renovation. The Gallery is scheduled to reopen to the public in late 2021.
Both Sides of Here: Artistic Encounters at the Threshold explores the multiple ways in which people have turned to art to capture their experience of thresholds. A waiting room, a locked door, an open window, a closed gate, a portal to another dimension: a threshold is the in-between space at which one thing becomes another. It is an undefined and often transformative realm of possibility and change. Both Sides of Here will explore real and conceptual thresholds by looking at artworks that capture the richness of human experiences, exploring themes of gender, sexuality, architecture, the body and states of consciousness, while also addressing the threshold in terms of access, privilege and social mobility.
Drawing from The Courtauld Gallery Collection and the Arts Council Collection (ACC), Both Sides of Here presents works by 31 artists, including well-known artworks such as Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve (1526) and Francis Bacon’s Head VI (1949), presented with new and refreshing perspectives. These masterpieces are brought into dialogue with more contemporary pieces such as Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (6 spaces) (1994), Alberta Whittle’s Between a Whisper and a Cry (2019) and Damien Hirst’s Relationships (1991), in a series of rich and revelatory configurations.