Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Warrior Birds, 1957, Dame Elisabeth Frink, RA. © The Executors of the Frink Estate and Archive, courtesy of the Ingram Collection.
Warrior Birds, 1957 by Elisabeth Frink. © The Executors of the Frink Estate and Archive, courtesy of the Ingram Collection.
Warrior Birds, 1957 by Elisabeth Frink. © The Executors of the Frink Estate and Archive, courtesy of the Ingram Collection.

Reflection: British Art in an Age of Change review – an embarrassment of riches

This article is more than 4 years old

Ferens Art Gallery, Hull
This revelatory show juxtaposes old and new, domestic and unusual, to startling and unmissable effect

Ralph Brown’s Meat Porters, a sculpture of 1959 that was commissioned for Harlow New Town in Essex, really must be seen to be believed – and from every possible angle. A tribute to physical labour that is said not to have been too popular with some of the more aspirational of the town’s early residents, it depicts two men, strong-looking but rather squat, and a carcass they’re doggedly hauling on their shoulders. From a distance, arms outstretched and backs bent, the piece resembles a huge bat or an umbrella blown out of shape by the wind. But get closer and the effect is even odder. It’s almost sexual: a bizarre threesome at the heart of which, courtesy of the ox’s splayed hind legs, we may peer into a cave-like crevice that is unnervingly and grotesquely human.

It would be worth seeing Reflection: British Art in an Age of Change at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull for this bronze alone. In Harlow, Meat Porters stands on a plinth, inaccessible as some throne. But at the Ferens it rests on the floor, enabling the visitor to go eye to eye with these muscled geezers and their fleshy cargo. Brown’s sculpture, however, is only one of an embarrassment of riches gathered by the exhibition’s deft and thoughtful curator, James Russell, using work both from the Ferens’ own collection and loans from the Ingram Collection, one of the largest private collections of modern British art in the UK.

How to make people see old and possibly familiar works with new eyes? Russell’s show aims to answer this question, a vital one for any gallery with a permanent collection, via a series of clever juxtapositions: here, the old and the new, the domestic and the outlandish, the seen and the unseen (he has raided the Ferens’ storeroom) cosy up together – and in doing so throw new light on one another. Far from being the nebulous muddle I’d feared – after all, it includes 150 pieces, the earliest dating from 1850 and the latest from 2013 – it is an exhibition that delivers a freshness born largely, though not exclusively, of contrast. It isn’t only that Russell wants you to look. Rather, it’s that he ambushes you into doing so.

Meat Porters, Ralph Brown, 1959. Photograph: © Estate of Ralph Brown. Image courtesy of The Ingram Collection

Loosely divided into three, it begins with portraits. From here it moves into relationships, work and play and then, finally, into place, with an emphasis on war. Russell’s approach hits you almost immediately. After David Tindle’s marvellously spectral self-portrait of 1991 and William Nicholson’s luxuriant painting of the socialite Maud Nelke of 1914, in which the pointed collars of her shirt suggest (as her expression does not, or not quite) a desire to be taken more seriously, are a series of photographs from 2004 by Bettina von Zwehl (b1971), in which four young women, each one dressed in the same white vest, are pictured listening to Für Alina by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

They’re lovely images, and clever, too, for the way they make you imagine the music reaching the sitters’ ears (one tune, four different expressions). But then your eye catches sight, right beside them, of Private Coe, 1941, a pastel of a soldier by William Dring (1904-90).

I can’t quite explain why I felt so touched by the proximity of these two; perhaps it had something to do with war and peace, the young man in Dring’s picture aiming for smiling nonchalance in the face of great danger, and the four women in Von Zwehl’s photographs looking so sombre when all that is required of them is to sit quietly. But I returned to this corner of the gallery again and again. It pulled me in, like an embrace.

Moving on, I loved the series of watercolours in the next room, a highlight of which is Landing of Paratroops, 1944, by Albert Richards, who was killed in action in 1945: a liverish moonscape at which you could stare all day, and one that only seems the more singular given the elevated company it keeps (Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious). I’ve seen Edward Burra’s extended bruise of a watercolour, Near Whitby, Yorkshire, 1972, before elsewhere, but in this show it benefits amazingly from its closeness to Barbara Rae’s (b1943) Roadside, Castelfiorentino (not dated), a picture you want almost to crawl into, the better to understand its dusty, magnified effects. Burra’s painting is all weather and heather, the blur divided wittily by white lines marked in a road, while Rae’s stubbornly gives us no sign at all of the way ahead; we could be looking at a Tuscan hillside, or about to run smack into an ancient chapel wall.

Fun Bag, 2015, Victoria Sin. Photograph: Image courtesy of The Ingram Collection

Finally, do not miss Alan Reynolds’s Bleak November (1955-6), which hangs on a wall with Temple of Industrial Devotion IV, 2016, by Steven Ingman (b1984). In the first moments that you look at them, these two paintings could not be more different in mood. The former, a rural landscape, is watercolour and gouache; the latter, in oil, depicts a decaying industrial building. Gaze on, however, and their affinities are slowly revealed to you.

If Reynolds’s seedpods bring to mind old bones, Ingman’s factory has an equally skeletal air. In his labels, Russell has carefully avoided mention of the moment in which we find ourselves, perhaps because the people of Hull voted so strongly in favour of leaving the EU. But Brexit can be felt all about here, I think, and not only because this is a show that is so keenly interested in difference, human and geographical. Something mournful lurks at its edges. In our past lay our future, if only we had been better able to read the runes.

At Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, until 5 Jan 2020

More on this story

More on this story

  • Ben Wheatley to direct zombie-pensioner TV satire on divided Britain

  • Take back remote control: a year of beguiling Brexit television

  • Paul Dacre to front TV series on Daily Mail and modern Britain

  • Painted into a corner … British art responds to the folly of Brexit

  • Action, suspense, drama … how Brexit became the latest reality TV hit

  • Brexit: The Uncivil War review – superficial, irresponsible TV

  • Anish Kapoor's Brexit artwork: Britain on the edge of the abyss

  • Brexit stage left: how theatre became the best way to understand today’s Britain

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed